> killed himself in a cell and unit where suicide is made a practical impossibility
Ken White (famous-ish lawyer and notable internet personality) puts it this way: "But your assessment of plausibility is based on your assumptions about how the system works. Those assumptions are, mostly, wrong — naive Dick-Wolf-level law-enforcement-are-competent-good-guys stuff".
Prisons, particularly american prisons, are full of incompetence and casual disregard to human life and dignity. The prison where Epstein died was understaffed, and the guards tasked with watching him had next-to-no training. Epstein had also been taken off suicide watch nine days earlier.
The jail that Epstein died in has had one other suicide in the past 40 years. They haven't actually lost someone to suicide 21 years, despite several attempts. They're not incompetent at all at preventing their inmates from committing suicide. So no, the statement that suicide is made practically impossible there isn't based on wrong assumptions, it's very well supported by statistics.
I didn't quickly get data on attempt/completion in prison, but the attempt/completion rate is the general pop is ~30 attempts/completion, and the completion rate is dramatically driven up with access to firearms. (https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/) I'd expect to see a lower completion/attempt rate in prison, not a higher one, given the monitoring and reduced access to methods.
I stand by my statement- something is funny with the way they reported that data.
The general prison suicide rate isn't comparable- Epstein was in jail rather than prison, previously already on suicide watch from a supposed attempt and was more importantly possibly the most high profile prisoner of the Millenium.
Again you are comparing apples with oranges. Outside of prison, nothing prevents you from attempting suicide. Whether you succeed or not depends mostly on your resolve and how you do it.
In a perfect prison, suicide attempt should be 0%, not because people are happy, but because inmates should have no way to even attempt a suicide.
If at some point a mistake is made and an inmate manages to kill himself, it will be a 1 attempt/completion and going to the conclusion that prisons make it easy to kill yourself does not seem right.
No that is not a perfect prison. A perfect prison should probably be more like the general population. Unless you think the perfect prison is chained to the wall at all times. And that prison is no place for rehabilitation.
Sure, I thought it was obvious I meant : "in a perfect high-security cell where the goal is to keep the prisoner from killing himself before testifying"
Just because something is a conspiracy doesn't mean it isn't the most plausible scenario. The theories that a man who as many powerful people wanted dead as Epstein not only beat the odds when it came too attempting suicide but also succeeding is just not plausible. It's just unlikely. It's possible but not probable.
There's such a thing as an irrational bias that something CAN'T be a conspiracy if other scenerios are possible. Many people take pride in "debunking" conspiracies and that ego can make it hard to see a real one right in front of you.
Yep. The hard conspiracy theory - that some rich agent with something to lose took determined action to subvert the prison's protections and assassinate him - doesn't hold water for me.
I am, however, willing to entertain the softer conspiracy theory - that people in prison (prisoners and staff) hate pedophiles and people who enable pedophilia, and the guy was, perhaps, given more opportunity than average to "fix his own problem" by a staff that wasn't going to shed a tear over a dead pedo.
Maybe in some more run-of-the-mill cases, sure. But even the dimmest staff member must have been well aware that this particular pedophile was on the verge of testifying against an entire network of other pedophiles.
If you hate pedophiles so much you're willing to risk your life/career just to let one of them commit suicide, surely you also hate them enough to wait just a little bit longer to prevent a bunch more of them from getting away with it.
They were sleeping through their shift because that's just what prison guards frequently do. They were doing a lot of overtime, partly because the prison is understaffed and partly because you make a lot of money signing up for overtime. They were tired, and nobody watches the watchers.
Why do you think that sleeping through overtime would be a case of the guards risking their life? I doubt they've even been fired.
If nobody watched them, how do we know they slept through their shift, and if they did, how do we know they did it because they were tired and not because somebody asked them to sleep for a while and not worry about a thing, and that part of overtime would be paid at much, much different rate?
> I doubt they've even been fired.
Especially in this situation. We have huge motive, excellent opportunity and unless one of the guards is so stupid as to talk, almost no possibility of detection. A perfect crime, if there's one. Of course, there's no proof of that - maybe Epstein indeed was suicidal. Maybe the guards were just paid to give him an opportunity, not avoid witnessing murder. Who knows. But I don't see how guards sleeping excludes any of that.
First, there are lots of suicides in prison. The suicide rate is 4 times higher there than in the general public, and the rate is highest among pre-trial detainees, like Epstein.
