For 183 days at the beginning of 2024, Ian Smith sat in a locked jail cell in the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, sure that he should by then be freed. 

According to a lawsuit filed earlier this month by Smith, a combination of clerical errors and failures by Dallas County officials in charge of the jail processing system led to Smith’s overincarceration by half a year, a violation of his constitutional rights under the Fourth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The filing states that the overserved time was due to a district clerk’s miscalculation of time already served, resulting in a “320-day error” that took months to correct. 

Smith’s attorneys claim that “even the most cursory review” of the records would have shown the “glaring discrepancy” between the clerk’s calculation and the time Smith had already served, but no such review process exists within Dallas County. The Dallas County District Attorney’s office declined to comment on the lawsuit. 

“[Mr. Smith] suffered concrete and devastating injuries — including profound humiliation, shame, fright, mental anguish and loss of enjoyment of life — for which he seeks full recovery,” the lawsuit states. “For 183 days, Mr. Smith was deprived of his freedom, his ability to earn a living, and his participation in daily life — all because Dallas County could not be bothered to verify a simple calculation.”

Smith, originally from Plano, has been convicted multiple times of charges related to stalking female SMU students. He was most recently arrested in July 2025, according to a university bulletin, in connection with online threats made against the university. 

In 2023, Smith was convicted of obstruction/retaliation, a third-degree felony, for threatening to harm a woman. After pleading guilty, Smith was sentenced to two years’ incarceration. At that time, he had already served 540 days of jail time that was to be shaved off the sentence, the lawsuit states, which should have seen him released by Sept. 13, 2023. 

Instead, Smith remained in custody until March 13, 2024. After officials recognized the issue, it took nine additional days for Smith to be released. 

While Smith has since gone on to reoffend, attorney Jim Spangler cautions against using that as a reason to be ambivalent about his client’s overserved time. The case represents a fundamental breakdown pervading the Dallas County justice system, he said. 

“When people are held for months past their due date, that undoes all that work that the criminal justice system is supposed to do,” Spangler told the Observer. “It’s unfair, and it’s unjust. The system has gone through the process to try and make it as fair and just as possible; it’s listened to all the voices, and they’ve come to an outcome in this case that everyone agreed to. And the fact that he had to do more time is fundamentally unfair.” 

There is no state law that punishes municipalities for overdetentions. Additionally, no state agency officially tracks the number of Texans who overserve their sentences annually, but the issue has been reported in Dallas County for years. In 2023, the Observer found that a shift to the court management software Odyssey — which Smith’s lawsuit repeatedly cites as one of the factors contributing to his overdetainment — was causing inmates to overstay their sentences by days or weeks. 

According to the Texas Tribune, Dallas County has settled three lawsuits in the last two years filed by inmates who accused the county of failing to release them on time. The settlements have cost Dallas County nearly $250,000, money meant to compensate for missed job interviews or evictions that can result when a person is held in jail longer than planned. 

The Tribune article references at least one other individual, a woman arrested for misdemeanor drug possession and violating parole in December, who intends to sue Dallas County for the 49 extra days that she was kept in jail this year. 

To completely blame Dallas County’s processing system, Odyssey, for overserved time would be to scapegoat a recently-introduced software for a decades-old problem, said Spangler. County officials approved the program in April 2022, and it went into effect in May 2023, meaning the miscalculation of Smith’s time served occurred before the county installed the software. According to the lawsuit, one former public defender admitted to knowing of “at least 30” cases of over-detention before the Odyssey system’s implementation.

At the core of the issue is a failure to properly train district clerks in calculating time served, something that “they have a responsibility to get right,” as the sole determinants of when a person walks free, Spangler said. Additionally, “the county has failed to put proper checks in place” to prevent the issue, despite knowing it occurs.

A software-specific issue is that Odyssey is used by the courts but it is not integrated with the jail system. This can result in clerks failing to see time that may have been served in other counties, and prevents electronic communication between the justice and enforcement agencies. According to the lawsuit, as of fall 2025, district clerks were required to “print the information” from Odyssey “onto paper, then physically deliver it” to the sheriff’s office. 

According to the Texas Tribune, Dallas County is expected to be one of the first testing grounds for a new Texas Department of Criminal Justice program that formalizes communication between courts and jails, which may help prevent future overdetentions. 

“People know when they’re supposed to get out. They are counting down the days and when they don’t [get released on time], it is just an extremely stressful situation,” said Spangler. “It’s really challenging time to do, especially when you think you’re supposed to be out and when you have people calling on your behalf. In [Smith’s] case, he even had an attorney ultimately working on his case. But a clerical error is just holding you in jail for months. It’s just one of those things that is really hard.”