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  3. Not Guilty Verdict for Prison Caseworker

Not Guilty Verdict for Prison Caseworker

Feb 17, 2016 | Sex Crimes

For almost a quarter century, Wynona Mixon was a caseworker in the federal prison system. Most recently, she worked at USP Tucson, a high security United States penitentiary housing male offenders, including sex offenders. Her job was to assist inmates lining up programs such as counseling and educational classes. Then, in 2011, she told her supervisors that she had been raped by an inmate. Instead of taking action against the inmate, the feds accused Mixon of voluntarily getting sexually involved with the inmate, and then reporting the rape in order to hide her behavior. They also say she filed a false claim against the Federal Bureau of Prisons for failing to provide proper security, and lied to the FBI when she was interviewed concerning the charges.

When all was said and done, the feds went all out, charging her with a number of offenses, including:

  • Sexual abuse (four counts).
  • Providing false statements to the government (three counts).
  • Attempting to impede a government investigation (one count).

If you add up all the time Mixon could have been sentenced to on all the charges, it comes to more than 35 years behind bars.

In the meantime, the inmate, Christopher Goins, filed a lawsuit asking for $13 million in damages against Mixon and her supervisors, claiming that Mixon is a sexual predator; that the defendants in the lawsuit knew she was a sexual predator; and that they had nevertheless allowed her access to inmates. That case is still pending.

In any event, the jury in the criminal case against Mixon did not buy the government’s story. They found Mixon not guilty on all counts. And some question why the feds would have pursued the case on what appears to be rather slim evidence. One line of thought is that it was an attempt to cover up the failure to assign Goins to a maximum (as opposed to high) security prison. We’re not sure what the reason was, but this appears to have been a major effort by the government resulting in nothing, other than the depletion of the defendant’s retirement savings.

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