NEW YORK, Jan 26 (Reuters) – Ghislaine Maxwell requested a U.S. choose to dismiss the criminal case accusing her of recruiting teenage women for Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse, citing numerous grounds together with that an settlement to not prosecute the late financier additionally shielded her.
In courtroom filings on Monday evening, legal professionals for the British socialite additionally complained that not sufficient Black and Hispanic grand jurors had been used to indict her, and that components of the indictment had been too imprecise and must be thrown out.
A spokesman for U.S. Legal professional Audrey Strauss in Manhattan declined to touch upon Tuesday. The workplace is predicted to reply in a number of weeks.
Maxwell, 59, is being held in a Brooklyn jail after being denied bail twice following her arrest final July 2 at her New Hampshire dwelling, which prosecutors known as a hideout.
She has pleaded not responsible to serving to Epstein recruit and groom three women for intercourse in Manhattan within the mid-1990s, and mendacity about it beneath oath. Her trial is scheduled for July 12.
Underneath a nonprosecution settlement now extensively seen as a sweetheart association, Epstein agreed to plead responsible in 2008 to Florida state prostitution expenses and register as a intercourse offender.
He accepted a 13-month jail sentence, averting doable life in jail on federal expenses.
Strauss’ predecessor, Geoffrey Berman, mentioned the New York workplace was not certain by Epstein’s settlement when it lodged intercourse trafficking expenses towards him in July 2019, saying the accord coated solely southern Florida and didn’t cowl Epstein’s accomplices.
Attorneys for Epstein deliberate to invoke the settlement in his protection earlier than the 66-year-old killed himself in August 2019 in his Manhattan jail cell.
A federal appeals courtroom in Atlanta is contemplating a request by Epstein’s victims to void the Florida settlement.
In objecting to the indictment, Maxwell’s legal professionals mentioned prosecutors used the COVID-19 pandemic, and a “publicity-driven need” to arrest her one 12 months after Epstein, as excuses to seat her grand jury in suburban White Plains, New York, somewhat than in Manhattan.
They mentioned Blacks and Hispanics had been “considerably underrepresented” in White Plains, depriving Maxwell of her constitutional proper to be indicted by grand jurors drawn from a “honest cross part” of her group.
Maxwell will not be Black or Hispanic, however her legal professionals mentioned she nonetheless had standing to lift the declare.
The case is U.S. v Maxwell, U.S. District Court docket, Southern District of New York, No. 20-cr-00330. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Enhancing by Dan Grebler)