Former socialite and convicted sex offender, Ghislaine Maxwell is now asking the US Supreme Court to hear her appeal against a 2021 conviction on five counts of aiding convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in his sexual abuse of young girls.
Daily Mail reported:
“Maxwell’s lawyers filed a 159-page Petition to the highest court in the country on Thursday asking the Supreme Court Justices to throw out her 20-year sentence for sex trafficking.”
Maxwell is serving her sentence in Tallahassee State Prison, in Florida.
“The former close friend of Prince Andrew continues to vehemently deny all the charges against her and is asking the Supreme Court to throw out the conviction which could end up with her walking free.
Maxwell argues she should never have been charged as Epstein’s ‘co-conspirator’ because of a 2007 plea deal Epstein made in Florida in which he agreed to plead guilty to two counts of child sex abuse and served 13-months in jail in exchange for any of his ‘co-conspirators’ avoiding prosecution.”
A federal appeals judge rejected her appeal last year, saying the Southern District of New York was not bound by the Florida ‘sweetheart deal’.
“In their lengthy petition, Maxwell’s lawyers said: ‘Despite the existence of a non-prosecution agreement promising in plain language that the United States would not prosecute any co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein, the United States in fact prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell as a co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein’.”
The prosecutors argue that different jurisdictions have different rules to honoring a plea deal made elsewhere.
“The petition, written by Maxwell’s high-powered lawyer David Markus, added: ‘A defendant should be able to rely on a promise that the United States will not prosecute again, without being subject to a gotcha in some other jurisdiction that chooses to interpret that plain language promise in some other way’.”
Epstein was found dead in 2019 while behind bars in New York, after being arrested on child sex trafficking charges.
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