U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein appears in a photograph taken for the Recent York State Division of Criminal Justice Services’ sex offender registry March 28, 2017 and obtained by Reuters July 10, 2019.
Recent York State Division of Criminal Justice Services | Handout | Reuters
“Significant misconduct” by federal Bureau of Prisons staff made it much easier for sex predator Jeffrey Epstein to kill himself in a Recent York jail in August 2019, a Department of Justice watchdog said in a recent report Tuesday.
The 120-page report, which made eight recommendations to the BOP to deal with “quite a few issues,” also said that “the mixture of negligence, misconduct, and outright job performance failures” also led to widespread skepticism concerning the circumstances of Epstein’s death.
And “most significantly,” those failures deprived “his quite a few victims, a lot of whom were underage girls on the time of the alleged crimes, of their ability to hunt justice through the criminal justice process,” the report by the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General said.
The report details how BOP employees failed to examine in every half-hour on the 66-year-old investor in his cell, lied about their failure to achieve this and allowed him to have extra clothing.
It also said staff failed to switch a cellmate that Epstein lost on Aug. 9, 2019, the day before he was found dead in his cell within the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan. The jail’s psychology department had issued a directive that he be given a recent cellmate.
Epstein’s death got here a month after he was arrested on federal child sex trafficking charges.
Town’s medical expert’s office ruled shortly after his death that Epstein’s injuries were consistent with him hanging himself, reasonably than from being strangled by one other person.
A general view of the Manhattan Correctional Center where the US financier Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in Recent York, United States on August 10, 2019.
Atilgan Ozdil | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
The watchdog report, which found misconduct by greater than a dozen BOP staff, didn’t find any evidence that Epstein was murdered by either one other inmate or BOP staff, which has been the topic of widespread conspiracy theories since he died.
Epstein previously had been present in his cell on July 23, 2019, with orange cloth around his neck. His cellmate told officers that Epstein had tried to hold himself, the report noted.
Two BOP correctional officers, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were arrested in November 2019 on a federal indictment charging them with conspiracy and filing false records in reference to their failure to observe Epstein the night that he died after which lying about it. In May 2021, a judge approved a deferred prosecution deal for each ex-guards, allowing them to flee a possible criminal conviction.
Tuesday’s OIG report blasted the BOP for the failures that contributed to Epstein’s suicide, noting that “this isn’t the primary time the OIG has found significant job performance and management failures on the a part of BOP personnel and widespread disregard of BOP policies which are designed to be certain that inmates are protected, secure, and in good health.”
“The incontrovertible fact that these failures have been recurring ones on the BOP doesn’t excuse them and provides additional urgency to the necessity for DOJ and BOP leadership to deal with the chronic staffing, surveillance, safety and security, and related problems plaguing the BOP,” the report said.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in an announcement, “The mixture of negligence, misconduct and outright job performance failures documented in today’s report all contributed to an environment by which arguably one of the crucial notorious prison inmates in BOP’s custody was left unmonitored and alone in his cell with an excess of prison linens, thereby providing him with the chance to take his own life.”
In an announcement to CNBC, a BOP spokesperson thanked the OIG for its report, and said, “We note that several enhanced practices have already been implemented to deal with the problems at hand.”
“These improvements include diligent review of video footage from restrictive housing to be certain that worker rounds are conducted promptly and accurately,” the spokesman said. “As well as, lieutenants have been assigned the responsibility of conducting regular counts in restrictive housing, while employees are actually required to submit reports on inmates housed alone. Moreover, it’s mandatory to notify the warden for a radical review at any time when a person is placed on suicide watch.”
Epstein’s was considered one of several high-profile prison deaths in recent times. A yr before Epstein died within the MCC, notorious Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger was murdered in a West Virginia federal prison. And on June 10, Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber who murdered three people and injured 23 more in mail bombings that spanned 17 years, died by suicide in a North Carolina federal prison medical center.
Epstein, a former friend of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, previously served a 13-month stint in a Florida state jail after pleading guilty in 2008 to soliciting sex for money from an underage girl.
— CNBC’s Jim Forkin contributed to this report.