Second, people are generally pretty bad at suicide, and the methods most likely to succeed (firearms, drugs, falling) are not available as options.
Why do you think he would witness against anyone? He didn't do that last time as far as I know.
And IF people thought he had dirt on people then I would assume he would at least have a basic dead mans switch that would send out the dirt to the press in case of death; to prevent assassinations. Especially if there was an earlier attempt.
The people he had dirt on may not be the same people that would assassinate him. If the honeypot theory is true, then exposing those people doesn't serve the purpose, but it also wouldn't be much of a problem. What's more problematic is the information that only Epstein had and could testify to.
Also, from Epsteins perspective, actually having a dead man switch versus just letting people assume he has one has exactly the same impact.
So why bother setting one up? If the switch goes off, he will be dead, perhaps there will be retaliation against relatives. How would he benefit?
Guards at this prison have raped and beaten inmates. At least some of them have been convicted. There's no real reason to believe that they would be acting based on some kind of higher-level planning. https://gothamist.com/news/prisoners-endure-a-nightmare-gula...
Assuming they are rational. But it's evident to me that in a lot of cases pedophilia flips a switch in peoples brains and rage completely crowds out reason.
The softer conspiracy theory is also possible but it lacks a plausible motive given anybody with two brain cells to rub together would know that killing Epstein would be protecting pedophiles.
Why doesn't the hard conspiracy theory hold water for you? The motive is much more reasonable and prison assassinations are hardly some unheard of impossibility especially given the sheer amount of extremely powerful people with a reason to kill him.
When competing theories nessecarily have the prison guards who have been overwhelmingly successful in preventing suicide attempts and somewhat successful in stopping suicides after they get to attempts to hold the idiot ball it stretches credulity. Why haven't more prisoners been suicided if these guard were on such a hair trigger they would murder somebody at the expense of children's safety?
On the other hand compromising a prison guard and blackmailing him into murdering Epstein or else would be trivial for an Epstein associate. I just don't get how enraged prison guard is a remotely more plausible motive than prison guard being given a compelling reason to kill Epstein by an associate. It seems like setting out to prove the conclusion Epstein wasn't killed by the rich.
The two broken cameras must have been incompetent as well then. Not suggesting a conspiracy, but I wouldn't call it that anyway. Maybe it was just a crime.
Add to this the fact that he had been reported as being optimistic about winning his case and had never exhibited suicidal behavior before, even when he was facing a serious sentence
From what I've read, the two broken cameras story is just that "two of the many cameras in the area" were broken. At least one camera was actively recording the area outside his cell and they have the footage and it doesn't show anything interesting.
If they were going to fake footage why would they have allowed broken cameras? I'd also bet it's not really that easy to get fake footage into their security system even if you could produce it.
"The Washington Post reported that 'at least one camera in the hallway outside the cell where authorities say registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself earlier this month had footage that is unusable' and that it is 'unclear whether the flaw in the taping affected a limited duration of the footage or whether it was a chronic problem in the beleaguered Manhattan facility.' "
Yeah the shorter version of Ken "Popehat" White's thoughts are: middle class white people have no fucking idea how shitty the justice system is.
And it's true, based on the replies to this post. No one who says Epstein's suicide was a "practical impossibility" has been anywhere near the justice system. They definitely don't know anyone who has been on the prisoner side of it.
Convicted terrorists have said that Gitmo and warzones are better than this place. It's also very used to "high profile" prisoners, like El Chapo and accused terrorists picked up in Somalia and transferred back here.
Because he is the 20th prisoner in federal custody to commit suicide in a year? Because people routinely kill themselves even in supermax jails? Because 4-5 people attempt suicide in that prison every year and it'd be even more surprising if they were perfect at preventing it? Because they weren't allowed to hire new staff since Sessions froze hiring in 2017, until April, and their staffing levels went well down over that time?
Here's the story of a death, not suicide, in an equivalent facility in Chicago - Solebo. He wasn't taking his meds, and nobody knew because the blood samples they'd taken from him were contaminated. Coincidence? And although a judge had ordered twice, six months apart, that he be transferred for proper medical examinations, he wasn't. Coincidence? And every staff member with a medical license was on leave or away the day he was found dead. Coincidence? Does the federal DoC just actually fail that much in that many ways? Yes. All the time.
