An appeals court ruled on Friday that victims of deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein will get another chance in court to argue that the Justice Department violated their rights when Florida prosecutors inked a sweetheart deal with the wealthy financier more than a decade ago.
Courtney Wild has argued that DOJ lawyers violated her rights and the rights of dozens of Epstein’s victims under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act of 2004 by reaching a nonprosecution agreement with Epstein’s high-power defense team without consulting with or informing the victims. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled on Friday that it was vacating a 2-1 ruling made by a three-judge appeals court panel that had shot down Wild’s argument and is granting an en banc review to be heard by the full appeals court.
Wild filed a petition with the appeals court in October after U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra’s ruling in February 2019 that she and dozens of other Epstein victims were not entitled to relief even though the same judge had also ruled that Justice Department prosecutors, including now-former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, had violated the rights of Epstein’s victims by concealing the nonprosecution agreement from them.
The three-judge appeals court panel agreed with Marra in April, but the full appeals court will give Wild another shot at arguing in favor of invalidating the agreement.
Wild’s latest petition, filed in October, challenged the 2007 nonprosecution agreement that Acosta helped negotiate, saying it violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act because she and other alleged victims were not consulted before the deal was struck.
Acosta, the U.S. attorney for Southern Florida at the time, reached the agreement with Epstein’s attorneys, including Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, which allowed Epstein to plead guilty to two state-level prostitution solicitation charges related to a 17-year-old girl, thus letting him dodge a slew of serious federal charges. As a part of the deal, Epstein served just 13 months in a Palm Beach County jail where he was allowed out on work release, was forced to pay restitution to certain victims, and was registered as a sex offender. Acosta left his Cabinet position last year amid increased scrutiny of the ‘heart deal.
The agreement was reportedly struck before investigators had even finished interviewing all the alleged victims and was kept under wraps for more than a year. Many of Epstein’s alleged victims didn’t learn of it until he was out of jail.
Judge Kevin Newsom and Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat ruled in April that “as the CVRA is currently written, rights under the Act do not attach until criminal proceedings have been initiated against a defendant, either by complaint, information, or indictment” and thus “because the government never filed charges or otherwise commenced criminal proceedings against Epstein, the CVRA was never triggered.” The duo said that “it’s not a result we like, but it’s the result we think the law requires.”
“Despite our sympathy for Ms. Wild and others like her, who suffered unspeakable horror at Epstein’s hands, only to be left in the dark — and, so it seems, affirmatively misled — by government lawyers, we find ourselves constrained to deny her petition,” Newsom and Tjoflat said.
But Judge Frank Hull filed a lengthy dissent, arguing that the majority “patently errs in holding, as a matter of law, that the crime victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators had no statutory rights whatsoever under the CVRA” and said that “instead, our Court should enforce the plain and unambiguous text of the CVRA and hold that the victims had two CVRA rights — the right to confer with the government’s attorney and the right to be treated fairly — that were repeatedly violated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida.”
“Given the undisputed facts that the U.S. Attorney’s Office completed its investigation, drafted a 53-page indictment, and negotiated for days with Epstein’s defense team, the Office egregiously violated federal law and the victims’ rights by (1) not conferring one minute with them (or their counsel) before striking the final NPA deal granting federal immunity to Epstein and his co-conspirators, (2) intentionally and unfairly concealing the NPA from the victims, as well as how the upcoming State Court plea hearing would directly affect them, and (3) affirmatively misrepresenting the status of the case to the victims after the NPA was executed,” Hull concluded.
Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on federal sex trafficking and conspiracy charges for allegedly abusing girls as young as 14. He was found dead in his Manhattan prison cell in August, which the New York City medical examiner determined to be a suicide.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime friend and on-again, off-again girlfriend, was arrested in early July of this year and charged with conspiring with Epstein to recruit, groom, and sexually abuse underage girls, as well as perjury in depositions regarding Epstein. The British socialite has said that she “vigorously denies the charges” and pleaded not guilty. She was denied bail by Judge Alison Nathan of the Southern District of New York in July, and her trial is set for the summer of 2021.
Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and former Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Jon Kyl of Arizona also filed an amicus brief in support of Wild. Hatch led the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Feinstein and Kyl were members of it when Congress passed the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. The senators argued: “If anything, the Crime Victims’ Rights Act is even more vitally important today than when it was first signed into law. But if permitted to stand, the panel decision will regrettably roll back the clock to the days before the Act, when victims, and their families, were ignored, cast aside, and treated as non-participants in a critical event in their lives.”
