Kenneth Morton Photo by: Courtesy to the Ledger Dispatch

A long, hardening prison sentence doesn't equal a license to kill.

That's the message being sent by Amador County District Attorney Todd Riebe, whose office is filing charges against a local prisoner for the startlingly vicious slaying of his cellmate.

Riebe's latest homicide case was triggered by a three-month investigation into the death of Mule Creek State Prison inmate David Noles. It was in the afternoon of Aug. 30 that Noles was discovered bludgeoned within the confines of his cell. The damage to his face and neck were extreme. Prison staff attempted to revive Noles as he was rushed to the prison's Triage Treatment Area - but he was soon pronounced dead.

Noles had been sent to Mule Creek after being convicted of various sex crimes in Sonoma County in 1993. He was serving a 34-year sentence. He was 73.

Noles's corpse was taken to Sacramento, where a forensic autopsy was performed, which determined that the cause of his death was major blunt force trauma to his neck and groin.

Amador DA investigators John D'Agostini and Ron Rios launched a probe to find Noles's killer. Though Noles had been housed in a level-four maximum security wing of Mule Creek, which contains roughly 1,200 prisoners, suspicion immediately fell on his direct cellmate, Kenneth Morton.

Behind the walls of the prison, Morton is often referred to as "Mountain." The 300-pound inmate is serving a 15-year-to-life sentence for strangling a woman to death in 1987.

Because Morton is already a prisoner, the DA investigators often found themselves working other criminal cases ahead of his - cases that Riebe felt had a more direct impact on the public-at-large. Nevertheless, after recently confronting Morton with the physical evidence they'd accumulated since September, D'Agostini and Rios got the inmate to confess. On Monday, Riebe told the Ledger Dispatch that his office was charging Morton with first degree murder.

"He made a detailed statement to us that's consistent with the physical evidence we found and all of the injuries sustained by Noles," Riebe said. "We're looking for murder one."

When asked what prompted Morton to beat Noles to death, rendering him almost unrecognizable, the district attorney said it may have been a random motive even within the prison culture.

"It's bizarre," Riebe commented. "Based on his statements, the motive appears to be that Noles was selling mutual prison supplies that they shared in their cell to other inmates."

Noles' killing marks Amador County's second homicide case of the year. Despite the public's feelings about sex offenders like Noles, and despite the fact that Morton is already serving an insurmountable prison sentence, Riebe believes not prosecuting him would contribute to an atmosphere in Mule Creek State Prison that would endanger the lives of the men and women who work there.

"You can't just let crimes that happen within the facility go," he said. "If you sent the message to inmates that once they're in prison with a really long sentence that they can do anything they want without consequences, it wouldn't just put other inmates in jeopardy, it would put the entire prison staff in jeopardy as well. The last thing you want is a violent prisoner thinking they're bulletproof because we won't extend the resources to prosecute."