It's actually fairly normal to not keep people on suicide watch for very long. Full-blown suicide watch is expensive, but furthermore can stress a patient to the point of actually encouraging suicide. Being unable to sleep because your cell lights are kept on 24/7 and you're constantly getting checked on, the humiliation of having to wear a suicide smock, not having sheets on your bed, etc.
You can argue that this is a crappy system, and I'd agree - but it is the dominant system in US prisons.
I understand your point, however I want to rhetorically ask: expensive relative to what? What's a life worth? What's it worth to keep someone alive where there's very high probability that they alone could be linchpin to bring down a network of bad actors?
> expensive relative to what? What's a life worth?
I absolutely agree - it was stupid and shortsighted to take him off of suicide watch, and better suicide watch programs are needed in general.
My point is more that nothing that much out of the ordinary for American jails happened here. Things happen in US jails every day that, to most people, would seem insane - incompetence and indifference to life are the norm. See my comment above - US jails are run on shoestring budgets with no accountability. People die in jail all the time for causes that were trivially preventable.
I've been in jail and while I fully agree about the poor quality thereof, the argument that 'jail is crap there's your answer' is woefully insufficient; in the worst case, it can be used to foreclose any inquiry in specific circumstances by a sort of reverse concern trolling.
It can be true both that the carceral system is hopelessly corrupt and should be abolished, and also that an individual death within the carceral system was avoidable and hyper-suspicious.
My point is more that nothing that much out of the ordinary for American jails happened here.
This argument holds water if we're talking about an ordinary prisoner, but we aren't. Careers were at stake -- and reportedly have been lost -- over this one in particular.
It made no sense not to give Epstein 24/7 supervision, with everything from (competent) guards outside his cell to dedicated IR cameras looking into it. Nobody is entitled to privacy in prison, so why was it voluntarily given?
Fed prison policy to stop after x days, because most inmates to avoid being written up for things/force a transfer will threaten suicide and play the system.
Epstein himself was also a consummate con-man and sociopath. If he'd resolved to kill himself, he'd know the things to say to exit suicide watch as smoothly and cleanly as possible.
It is true that prisons are not exactly healthy environments, prison guards are not exactly loving companions, obsessed with inmate's wellbeing, and that many of them are careless and/or incompetent. And sometimes deliberately cruel and criminal. However, the case of Epstein is one of the major scandals of the century. He's not a random stoner police picked up. He's somebody whose name has been on the front pages of every newspaper for months. In this condition, either everybody in the prison system are blithering idiots, or somebody took care that Epstein would be surrounded by specific idiots at specific time. And then plausibly denied all involvement - we have idiots, what can you do. If you start counting how many times government officials used this excuse - we're just idiots, you know, can't blame us - to successfully escape responsibility for corruption, fraud and blatant criminal behavior. True, murder requires special hutzpah - but that also doesn't happen every day. Now it happened.
While I get what you’re trying to say ... the incompetence also makes them especially susceptible to corruption and nefarious influence. So, while accidents happen at a higher rate with incompetent staff ... so do “accidents”.
Apparently as Epstein arrived or shortly before his death the guards were rotated and two with very little suicide watch experience were present. One was also caught sleeping?
Is a guard sleeping on duty during a night shift surprising to you? As 542458 said, the level of competency that people assume is hilarious. Prison staff are overworked, underpaid, and have miserable jobs.
It was two guards that both fell asleep. Okay that might be coincidence. What about the two cameras that failed at the same time? They should publish failure rates of cameras at that facility.
When was the last time two sets of electronics failed at the exact same time randomly? If there was a voltage spike or something that killed them both how come it didn't affect anything else at the facility? Maybe they were EMP'ed or something? Okay that sounds fantastical, but I hope they do answer questions. There is likely an innocent explanation to all this, but there should be a thorough investigation.
It was probably less a coincidence and more of SOP. The guards probably have to do rounds at set times (every hour, for example) and then post up somewhere between those times and most likely fall asleep, or do a crossword puzzle or whatever to pass the time.
As for electronic failure, I would say it's probably common as well. Just search for "Prison conditions in the united states" or "deterioration of prisons". Our prions are overcrowded and under funded. These things are usually reported in regards to the terrible conditions for prisoners (heating constantly failing, mice/bug infestations, leaking roofs, etc), but this also applies to equipment used by guards. We are talking about facilities running old facilities and equipment with minimum maintenance. Even if the camera's didn't fail (I am not up to date on the story, but I assume they both did?), I would be surprised if the quality of the footage was usable (or if it was even recorded).
