Jury Deadlocks at Trial of Last BOP Guard Accused at California “Rape Club”
A jury deadlocked in federal court for the Northern District of California on April 14, 2025, leading Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to declare a mistrial for Darrell Wayne Smith, 55, a former federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) guard accused of sexually abusing prisoners at the now-shuttered Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin.
Smith’s 12-count indictment was unsealed on the same day in May 2023 that he was arrested at his new home in Florida. As PLN reported, he was the eighth BOP staffer accused of sexually abusing prisoners at the lockup. Already sentenced were former Warden Ray Garcia in March 2023, followed by former Chaplain James Theodore Highhouse; former guard supervisor John Russell Bellhouse; former kitchen and food supervisors Enrique Chavez and Andrew Jones; as well as former guard and maintenance technician Ross Klinger, who flipped and testified against the rest. Former guard Nakie Nunley was then the seventh former employee sentenced in March 2024. [See: PLN, Apr. 2024, p.60.]
As PLN also reported, a superseding indictment in July 2024 added three more counts of sexual abuse against Smith, whom his alleged victims called “the worst” of the sexual predators on the prison’s staff, recalling he liked to sit in the dark and eat bananas while watching them undress. [See: PLN, Sep. 2024, p.61.]
At his trial, Smith’s attorneys argued that it was he who was the victim—of retaliation by former Warden Garcia, who initiated an investigation that stretched into a six-year probe of Smith’s alleged inappropriate relationship with an unnamed prisoner. But prosecutors pushed back against that, noting that Smith was sanctioned at the end of the investigation with just a six-day suspension. After the mistrial, prosecutors moved to re-try the former guard, and Judge Rogers accommodated them with an expedited schedule that will see jury selection begin on August 20, 2025. See: United States v. Smith, USDC (N.D. Cal.), Case No. 4:23-cr-00110.
Additional source: KQED
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