Aryan Brotherhood leaders ordered murders from California prisons. Can federal prison stop them?
A judge on Monday sentenced three leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood to federal prison terms, clearing the way for the men to be transferred from the California lockups where they orchestrated murders and racketeering schemes and into the custody of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
The sentences handed down don't necessarily mean the men have to serve their time in the more restrictive federal prison system. But prosecutors in the case said such transfers were 'likely.' Evidence presented during trial showed the three longtime inmates had exploited the California prison system's inability to weed out contraband phones .
President Trump has invoked the U.S. Bureau of Prisons as a cornerstone of a crackdown on what he calls lawlessness in cities and states led by Democrats. This month, he proposed reopening Alcatraz, the decaying island penitentiary in the San Francisco Bay, to house the country's 'most ruthless and violent' criminals.
In the last six years, federal prosecutors in Sacramento and Fresno have targeted the Aryan Brotherhood, the dominant criminal organization among white inmates in the California prison system.
Two of the group's leaders, Kenneth Johnson, 64, and Francis Clement, 58, were sentenced Monday to life terms in federal prison after being convicted of murder and racketeering, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney in Sacramento said.
U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston sentenced another Aryan Brotherhood member, John Stinson, 70, to 20 years in federal prison — an academic punishment, given he'd already received a federal life term in 2007.
Rather than being transferred to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons at the time, Stinson was sent back to state prison, where he'd been serving a sentence of life without parole for murdering a Long Beach drug dealer in 1979.
Johnson and Clement were also serving life sentences in California's state prison system. Johnson was convicted in 1996 of attempting to murder a Madera County sheriff's deputy. Clement has been imprisoned for a murder committed on his 18th birthday, when he cut his friend's throat during a road trip to Las Vegas.
During a trial this year in Fresno, federal prosecutors showed that Johnson, Clement and Stinson coordinated murders, drug sales, fraud and extortion inside and outside prison walls, often using smuggled phones. In some cases, their underlings on the street funneled money from the criminal enterprises into the inmates' bank accounts.
The defendants faced few repercussions. At Johnson's most recent parole hearing in 2022, which he refused to attend, a parole commissioner said Johnson had been caught using phones eight times in the previous three years.
At the close of the Fresno trial, all three defendants were convicted of racketeering. Johnson and Clement were also found guilty of commissioning murders — Johnson was tied to two killings and Clement to five — on the streets of Los Angeles County. Thurston sent all three men back to state prison after the verdict to await sentencing.
Lawyers for Johnson and Clement last week asked that their sentencing be delayed. In a motion, they said a U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent notified the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that Johnson and Clement had been marked for 'assault and/or murder' after the trial.
The agent warned that 'violence will inevitably occur' if the two prisoners remained in general population, according to the motion. Defense lawyers said the alleged threat to Johnson and Clement could be grounds for a new trial and asked for more time to investigate.
Prosecutors argued Johnson and Clement were trying 'simply to delay their inevitable transfer' to federal prison.
This month, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons took custody of five Aryan Brotherhood members who were convicted of murder and racketeering in 2024. They are now serving life terms at federal penitentiaries at Victorville and Atwater, Calif.
Prosecutors said in a motion it was likely that Johnson, Clement and Stinson were also bound for federal prison. In a sentencing memo, prosecutors called it a fitting place for men such as Clement, who showed a 'complete disregard for human life' in ordering the torture and killings of his victims.
Clement's lawyers said it was easier to blame the person who did the crimes than to try to change the 'violent, unstable, chaotic environment' in which they were committed. No guards were prosecuted for smuggling in phones or colluding with gang leaders, the lawyers noted in a sentencing memo.
'What difference does it really make to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to give three elderly prisoners another life sentence,' they asked, 'while not spending a penny on making institutional changes' in California's prisons?
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