Trial of Guards in Brawls, Killing at Corcoran Opens

Eight prison guards purposely invited violent brawls by putting rival gang members together in a cramped recreation yard and waiting for them to fight, a prosecutor told a federal jury Friday.

“This unit had over five times more fights than every other unit and every other shift,” Assistant U.S. Atty. John Conklin said in his opening statement.

Four of the guards from the maximum security Corcoran State Prison between Fresno and Bakersfield face possible life sentences for the shooting of an inmate during a 1994 brawl, allegedly set up for the guards’ entertainment.

The other four face up to 10 years in prison if convicted of conspiring to deny prisoners the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment in connection with another melee.

“The defendants had a duty to prevent these fights from occurring and they did not,” Conklin said.

Several inmates escorted to the 70-foot-long, concrete-walled exercise yard will testify during the trial that they were told by guards to “take care of business” and “do your job,” Conklin said. When sending rival inmates into the yard together, the guards knew the prisoners were bound by an unwritten code of conduct to attack or face retaliation from their own gang, Conklin said. “You will learn that these fights were anything but voluntary,” he said.

Defense attorneys said the guards were simply following a well-known prison system practice called the “integrated yard policy” that ultimately led to the prisoner fights.

The policy required guards to place inmates from different races and different geographic locations in exercise yards together.

“Every time every inmate went to the yard, there was the possibility of a fight,” defense attorney Michael Rains said during his opening statement.

Rains is representing Officer Christopher Bethea, the man who fired the shot that killed inmate Preston Tate during a brawl on April 2, 1994.

In addition, the defense will argue that inmates in Corcoran’s notorious Security Housing Unit are the “worst of the worst” and can’t be trusted to mingle with other prisoners without fighting.