MACHIAS, Maine — Former Washington County Sheriff Donnie Smith pleaded not guilty Monday to felony theft charges in connection with illegal expenditures from an inmate benefit account at the 48-bed county jail.
Smith was indicted May 4 on charges of theft by unauthorized taking, theft by misapplication of funds, both Class B crimes, and misuse of entrusted property, a Class D crime.
Smith, 62, appeared Monday along with his attorney, Don Brown of Brewer, for the proceeding before Justice William Stokes in Washington County Superior Court.
A county clerk confirmed Smith posted $1,500 in unsecured bail Monday. A trial date has not been set. Smith is due in court again Aug. 24 for a “status conference,” she said.
Brown and Smith declined to comment after the arraignment.
Smith is accused of misappropriating $11,700 from the county’s inmate benefit fund by spending it on gifts for deputies, charitable donations, meals, flowers, uniforms and other items that did not benefit inmates, according to a previous statement by Washington County District Attorney Matt Foster, who is prosecuting the case.
Foster could not immediately be reached for further comment Monday.
He said in May, however, that he sought to indict Smith on the charges after a lengthy investigation by detectives from the Maine attorney general’s office.
Court documents indicate that the alleged thefts occurred over a six-year period between January 2007, just after Smith first took office as sheriff, and December 2012. Smith lost his re-election bid last fall to current Sheriff Barry Curtis. Smith’s last day in office was Dec. 31, 2014.
Use of funds from the inmate benefit account at the 48-bed Washington County Jail has been under scrutiny for years. Funds from the account, which contains revenue from jail commissary sales and fees from telephone service for inmates, are to be used to directly benefit inmates and not for a jail’s operating budget or other purposes, according to state Department of Corrections jail standards.
Smith had received a report from an administrative assistant in October 2012 indicating suspicious expenditures were being paid from the inmate benefit fund, and he hired an attorney to investigate.
Waterville attorney Peter Marchesi said in his 28-page report that his investigation could not justify the purchase of cellphones, a leather motorcycle jacket, dresses, jewelry and lingerie, among other items paid for with inmate funds.
In December that year, Smith suspended Karina Richardson, the jail clerk, and Robert Gross, the jail administrator, and recommended to county commissioners that both be discharged. Gross resigned not long after being suspended. The commissioners held a disciplinary hearing in January 2013 and approved Smith’s recommendation to fire Richardson. At about the same time, the commissioners also asked the state attorney general’s office to investigate jail operations and have been awaiting the results since.
Meanwhile, Richardson took her case to the state Board of Arbitration and Conciliation, which ruled in October 2014, that she should not have been terminated, but rather only suspended without pay for six months.
The county later settled its case with Richardson.
Smith still faces unrelated misdemeanor charges of reckless conduct and driving to endanger, stemming from an alleged confrontation on the road Jan. 6 in Lubec with a woman he had previously accused of assaulting him.
He is scheduled to appear in court on those charges July 16, a court clerk confirmed Monday.
And he reached a deal on May 7 on two other unrelated counts of harassment by telephone, for which a jury trial had been scheduled to begin May 8. Those charges stemmed from “offensively coarse and obscene” texts sent on Jan. 1 to department employees, court documents say.
According to the terms of the deal, if Smith stays out of trouble for a year, the charges will be dropped, Foster has said. Smith also paid a $250 fee in that case.