Today’s story about the Royal family and the scandal.
I hadn’t known that Fergie had received money from Epstein. And the Queen is apparently smiling too much.
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/08/prince-andrew-jeffrey-epstein
I don’t know how that is remotely relevant here. You, as a lawyer, have to know that when jails or prisons don’t prevent suicides, they are often held liable in civil lawsuits. They don’t have the luxury of taking the position that" it’s not illegal to commit suicide, so it’s not our problem."
And we the tax payers pay when jails don’t do their jobs right.
Isn’t this the same prison that jailed El Chapo, the drug dealer? I don’t believe they are incompetent when they kept Chapo successfully. I wouldn’t be surprised it was no accident.
Revenge is not the goal of prosecution, justice is. In this case, a conviction that would have denied Epstein his freedom. Well, he has been denied freedom, so that goal has been achieved, and some quest for accountability has been satisfied by his death. You want to see him tortured in prison? Sorry, not really an option, and time to point out that getting to a conviction is going to inflict a whole lot more pain on the victims as they suffer thru cross examination, and is never certain. Epstein’s family is not going to sue and likely welcomes the outcome.
Because there just is no bottom these days, it really wouldn’t surprise me if Epstein’s family did sue …
Victims won’t be able to face him in court. I do take your point that would likely have been unpleasant for them, but they had a choice when he was going to trial, that is now taken away.
I suspect his death will make it harder to pursue co-conspirators too, but I suppose that remains to be seen.
Someone had asked about Ghislaine’s whereabouts and the Daily Mail has been on her trail:
If the estate sues for wrongful death (and it is expected to do so, the estate administrators probably obligated to do so), it seems to me it will just be a circular exchange of money. The estate sues and makes the estate bigger, but the government files forfeiture actions against the estate and gets huge amounts of assets. Who benefits? The estate lawyers and administators who get paid based on the size of the estate.
People dying while in federal custody is a problem. That doesn’t have anything to do with justice.
People die in federal custody every day. Sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, sometimes of natural causes, sometimes not. It is really not that unusual.
I can’t imagine anyone suing for wrongful death in this situation.
A fast google indicates that in certain circumstances, the estate can sue for wrongful death when a pretrial detainee commits suicide. There are certain necessary requirements though. One is that the prison has to know that the prisoner had a particular vulnerability to suicide. My understanding is that in this case, Epstein claimed he had not previously attempted suicide, but had been attacked. Based on his claims, his attorneys demanded that Epstein be placed in a single cell and removed from suicide watch. The feds complied.
Epstein was also supposedly evaluated several times by psychiatrists, whom I assume found that he was not suicidal.
In these circumstances, I don’t think a suit again sthe prison for wrongful death would get very far.
Well…I wouldn’t take the case against the prison.
310 and it is a HUGE problem. The very fact it is not unusual is outrageous and completely antithetical to the idea of a fair justice system.
Just reported that “both” the guards were asleep and fudged the records book to check on all the inmates
My senior resident during my training once told me “If you don’t do anything wrong then you can’t get caught” Good words to live by.
You have to look at who is committing suicide. Many arrested are also in a group more likely to commit suicide even if they aren’t in jail - mental illness, drug users (who suddenly don’t have access to drugs), depressed, frightened, hopeless, just DID commit a crime and they see no way out…
The judge I worked for used to sentence people to 1 day in jail (not prison, a nice clean county jail) because he knew it would be the worst day of their lives. Just processing them into jail takes hours, photos, fingerprints, strip searched. Meals at odd times. They are hungry when they go to bed. It is noisy and the lights are on, they are scared. If they are on meds, they might be off schedule. Judge wanted them to want to never return.
His estate executors have an obligation to bring in ALL assets of the estate, and a wrongful death suit is an asset of the estate.
But it should be unusual. We should do a lot better.
I have it on good authority (from someone very close to me who knows a family member socially) that in this particular case, Ghislaine is pronounced with a hard G. (Either that or her own relatives are saying it wrong.)
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Executors have great discretion as to which claims to pursue and which to pay. The beneficiary of the estate is likely his brother, who seems to distance himself from the situation. Maybe Epstein couldn’t live with the guilt. Maybe he thought death preferable to jail. Maybe his gods told him to do it. Regardless, few mourn his death, and for most, there are more pressing issues than the death of an evil man.
If that really worked there’d be no recidivism.
Maybe it works for people sentenced to one day and that small group has no repeaters? These weren’t big crimes but ones where the sentence was probably 6 months plus probation. Some judges would suspend all the jail sentence but mine would have them serve one day and then suspend the rest of the sentence to only probation. He wanted them to taste jail and how horrible it was.