[imagesource: CBS]

On August 10, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his prison cell (above).

New York City’s medical examiner ruled Epstein’s death a suicide, but that’s never going to stop the rumours and conspiracy theories doing the rounds.

What is clear is that the guards on duty – Tova Noel and Michael Thomas – did not do their jobs properly, having been assigned to check inmates at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City twice an hour.

NPR reports:

…footage from the night of the suicide shows the two guards at their desks, browsing the Internet for furniture, motorcycle sales and sports news instead of monitoring Epstein in his cell.

Authorities say that footage shows that the two guards were apparently sleeping for more than two hours of their shifts.

That’s a serious dereliction of duty, but the pair are set to avoid jail time after a court filing from Friday showed they had cut a deal with prosecutors.

They had been charged with falsifying documents to conceal that they did not make the required welfare and security checks.

This from The Guardian:

As part of the deal with prosecutors, the prison workers will enter into a deferred prosecution agreement with the justice department and will serve no time behind bars, according to a letter from federal prosecutors that was filed in court papers Friday.

Noel and Thomas would instead be subjected to supervised release, would be required to complete 100 hours of community service and would be required to fully cooperate with an ongoing probe by the Justice Department’s inspector general, it says.

The pair have “admitted that they ‘willfully and knowingly completed materially false count and round slips regarding required counts and rounds’”.

Epstein’s name is once again back in the news, after it emerged that he had spent a decent chunk of time hosting Bill Gates, who was allegedly looking to use the convicted pedophile’s connections to score a Nobel Peace Prize.

[sources:npr&guardian]