If they had been broken for a long time before this, why would they put the highest-profile prisoner in the entire country in there without fixing them first, or moving him to a cell where the cameras do work?
-I don't know how the cameras were installed, but it wouldn't surprise me if the explanation was simply that they were on the same mains circuit - only to have that trip for some reason or the other.
Heck, possibly they were dumping their video onto a recorder in the prison guards' personnel room. Right next to the water boiler. With only one socket within easy reach. Go figure.
(The latter example not being as far-fetched as it may seem; our workshop pager system went down several times a day for this very reason until we cajoled an electrician into fitting another outlet...)
Do you think these low tech security cameras are hooked up to Pager Duty or something so their crack team of IT pros staffed 24x7 can jump into action and fix them?
24x7 no but 9-5 staff fixing broken cameras in a matter of weeks is probably more typical. Especially considering how many cameras are in this one location and how straightforward it is to keep track of if any cells don't have working cameras.
I'm not saying it's a movie where the moment a camera goes down a 250lb Russian goon comes down and investigates. However cameras not working for years? In the fucking suicide watch cell? You honestly think that's realistic? Honestly those would probably get replaced faster than most cameras...
Maybe there's a few cameras people just forgot were broken and get forgotten about for years but it wouldn't be a typical case if the IT and maintenance team was even half-competent.
Also the cameras just so happened to not have been recording at the time of the incident... doesn't seem coincidental considering his profile and potential to bring down some big name elites
This is the problem with conspiracy theories... Avoidable accidents and conspiracy theories have the same fact pattern, which is an overlap of failure modes that should have been preventable but weren't prevented.
Was the Titanic disaster a tragic accident borne of negligence... or a conspiracy to assassinate John Jacob Astor and make it look like an accident? A lot had to go wrong to make an unsinkable ship sink. Who paid off the watchmen that evening? Why was the captain going so fast? And did one of Astor's rivals gain a contract to sell the steel that... etc., etc.
Occam's razor is important to keep handy, and Occam's razor here should be factoring in that American prisons are designed-by-committee-and-cruelty shit that have needed a massive overhaul for decades.
Good post. I hope they do release the statistics of how often cameras fail at that facility. Two cameras failing in the same time widow feels very unlikely to me unless they're using some really bad ones, which won't surprise me. Would still like to know how that happened.
Sure, two cameras failing at the same time right before he incident seems very suspicious. But is that the case? Seems more likely both cameras were broken and had been for a long time and were never fixed.
How many other cameras in the facility were broken?
If cameras are broken, how would you ever learn that they are broken? Perhaps it would require an important event like a suicide to occur so that you would need to review the tapes and discover the broken cameras.
most likely the power line to the cameras were cut or interfered with. They should both be on the same network and it should not be difficult to disable if knowing about the security system before hand.
Not to mention, Epstein had pretty good reason to kill himself outside of anyone who might benefit from it. He was probably facing life in prison for despicable crimes. There's no coming back from that.
He had “come back from” one conviction before. And with what he knew he could probably have cut a deal, even gone into witness protection. The suicide theory just doesn’t hold water.
I thought the Titanic disaster was pretty well-explained as an accident caused by incompetence and hubris. The ship wasn't "unsinkable"; they just advertised it that way, but it was no match for a big iceberg. The ship was sailing through an area with icebergs, and going fast too, and it was nighttime. IIRC, the captain was in a rush to get to the destination (sorry, it's been a while since I watched Cameron's movie). Really, all it took was the decision to go full-speed through an area with icebergs at night to cause that disaster. Then other stuff afterwards was sheer incompetence and classism, like not fully filling the lifeboats.
Assassinating one person by sinking a whole ship is a pretty crazy way to kill someone; it's surely far easier to just hire someone to club him when he's walking the street somewhere. However, with Epstein, there's no such similarity: he was the only one to die, and since he was locked up in prison, anyone wanting to kill him really didn't have much choice, if they wanted to get him before he testified against someone. And there do seem to be a disturbing number of things that went "wrong" for this to happen.
Addendum: after watching an interesting YouTube video on the disaster, it seems that not filling the lifeboats actually wasn't all that incompetent. A lot of people didn't think the boat was really sinking, and there was another large ship within visual distance which could see them and their flares, and which they were radioing for help, so they thought help was going to be there very shortly if they needed it. Unfortunately, there was some very serious incompetence going on at that ship: the radio operator had gone to sleep for the night, and the captain, despite seeing many flares, decided not to bother investigating. After the disaster, apparently his story changed every time he was asked.
