Case Name: People of the State of California v. Christian Knighten, Frankie Lujan, Red Culbertson and Dennis Ray Morris

Case Description: Murder committed in the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail by four cellmates (who were members of the same gang) upon another inmate. After luring the victim into their cell, the defendants brutally stabbed him dozens of times about his head, neck and torso with jail-made stabbing implements, then wrapped the corpse in sheets and blankets and hid it under their bunk bed until the morning. They then created a ruse to distract deputies so they could dispose of the body in the shower.

For their own protection, Sheriff's deputies walked down the row of the "gang module" only a few times a day in order to conduct headcounts. These highly dangerous inmates were permitted to roam up and down the row for significant periods of time, unsupervised and essentially unwatched. The four defendants took advantage of this freedom to commit this brutal murder when no deputies were in the area to see or hear anything unusual. If any other inmates witnessed the crime, none came forward to assist in the investigation or to testify to observing the murder occur.

The murder was ordered, or at least authorized by, the Mexican Mafia prison gang and its associates and representatives in retaliation for the victim stealing narcotics inside the jail and failing to pay other narcotics-related debts inside the jail. The key witness was a former Mexican Mafia insider who agreed to enter the federal witness protection program in exchange for testimony in this case and a federal RICO case against a large number of Mexican Mafia members. This witness was one of the leaders of the row where the murder occurred, and had advance knowledge that it was going to occur. He of course had a significant criminal history himself, but his testimony about the inner workings of the Mexican Mafia, its history, leadership, structure, and culture, its methods of discipline and enforcement of its rules, its control of the jails and prisons and the narcotics trade inside those facilities, was extremely compelling.

The evidence also showed that as the investigation into the murder began and the detectives searched each cell on the row, the defendants' cell was extremely clean, as if it had been scrubbed with cleanser. However, the defendants missed two small spots of blood, which DNA testing confirmed to be the victim's blood. Unfortunately, although one of them had cuts on his mouth and another on his hand, none of the defendants could be tied via DNA testing to any blood in the cell.

Defendant Knighten, against whom the prosecution had the strongest case, took the stand and confessed, in the meantime attempting to exonerate the other three defendants by testifying that he had acted alone. This gesture was an apparent payback to defendant Lujan, for in a previous special circumstance robbery-murder in which he and Knighten were co-defendants, it was defendant Lujan who had taken the stand and taken the blame for the entire incident, exonerating Knighten.

The trial was also characterized by a fight between two of the defendants in which one stabbed the other, and a third defendant stabbing two other inmates in the courthouse lockup.