A lawyer for Ghislaine Maxwell, the socialite serving a 20-year prison sentence for luring young girls to be abused by Jeffrey Epstein, asked a judge to throw out her conviction based on a controversial non-prosecution agreement Epstein struck with a U.S. attorney in Florida in 2007.
Maxwell, 62, was convicted in December 2021 for recruiting and grooming underage girls for routine sexual abuse at the hands of the disgraced financier for a 10-year period.
Arguing before three judges for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday, Maxwell’s attorney Diana Fabi Samson made the case that Epstein’s plea deal from more than a decade ago also protected Maxwell.
The argument echoed one made by Epstein’s lawyers on the basis of the same non-prosecution deal after he was arrested in July of 2019.
Samson claimed a provision of the deal protecting potential co-conspirators invalidates Maxwell’s conviction. Judge Raymond Lohier appeared skeptical of Samson’s argument that deals between U.S. attorneys and defendants hold in other districts. Lohier said he read the Justice Department’s manual on non-prosecution agreements, and thought it “suggests the opposite of what you just said.”
Samson said the manual was “not a shield to allow the government to get out of its agreements made with defendants,” and that denying the agreement’s viability “strikes a dagger in the heart of the trust between the government and its citizens regarding plea agreements.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney…
