by Chuck Sharman

In a ruling on April 9, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California granted approval to a $3 million settlement of attorney’s fees and expenses, in a class-action challenge to sexual abuse by federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) staff of women incarcerated at the now-shuttered Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Dublin.

As PLN reported, the scandal grew to include claims from so many prisoners that the lockup became known as the “rape club.” The California Coalition for Women Prisoners then filed its suit on behalf of the victims in the district court, which bifurcated the case before the parties accepted (1) a consent decree governing injunctive relief for the prisoners and (2) a separate settlement paying 103 of them a total of $116 million in damages. Orders covering both were issued in February 2025. [See: PLN, July 2025, p.1.]

Parts of the consent decree were designed to prevent retaliatory transfers of prisoner-plaintiffs to distant lockups or delays in release otherwise provided by the First Step Act of 2018 and the Second Chance Act of 2008. Other provisions protected the prisoners from loss of personal property and “good time” sentence credits when the BOP inevitably began shuffling them around to other lockups. Still other provisions preempted delays in response to their requests for medical or mental health care, as well as retaliation against immigrant prisoners with referral to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation upon release.

The case marked one of the few times that the BOP has been forced to accept injunctive relief, and the prison agency didn’t take it well. The district court appointed Special Master Wendy Still to oversee the consent decree, and four days after the former chief probation officer for Alameda and San Francisco Counties arrived at FCI-Dublin, the BOP announced it was closing the lockup. In the ensuing rush to transfer some 600 prisoners, they were subjected to entirely predictable privations from a plan that the district court called “ill-conceived” and “like Swiss cheese, full of holes.”

Moreover, because the diaspora of victims from FCI-Dublin now spanned much of the BOP system, the consent decree became more widely enforceable. Still’s monitoring reports relayed waits for medical and mental health care across the system, along with prisoner access to non-English-speaking health providers, as well as those who were properly credentialed. To prevent retaliation, the special housing unit (SHU) in every BOP prison—better known as solitary confinement—also fell under the monitor’s review.

Costs and Fees Negotiated
for Class Counsel

To make all of this happen required a herculean legal effort from lawyers representing the Class, including Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP attorneys and more from Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice and Rights Behind Bars. Their motion for costs and fees documented $197,293 in costs and $4,959,196 in fees. But that total of $5,156,489 was discounted some 40% in the $3 million settlement that the parties reached.

Reviewing it, the district court noted that the lodestar calculation for attorneys’ reported hours worked totaled $4,978,694, slightly more than the fees they reportedly could have charged. Given that—as well as their unique achievement, securing the first-ever special master appointed to oversee the BOP’s compliance with a decree—the district court found the $3 million settlement reasonable and issued its approval.

The agreement did not include fees for the attorney’s additional time that will be required with ongoing monitoring of the consent decree for Defendants’ compliance. Instead, both sides agreed to return to the district court with a request for costs and fees concurrent with submittal of the Monitor’s regular reports. See: Calif. Coalit’n for Women Prisoners, USDC (E.D. Cal.), Case No. 4:23-CV-04155.

Criminal Prosecutions and Additional Settlements

Prosecutions of BOP staffers for the sex abuse of prisoners at FCI-Dublin resulted in prison terms for nine of them, including former Warden Ray Garcia and former Chaplain Theodore Highhouse, as well as former technician Ross Klinger and his supervisor, guard John Russell Bellhouse. Kitchen guards Enrique Chavez and Andrew Jones also went to prison, as did guard Nakie Nunally, who found his victims working at a federal prison industries call center he managed.

Two more staffers charged in the scandal, medical technician Jeffrey Wilson and guard Lawrence Gacad, were sentenced on August 7, 2025, to federal prison terms of 52 months and one year, respectively. See: United States v. Gacad, USDC (E.D. Cal.), Case No. 4:25-cr-00180; and United States v. Wilson, USDC (E.D. Cal.), Case No. 4:25-cr-00181. A federal jury hung in April 2025 on charges against a tenth staffer, former guard Darrell “Dirty Dick” Smith; his December 2025 retrial also ended in a hung jury, and prosecutors with the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) then abandoned his case. See: United States v. Smith, USDC (E.D. Cal.), Case No. 4:23-cr-00110.

Additional pre-suit settlements were negotiated with the BOP on behalf of another 30 victims, who accepted a total of $14 million, according to their attorney, Jayehyun Oh of the Jacob Fuchsberg firm. That brought the total payout from the Rape Club scandal to $130 million for 133 victims.

Oh also represented three prisoners paid a total of $4.8 million in 2021 and 2022, the previous record for the BOP, in a suit accusing former guard Colin Arkparanta of sexually abusing them at another now-closed lockup, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. He was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison in December 2020. [See: PLN, Jan. 2023, p.40.]

At sentencing for Wilson, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers told him that “[m]any of these women were emotionally damaged,” the New York Post reported. “And yet men like you take advantage of that. I find that offensive and illegal.”  

Additional source: New York Post

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