SACRAMENTO — After years of waiting and failed petitions to the court, Brant “Two Scoops” Daniel now has a path towards receiving surgery for his “extreme and debilitating” back pain and a lipoma on his head.
All he had to do was plead guilty to murder.
In a Sacramento federal courtroom Wednesday morning, Daniel finalized his guilty plea on charges that he murdered 36-year-old Zachary Scott on a Salinas Valley State Prison yard on Oct. 29, 2016, a stabbing prosecutors say Daniel committed to maintain or improve his standing in the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang. His defense team says they were ready to fight the charge in a February 2024 trial, but that Daniel changed his plea to spare his family the stress and clear a path to hopefully receiving surgery in federal prison.
Days before Daniel changed his plea, his attorneys filed court paperwork seeking hurry along sentencing process, indicating Daniel will not try to argue against his mandatory life sentence and instead “expedite” his eventual transfer to the federal Bureau of Prison system.
Daniel’s lawyers have filed multiple failed motions asking a judge to order the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide surgery for Daniel. They argued it was a Constitutional issue; Daniel’s back pain was so intense it prevented him from conferring with his lawyers, and the lipoma affected his vision and ability to read court papers, they argued.
Federal prosecutors countered that Daniel’s maladies were not life-threatening and therefore surgery shouldn’t be compelled. A judge agreed.
Daniel was charged along with two dozen alleged Aryan Brotherhood members and associates in 2019, as part of a massive, two-pronged federal and state investigation into the prison gang. He was scheduled to go on trial with five co-defendants in February, who faces various charges related to five alleged gang-related murders and four alleged murder conspiracies.
Along the way, Daniel has accused officials at California State Prison, Sacramento of corruption, including withholding legal mail, eavesdropping on private visits with his lawyers, placing him in solitary confinement, planting a knife in his cell, and false accusing him of plotting to kill a corrections officer, an administrative accusation for which Daniel was acquitted.
The plea agreement offers Daniel no leniency, nor does it require cooperation. In fact, it states explicitly that the only possible outcome is a sentence of life in prison.
Daniel had already pleaded no contest to killing Scott, through a 2017 agreement with prosecutors in Monterey County, where Salinas Valley State Prison is located. His attorneys had previously indicated that they would argue in trial the murder was over a personal dispute, not gang related, and therefore was not prosecutable under the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act.
Scott was stabbed to death during outdoor time on the B Yard at the prison in Soledad. Prosecutors say he and another inmate, Leonard Dunning, appeared to corrections officers to be punching Scott, so they were slower to break up the fight. Then they realized Daniel was armed with a knife.
“I did it, and that’s all I have to say about that,” Daniel allegedly said, before allegedly adding that if a second specific inmate was on the yard that day, the authorities would have had a double homicide on their hands. The man in question had requested protective custody just four days earlier, according to court records.
Later, prosecutors say prison officials intercepted a letter that indicated Scott was killed for failing to carry out an order to murder another inmate, and for flushing drugs down a prison toilet that he’d been instructed to hold onto.
