Aryan Brotherhood inmates sue over Sacramento jail conditions as they await trial
As leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang await trial in Sacramento on federal racketeering charges, they are raising new legal concerns about the conditions of their confinement, with a lawyer for one declaring Monday that his client is being subjected to “torture.”
In recent weeks, defendants in the case – including some who face potential death penalty prosecutions by the federal government – have complained in legal filings about their access to their lawyers, the lack of access to outdoor recreation and the X-ray body scans they are subjected to before being moved to new cells regularly.
Aryan Brotherhood leader Ronald “Renegade” Yandell, who is serving 50 years to life for murder and faces a potential death penalty prosecution in the federal case, also has complained about the lack of a vegetarian diet at the Sacramento County Main Jail, where he is being held pending trial and plans to represent himself in court.
“On 3-8-20 and again on 3-20-20 plaintiff sent requests to the jail chaplain to be placed on a vegetarian diet for religious reasons which were ignored,” Yandell explained in a 10-page, handwritten lawsuit filed in federal court March 15 against Sacramento Sheriff Scott Jones, the U.S. Marshals Service and other officials.
Another Aryan Brotherhood member, Pat “Big Pat” Brady, has filed a separate, 13-page handwritten lawsuit alleging similar deprivations, including a complaint that he is locked inside his cell for 22 hours a day and that his cell door has a padlock on the outside as “an additional locking mechanism.”
Brady, who is accused in a brutal prison yard stabbing of a fellow inmate in 2018, also complained that since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year he has been moved from unsanitized cell to unsanitized cell at least 12 times.
And in a hearing Monday morning in federal court, attorneys for Brant “Two Scoops” Daniel argued that their client’s incarceration inside the psychiatric services unit at California State Prison, Sacramento, has exposed him to severely mentally ill inmates who have made it impossible for him to sleep enough to assist in his defense preparations.
“It amounts to torture,” attorney John Balazs said to U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller as he sought to win Daniel a transfer to a different prison or jail.
Balazs filed court papers in January accusing prison guards of conspiring to have inmates killed and threatening to kill Daniel, who court papers say is charged with killing Salinas Valley prison inmate Zachary Scott on Oct. 29, 2016, to further his status with the Aryan Brotherhood gang.
The legal maneuvers are the latest in a series by the defendants and their lawyers in a massive murder and drug conspiracy case federal prosecutors filed against the prison gang in June 2019 alleging that leaders had orchestrated hits inside and outside California prisons and used smuggled cell phones to peddle huge amounts of drugs.
Law enforcement officials have dismissed the inmates’ various complaints since they were first indicted, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Ross Pearson explained to the judge Monday that Daniel’s complaints about being housed with psychiatric inmates left out one detail: he was moved to that unit after prison officials discovered a six-inch handmade shank hidden in his mattress.
The discovery came after a confidential informant told authorities Daniel was planning to kill a prison guard, court papers say, adding that he is “an AB member with an egregious 24-year history of prison violence, including murder, conspiracy to commit murder, manslaughter, battery with a deadly weapon (twice), and battery on an inmate with serious injury.”
“It appears that Mr. Daniel is prepared to attack someone, and the specific allegation is that he was prepared to attack a prison guard,” Pearson said, calling Daniel’s written complaints about his housing situation “self-serving and selective.”
Mueller ordered a further hearing on Daniel’s housing status for May 17, but with the racketeering case expected to drag on for years – the docket already has 736 entries – the disputes over how the defendants are being treated are expected to continue.
Lawyers for the defendants say extreme restrictions on access to their clients has hindered their ability to fashion a proper defense, but law enforcement officials say the Aryan Brotherhood members and their associates are being given proper access to the legal system and are extremely dangerous.
“While I can certainly appreciate this group’s frustration that they do not get to enjoy all the freedoms they had in the California prison system – that same system, incidentally, where they were able to carry out the extraordinarily heinous crimes that they are now being charged with – they are treated and housed according to their charges and in-custody conduct,” Jones told The Bee last year.
This story was originally published March 29, 2021 at 12:15 PM.