Another Dublin Women's Prison Officer Sentenced for Sexual Abuse

A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced former women’s prison correctional officer Nakie Nunley to six years in prison for sexually abusing people incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin.

Nunley is one of eight officers to be criminally charged for sexual abuse since 2021 at the low-security federal women’s prison that has been embroiled in sexual misconduct allegations for years.

“You left a wake of destruction behind you. I don’t know how else to describe it,” said U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on Wednesday to Nunley, just before announcing his sentence. “You were cruel, you were perverse, you were predatory, and you exploited them. A sentence has to reflect the reality of what you did. There are women you abused who have longer sentences than I will give you. One wonders if that is appropriate.”

Allegations of sexual abuse at FCI Dublin go back decades, and the most recent scandals began unraveling in 2021 after an investigation by The Associated Press revealed a culture of abuse and cover-up at the facility. The former warden, chaplain and multiple other officers have been charged and sentenced, but allegations of abuse have continued.

FCI Dublin is currently facing 63 individual lawsuits over sexual misconduct and retaliation by officers, including 12 filed this year. A separate class-action lawsuit was filed by eight women incarcerated at FCI Dublin, alleging women at the prison were subject to rampant and ongoing sexual abuse, including rape and sexual assault, drugging, groping and being forced to take explicit photos.

It also claims women incarcerated at the facility were subject to abuse during medical exams and that immigrants were threatened with deportation if they did not comply.

Nunley, who is from Fairfield, served in the U.S. Air Force before working for the Bureau of Prisons. In July 2023, he pleaded guilty to sexually abusing five women who were serving prison sentences while he was a supervisor for inmates working at a call center called UNICOR.

The call center was a desirable place to work because it paid more than other jobs at the facility and women could gain transferable work skills, Molly Priedeman, assistant United States attorney who is prosecuting the case, said in court on Wednesday. She said the guard took advantage of his position and threatened women with firing and other punishment if they didn’t comply with sex acts.

“He held his victims’ jobs, their livelihood within the prison walls within his hands, and he used that power to harass, degrade his numerous victims,” Priedeman said. “This is not just a case where there are implicit power dynamics at play. … A number of his victims have described nightmares, suicidal thoughts.”

In his plea deal, Nunley admitted that he lied to federal investigators about sexually abusing his victims and about sending one of his victims sexually explicit notes. When confronted about his behavior, Nunley threatened to transfer one woman who was incarcerated at the prison to another facility and that she could lose her job.

At Wednesday’s court hearing in Oakland, women currently incarcerated at FCI Dublin testified about their experiences with Nunley. One inmate said that Nunley promoted her in the call center “because he told me he liked the way I looked” and that he repeatedly sexually assaulted her in his office.