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A scathing report from the Department of Justice blamed negligence and misconduct by staff at the Bureau of Prisons for the suicide of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, while reiterating that there is no evidence to suggest his death was a conspiracy.
“The combination of negligence, misconduct, and outright job performance failure... all contributed to an environment in which arguably one of the BOP’s most notorious inmates was provided with the opportunity to take his own life,” the DOJ’s report said.
More importantly, the report said, the errors by prison staff deprived Epstein’s “numerous victims, many of whom were underage girls at the time of the alleged crimes, of their ability to seek justice through the criminal justice process.”
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A little over a month after Epstein was convicted in 2019 of a years-long sex trafficking scheme involving underage girls, he died by suicide.
For reasons that remain unclear, prison staff allowed Epstein to hoard supplies like bed linen and clothing despite his previous suicide attempt, the report noted.
Guards also allowed Epstein to remain alone in his cell for a full day without a cellmate, despite one official emailing 70 Bureau of Prison employees to explicitly warn them that leaving Epstein isolated was dangerous.
Two guards who were responsible for searching Epstein’s cell failed to conduct a search before his suicide, the report said. Prosecutors reached an agreement with the guards for them to serve 100 hours of community service.
However, the DOJ emphasized that the department found no evidence to contradict a previous FBI investigation that found there was “absence of criminality” in his death.