SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Before a federal judge could rule whether the Sacramento jail was violating the constitutional rights of a half-dozen men accused of crimes on behalf of the Aryan Brotherhood, the defendants were whisked away in the middle of the night and taken to other facilities, including a nearby prison.
In late March, the U.S. Marshals transferred Pat Brady, Jason Corbett, William Sylvester, Danny Troxell, and Ronald Yandell from the Sacramento jail to New Folsom prison in Represa, where they’re being held in a “short-term restrictive housing” unit, records show. Additionally, other co-defendants Justin Petty and Samuel Keeton were taken to over pretrial detention federal facilities.
All of the five were already serving life sentences in state prison when the case began, and Sylvester and Yandell were housed in New Folsom, records show.
When asked why the transfers took place, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office would only confirm that the defendants were still in federal custody.
The move came as U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeremy Peterson was mulling over a defense motion that accused staff at the jail of violating the defendants’ rights by holding attorney/client meetings in non-confidential booths and requiring them to call their attorneys in areas where other inmates could hear, among other concerns. Last year, Brady filed a civil suit that revealed staff had secretly recorded meetings between criminal defendants and their attorneys, though the Sacramento Sheriff claimed it was accidental and the recordings were video-only.
After Peterson was informed of the move, he declared the motion was legally “moot” and dropped the issue, court records show. Had Peterson ruled that the jail’s facilities were inept, it could have influenced other cases.
The transfer to New Folsom prison comes with a major irony: one of the co-defendants in the case, Brant Daniel, has claimed for more than a year that the jail was violating his constitutional rights in similar ways, and his attorneys filed letters that corrections officers wrote to Daniel confirming they could hear his supposedly confidential legal visits. On top of that, Daniel’s legal filings have exposed an ongoing FBI investigation into alleged corruption in the prison, which has resulted in civil rights violations charges against multiple corrections officers, including allegations that they covered up an inmate’s death.
One of the whistle-blowers, a corrections officer at the prison, died last year in what was ruled a suicide, The Sacramento Bee reported last year.
Peterson has taken Daniel’s motions seriously enough to agree to perform a rare on-site visit to the prison, and in February, Peterson visited the jail so he could better determine how to rule on the defense motion over legal confidentiality there. Last month, federal prosecutors filed a legal document suggesting that a different magistrate judge than Peterson handle future pretrial motions, arguing that others in the Eastern District better understand the nature of the case.
Brady, Corbett, Daniel, Keeton, Petty, Sylvester, Troxell, and Yandell were indicted in 2019 along with nearly two dozen others in four separate cases that resulted from a 2016 wiretap operation targeting contraband prison phone.
Prosecutors filed a range of racketeering charges, ranging from fatal prison stabbings and alleged murder conspiracies to alleged plots sell drugs. Many of the defendants are charged with plotting prison murders or carrying them out, while others, like Petty, are accused of arranging for drugs and other contraband to be sent inside prisons.
Keeton accepted a plea deal in 2020 but has not yet been sentenced. The others are scheduled to go to trial in March 2023.
