Lawyer says Epstein plea deal protects Ghislaine Maxwell, asks judge to ditch conviction

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 Andrew Rohrbach, arguing for the prosecution, told Lohier he was not aware of any deal reached by one prosecutor's office that required all other federal prosecutors to adhere to it.

Samson and Rohrbach did not return requests for comment from USA TODAY on Wednesday.

More:No, Jeffrey Epstein is not alive, he died by suicide while awaiting trial | Fact check

Plea deal saw Epstein serve just 13 months of jail time

At issue was a deal given to Epstein by then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta where Epstein served 13 months in jail after a 2006 arrest. At the time, Epstein agreed to plead guilty to two federal sex trafficking charges, register as a sex offender, and pay restitution to the victims. In exchange, he was sentenced to just 13 months in a county jail, as compared with the 10-year minimum sentence carried by a federal conviction of trafficking children age 14 and older.

An investigation by the Miami Herald found that work releases granted to Epstein by the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office allowed him to leave jail and serve his sentence from his office for 12 hours a day, six days a week.

Maxwell is currently serving her sentence at a low-security federal prison in Tallahassee. She was convicted in December 2021 of five out of six counts of sex trafficking and enticing minors as young as 14 to be abused by Epstein.

Contributing: Associated Press

Cybele Mayes-Osterman is a breaking news reporter for USA Today. Reach her on email at cmayesosterman@usatoday.com. Follow her on X @CybeleMO.