Tyler Davis Bingham, known as T.D., was a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white-supremacist prison gang that began in California's state prisons and spread into the federal system. On July 28, 2006, a federal jury in Santa Ana, California, convicted him of racketeering, of conspiracy to commit racketeering, of the murder of one inmate, and of conspiracy and aiding and abetting the murders of two others. He was not accused of carrying out the murders himself. The prosecution's case was that he sat on the three-man Commission that ran the gang, and that the Commission's orders, passed through coded messages, were obeyed in federal prisons in several states.
The jury was asked to decide whether he should be executed and could not agree. The judge declared a mistrial in the sentencing phase in September 2006, and in November he was sentenced to life in prison. The Ninth Circuit affirmed the convictions in 2011.
The Aryan Brotherhood began as a California state prison gang and later spread to federal prisons, including several holding the most dangerous inmates. Through the 1980s it had an informal command structure, in which members elected a three-person Council. The Council mainly passed messages and kept track of members, though its authority grew over time. In 1992 and 1993 the gang created a three-person Commission and placed the Council below it. The Commission oversaw the organization. Each federal prison had a leader who reported directly to it, and a major decision, such as ordering a murder or going to war with another gang, required a majority vote of the Commission.
The Ninth Circuit's later account of the evidence describes the gang's aims as dominating the prison system and running criminal enterprises, among them fraud, extortion, prostitution, gambling and drug trafficking.
Bingham joined the Council after it was formed and was a member of it before the 1993 restructuring. In 1992 he was the gang's leader at a federal prison in Kansas. After the Commission was created, he held one of its three seats, with Barry Mills and a third man, during most of the events at issue. In 1997 he and Mills were both held at a high-security federal prison in Colorado, which meant that the two of them made up a majority of the Commission. When he was indicted, and when he stood trial, he was already in federal custody on robbery and drug charges.
The first murder of which Bingham was convicted is that of Arva Lee Ray, an inmate and a member of the gang, who died on August 9, 1989, at a federal prison in California. The jury could find that Bingham, as a member of the Council and later of the Commission, ordered the murder. Mills and a third defendant, Edgar Hevle, were convicted of the same murder.
Bingham was convicted of this murder as Count 9 of the indictment.
One of the racketeering acts charged against Bingham concerned an attempted murder at a federal prison in Kansas on January 4, 1992. The jury found him guilty of that act, and of the conspiracy to commit it, as part of the racketeering counts.
In 1996 and 1997 the gang came into conflict with a rival prison gang, the DC Blacks, and Mills told Bingham that the war had begun. Bingham then sent coded messages, among them a note to the Pennsylvania prison announcing war on the DC Blacks and a letter to Mills confirming the plan.
On August 28, 1997, members of the Aryan Brotherhood led by the third Commission member murdered two inmates, Frank Joyner and Abdul Salaam, at the Pennsylvania prison. The jury also found Bingham guilty of a related racketeering act of attempted murder. Bingham's own order to carry out murders of DC Blacks members at the Colorado prison was not acted on, because prison officials placed all of the gang's members there in segregation.
The Ninth Circuit later held that a rational juror could find that Bingham had aided and abetted the murders of Joyner and Salaam. The court observed that he had told the third Commission member to go to war, and that the man did. Bingham was convicted of conspiracy and aiding and abetting the murder in aid of racketeering of each man, (Counts 6 and 7).
The case grew out of a 2002 federal racketeering indictment of dozens of alleged members and associates of the Aryan Brotherhood. Before the first trial, 19 of the defendants pleaded guilty and one had died. Prosecutors sought the death penalty against several of the remaining defendants, Bingham among them.
The trial of Bingham, Mills, Hevle and Christopher Gibson opened in Santa Ana on Tuesday, March 14, 2006, before U.S. District Judge David O. Carter. It was the first trial in a series meant to use the racketeering laws against the gang's senior leadership. All four men pleaded not guilty. Bingham was 58.