Anyway, I think my point stands: trying to murder someone by engineering a disaster at sea like this is pretty ridiculous; too many things have to go wrong all at the same time, which really aren't under control of any one person or small group. Getting the captain to speed through iceberg territory (and honestly, there weren't that many icebergs, they were just unlucky and happened across a big one), making sure a large iceberg was directly ahead, making sure just enough compartments flooded, making sure the radio operator on the other ship went to bed, making sure the captain of the nearby ship refused to investigate, and finally when help did arrive (and it did), making sure the assassination target somehow wasn't among the survivors. Killing someone in a prison cell where there's no witnesses except a camera or two (that "just happened" to be "malfunctioning") and a couple of guards to bribe is actually realistic and possible, especially if state-level operatives are involved.
You might be interested in the investigation into the death of Sandra Bland, which also found a disturbing number of things going wrong in the Texas jail system. Or probably any other investigation into any jail/prison in the US. A guy died of dehydration in a county jail in Washington. How ridiculous does that sound? (Keaton Farris, if you want to read more about it).
The pathologist from the article claims "Epstein suffered multiple fractures in his neck that are more consistent with strangulation than suicide by hanging". This is a forensic claim first, but one that also raises questions about the quality of the system. Mr. White's perspective is interesting, but doesn't speak to the forensics.
Mr. White might raise questions about the argument "Epstein couldn't have committed suicide because of the system", but by highlighting the incompetence in the system he lends plausibility to the idea that someone could gain access to Epstein in order to murder him.
The pathologist from the article, it is important to remember, contradicts the NY ME's report, and has been hired by Epstein's family, who have a wrongful death suit brewing. He's hardly an unbiased source, and unlike the NY ME, he's retired and (while he has a reputation to protect as a human being who cares about such things) he has no career to protect by not screwing up the details on this one.
Bias, reputation, and motive are irrelevant to the claim that "Epstein suffered multiple fractures in his neck that are more consistent with strangulation than suicide by hanging". 1) Did Epstein suffer these fractures? 2) Does established forensic science support that these fractures are more consistent with strangulation? 3) How much more? 4) Is there other evidence that supports the conclusion this was suicide?
The pathologists uses facts and established scientific knowledge to draw a conclusion. Legitimate responses to that conclusion should be factual and scientific. Counter arguments along the lines of the "middle class people don't understand the justice system" or "this guy was paid", however true they may be, don't have any bearing on the neck fractures and if those fractures are consistent with strangulation or suicide.
They are consistent with both, And if the standard were preponderance of evidence and the only evidence on the table where the forensic report, it's two to one odds in favor of homicide by strangulation.
One thing I don't know regarding a medical examiner's job is whether they are supposed to take in additional evidence, and if an ME is required to give one single conclusion. If they are required to give one single conclusion, then it still makes sense that the New York medical examiner would conclude the thing that is more probable in light of circumstances, even if the forensic evidence alone indicates something else is more probable. Because a 25% frequency isn't low enough that one would bet on the 50% frequency event being what occurred in light of the fact that the homicide would have had to happen In a secure and protected facility with an isolated prisoner.
It's almost feels like a Bayesian versus frequentist analysis question.
But in any case, if the medical examiner is required to give a single answer, and their reputation suffers if that answer turns out to be wrong, I would assume that they would factor in mitigating circumstances to allow for the lower probability scenario to outweigh the higher probability scenario in isolation. And the forensics expert who is not responsible for analyzing future cases and may not be constrained to give a single answer is free to answer based on raw probabilities without factoring in circumstances.
Ken White (famous-ish lawyer and notable internet personality) puts it this way: "But your assessment of plausibility is based on your assumptions about how the system works. Those assumptions are, mostly, wrong — naive Dick-Wolf-level law-enforcement-are-competent-good-guys stuff".
Prisons, particularly american prisons, are full of incompetence and casual disregard to human life and dignity. The prison where Epstein died was understaffed, and the guards tasked with watching him had next-to-no training. Epstein had also been taken off suicide watch nine days earlier.
Ken White put together 32 other cases where people died, or almost died in jail because the administration was too incompetent or too indifferent to do anything: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two...