Sacramento – Almost 18 months after the first of the six guilt verdicts, the federal government made its commitment to move some of California’s most dangerous detainees in the federal penitentiary system.
Five members of the Aryan Fraternity – Ronald “Renegade” Yandell, William Sylvester, Jason Corbett, Pat “Big Pat” Brady and Brant “Two Scoops” Daniel – were transferred from their state prison cells in the Sacramento region in the federal system. Yandell and Sylvester are currently hosted at USP Atwater while the other three are in prisons in Victorville, according to the files.
A sixth Aryan member of the Fraternity, Danny Troxell, awaits a conviction in the same case and if his conviction is maintained, he will probably join the others. The six men were guilty or have been found guilty of racketeering and murder, crimes that say that the prosecutors were determined to benefit to the sophisticated prison gang that lords on white detainees through the Californian penitentiary system.
Since 2019, federal prosecutors of the Oriental District of California have been targeting the Aryan brotherhood, with cases of racketeering in Fresno and Sacramento. Three other gang members, John Stinson, Kenneth Johnson, and Frank Clement, were found guilty of racketeering and murder and expect the conviction later this month.
But for a while, it was not clear if someone would go to federal prison, a controversy that started when Daniel pleaded guilty at the end of 2023 and declared that he was impatiently awaiting the change of landscape of the federal prisons. The nine men are already serving in life in state prison, but the federal prosecutors argued that they had been able to bypass the security measures to go around others, order and commit murders and manage drug rings of their cells.
When Daniel was not transferred after months, he tried to overthrow his conviction. What followed were months of prosecutors, who tried to get the BOP on board.
Along the way, prosecutors say they discovered additional murder plots involving the accused. Yandell and Troxell would have threatened to kill themselves during their trial last year, while Sylvester would have hired an ATF infiltration agent to kill someone before the start of the trial. After the trial, Yandell was accused of attempted murder for alleging a rod on two prison guards.
The last drama? On March 10, an ATF agent warned Clement and Johnson that the two had been “targeted for aggression and / or murder” if they returned to a state court. Their lawyers now want to postpone the condemnation to explore the theory that this evolution proves that Clement and Johnson could not have ordered murders in the name of the Aryan fraternity.
The memo of determining the penalty of clement sums up his life as having been mainly sent behind bars, since his adolescence, in Oregon and California, then spending a large part of his adult years to isolation.
“It is easier to believe that people are bad than trying to understand where the behavior comes from and how to change this,” concluded the lawyers of clement, adding later: “It is obvious in this case, how it is easier for the government and the system of blame only an individual like Frank, than to reflect on the defects of institutions today.”
California Daily Newspapers
