Mistrial Declared in FCI Dublin Sex Abuse Case After Jury Deadlocks on All Charges

The jury deciding the fate of Darrell Wayne Smith, the final former FCI Dublin official charged with sexual misconduct at the East Bay federal women’s prison, was unable to reach a unanimous decision on Monday, leading the judge to declare a mistrial.

Smith, who was a counselor and later correctional officer at FCI Dublin, was charged with 15 counts of sexual misconduct against five incarcerated women who were under his watch between 2017 and 2021. The most serious charge, aggravated sexual assault, carried up to a life sentence.

After nearly six days of deliberation at a federal courthouse in Oakland, the jury returned deadlocked Monday afternoon, unable to reach a decision on any of the counts against Smith. A new trial date has been set for Sept. 15, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Smith was among eight officials charged after a sprawling FBI probe into a culture of abuse, retaliation and cover-up at the prison, which was shuttered last year. The other seven, including former warden Ray Garcia and staff chaplain James Theodore Highhouse, have been sentenced.

Women who accused Smith of abuse began to come forward with stories of being threatened, groped and even ordered to have sex with him in 2022, after Garcia was walked off the grounds and reports against other officers began to come to light.

During his weekslong trial, Smith’s accusers and another half-dozen women who were formerly incarcerated at Dublin recounted to the jury the abuse they say he perpetrated.

“The defendant’s abuse broke me, it finished me,” testified one of the women, who said Smith abused her in the laundry room and supply closet of the housing unit she lived in.

“The damage he cost me is more painful than anything, and I don’t think I can recover from it,” she said.

But the defense made a case for Smith’s own victimization by FCI Dublin — painting him as a low-level guard who was taken advantage of by women who spun rumors that hurt his reputation and later capitalized on them to frame him as an abuser.

“Inmates had the ability to report him … and when it suited them, they did,” defense attorney Naomi Chung said during her closing argument last week.

She said that he was falsely accused of an inappropriate relationship with a woman when he was a correctional counselor — which the woman testified to during trial — and given the nickname “Dirty Dick” over a “petty comment” he made about another woman’s hair. The prosecution had painted the nickname as a testament to his flirty and unprofessional nature.

“The reports came after Warden Garcia was walked off the compound, and it became clear that benefits were on the table,” Chung said, referring to the fact that some of his accusers were granted compassionate release because of the allegations of abuse. “That’s when one by one the accusations against ‘Dirty Dick’ started coming in.

“This wasn’t a case of ultimate control, it was ultimate convenience.”

Four of Smith’s accusers have already received payouts as part of a civil suit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons that was settled in December. The $116 million agreement, divided among more than 100 victims of officials at Dublin, was the largest ever awarded to sexual assault survivors in U.S. prison history.

A class-action suit, filed on behalf of hundreds of incarcerated women, was also settled in February when a judge awarded additional protections and a formal acknowledgment of the damage caused by the Bureau of Prisons.