Palm Coast’s Gregory Smith, 45, Is Sentenced to 30 Years for Years-Long Sexual Abuse of Stepdaughter

Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols today sentenced Gregory Smith, a former resident of Palm Coast’s P-Section, to 30 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to eight felonies stemming from his repeated rapes of his now-ex-wife’s adolescent daughter before 2019.

Smith, 45, had admitted to the allegations in Facebook messages with his ex-wife. He had also spoken of his offenses in phone calls with the child’s mother that he did not know detectives were recording. “He admits to 90 percent of it,” Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark, who prosecuted the case, said.

He would have faced life in prison had he been convicted at trial.

Sometimes the consequences of a crime unravel over days at trial and the defendant’s fate is decided by hours of jury deliberations. More often, it happens in negotiations behind closed doors, and in comparatively brief exchanges with the judge in open court, as it did today.

For over an hour at today’s pre-trial hearing—with the victim in the gallery the entire time—Smith hesitated to accept the 30-year deal offered by Clark. “30 years is a long time,” he told the judge. He initially turned down the offer, prompting Nichols to tell him what she usually tells defendants facing the near-certainty of conviction at trial: “I want to have a one on one with you, with the attorneys, before you turn that down.”

Smith sat down for 20 minutes, then returned to the lectern before the judge, standing beside Assistant Public Defender Melissa MacNicol. He’s been held at the Flagler County jail on no bond since June 30. He wore his jail-issued orange garb, as did several other defendants he’d been sitting next to.

The judge asked him if he had ever been to prison before. He has not.

“The guys that I have in orange, you’ve been through this over and over again,” the judge said. “They understand everything I’m about to tell you. This is the first time for you on any of this, so I understand it’s hard to accept it, right? These are incredibly serious charges. You know that I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.” Smith agreed. “So if you take this to trial and you lose, there’s only one way you come out of prison, and that’s in a box.”

Smith has served half a year. He would be 75 when released because, as a sex offender, he is not eligible for “gain time,” or time off for good behavior.

“With the offer that’s on the table, you at least have the opportunity to get out,” the judge said. “You’ll be much older. Much older. But at least you’ll have the opportunity. If you lose at trial, you’ll have no opportunity. That’s what this is all about. And one of the things that’s frustrating is that for the people who go to trial and lose, they kick themselves when they hit the age that they could have gotten out had they taken the plea.”

The question wasn’t whether Smith was guilty or not, not even in Smith’s own mind. He was not disputing his guilt; he had conceded to having committed the offenses. He was disputing the length of the deal.

“Do you have any family here locally that has not turned against you?” the judge asked him. Of all the questions she asked, and despite the weight behind her other questions and explanations, that one was the harshest. In a small voice, Smith mumbled that he had his son, a 19-year-old living in Palm Coast. He was not in the courtroom.

“Does he come to visit you?” she asked him.

“Once in a while.”

“This puts him in a really hard spot, doesn’t it? Yes?”

“Yes.”

“So I feel like you’re on the train tracks right now,” the judge said, “and I know you probably heard me say this before, because you’ve been in court quite a bit over the past several months, and that light that’s coming at you is a train. I’m trying to have you step off the track.” She agreed that 30 years was a lot of time. “The way I look at it is it’s the opportunity of knowing you will never get out. That’s really where we’re at, because this type of crime in Florida, it’s life.”

“Just so he understands,” Clark, the prosecutor, said, her voice a vise, “he doesn’t take it today, it’s not out there. It’s done. The victim’s here. So if he wants to do this, he does it today. Otherwise, we just get geared up for trial.”

He opted to speak with MacNicol again. There was a break. Another case was resolved in a plea. Smith returned to the lectern and took the plea, though he had to plead guilty, with an audible yes, to every single one of the charges against him. He is to be on sex-offender probation for the rest of his life upon release from prison and was also designated a lifetime sexual predator.

The victim, no longer a child, had described to her mother—and later to Flagler County Sheriff’s detectives—assaults that took place several times a week for two to three years, all in the P-Section house during his 10-year marriage to the girl’s mother. Today the victim opted not to address the court.

“I want to thank you for being here. I think it’s incredibly brave,” the judge told the victim. She also thanked Smith for not going to trial, which would have required the victim to testify.

The case was investigated by Flagler County Sheriff’s Detective Stacy Kusek.