The prosecutor told the jury that the case was about power and control of the nation's prison population, and that the gang cared more about profits from gambling, drugs and prostitution than about racial ideology. The evidence included testimony from convicted murderers, former gang members and jailhouse informants, as well as coded messages. The defense argued that the government depended on a parade of perjurers who had been promised money and reduced sentences.
The jury reached its verdict on Friday, July 28, 2006. It convicted all four men under the federal racketeering law and of offenses of violent crime in aid of racketeering. Bingham was convicted on every count except Count 10; in a special verdict it found him guilty of every racketeering act charged against him other than those relating to William McKinney, and found that he had agreed to at least one murder-related act and at least one drug-trafficking act in support of the racketeering conspiracy.
Because he had been convicted of murder, Bingham and Mills were eligible for the death penalty, and the penalty phase began in August 2006 before the same jury. After three and a half days of deliberation the jurors told the court that, after reviewing the evidence, they were honestly and conscientiously unable to agree. On Friday, September 15, 2006, the judge declared a mistrial in the sentencing phase. The result was a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, with formal sentencing set for November 13.
Bingham was sentenced on Tuesday, November 21, 2006, in Santa Ana. The judge said the sentence fit crimes "spanning well over 30 years of murder and organizational murder." He was sentenced to life in prison; the three consecutive life terms reported that day applied to Hevle.
Bingham appealed, together with Hevle, as United States v. Bingham, Nos. 06-50668 and 06-50669. The Ninth Circuit heard argument on March 8, 2011, and on August 4, 2011, in an opinion by Judge Rymer, joined by Judges Callahan and Ikuta, it affirmed both convictions.
Bingham raised several points. He argued that the evidence did not support his conviction for the 1997 murders, that the acts before and after the 1993 change of leadership were not part of one enterprise, that the racketeering conspiracy count had been constructively amended, that he could not be liable for the attempted murder at the Pennsylvania prison, that evidence from the 1992 Kansas matter had been destroyed, and that the prosecution had used false testimony. The court rejected each of these. It held that the gang remained the same enterprise after 1993 because its goals did not change, that nothing showed bad faith in the loss of the evidence, and that the inconsistencies in a witness's testimony had been put to the jury. A jury, it said, could reasonably read Bingham's statements as an order to kill.
Count 10 charged Bingham with the murder of William McKinney, a former member of the gang. The jury acquitted him of that count, and of the racketeering acts concerning McKinney. Mills was acquitted of the same count.
The meaning of the 1997 coded messages was disputed at trial. The prosecution said that a note passed from the high-security prison in Colorado to the Pennsylvania prison ordered a race war. The defense said it was a warning to other gang members. The jury sided with the prosecution, and the Ninth Circuit held that the verdict could stand on that reading.
The defense claim that prosecution witnesses were paid and rewarded with reduced sentences was put to the jury. The Ninth Circuit found no support for the allegation of knowingly false testimony, and the verdict stood.
August 9, 1989: Arva Lee Ray dies at a federal prison in California; Bingham is later convicted of his murder.
January 4, 1992: attempted murder at a federal prison in Kansas, one of the racketeering acts of which Bingham was convicted.
1992 to 1993: the Aryan Brotherhood forms a three-person Commission above its Council; Bingham is a member of the Council before the change and of the Commission after it.
August 28, 1997: Frank Joyner and Abdul Salaam die at a federal prison in Pennsylvania.
August 28, 2002: ten-count racketeering indictment against 40 defendants returned; unsealed in October 2002.
March 14, 2006: trial of Bingham, Mills, Hevle and Gibson opens in Santa Ana.
July 28, 2006: jury convicts Bingham on all counts except Count 10.
September 15, 2006: mistrial declared in the death-penalty phase after the jury cannot agree.
November 21, 2006: Bingham sentenced to life imprisonment.
March 8, 2011: Ninth Circuit hears the appeal.
August 4, 2011: Ninth Circuit affirms the convictions.