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Case 1:19-cr-00490-RMB Document 11 Filed 07/12/19 Page 7 of 14
Honorable Richard M. Berman
United States District Judge
July 12, 2019
Page 7

2. Co-Signers, Moral Suasion, and Ties to the Community

The dearth of detailed financial information about the defendant himself, much less his brother or friend, further shows the hollowness of the proposal. The Court cannot possibly evaluate whether there would be any incentive whatsoever for those the two proposed co-signers to exercise moral suasion over the defendant—or whether, as noted above, the defendant could easily compensate them, perhaps many times over, for any loss they incurred through the defendant’s flight from justice. The defendant provides no information about his brother other than that he lives half the year in the home he purportedly would pledge, and even less information about Mr. Mitchell, other than that he is “Mr. Epstein’s friend,” his “close personal friend of decades,” and his “close personal friend.” Release Motion at 4, 9. Their willingness to “guarantee” his appearance, Release Motion at 9, is meaningless in the absence of such information.

Moreover, the notion that any individual co-signer could meaningfully secure a bond for this defendant strains credulity. Given the defendant’s wealth and his extraordinary risk of flight, any bond for this defendant would assuredly have to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars to even be claimed to be sufficient to guard against the risks posed by the defendant’s release. The defendant offers no reason to believe any co-signers could meaningfully sign such a bond, much less these two particular individuals, which is yet another reason the proposed package is patently insufficient.

3. The Defendant’s “Consent” to Extradition is Unenforceable and Impractical

The defendant’s offer to sign a so-called “consent” to extradition provides no additional reassurance whatsoever. As an initial matter, the Government would need to find and re-arrest the defendant before such a waiver would even come into play. Moreover, even assuming the Government could locate and apprehend the defendant, numerous courts have recognized that such purported waivers are unenforceable and effectively meaningless because any defendant who signs such a purported waiver and then flees will assuredly contest the validity and/or voluntariness of the waiver, and will get to do so in the jurisdiction of his choosing (i.e., the one to which he chose to flee). See, e.g., United States v. Morrison, No. 16-MR-118, 2016 WL 7421924, at *4 (W.D.N.Y. Dec. 23, 2016); United States v. Kazeem, No. 15 Cr. 172, 2015 WL 4645357, at *3 (D. Or. Aug. 3, 2015); United States v. Young, Nos. 12 Cr. 502, 12 Cr. 645, 2013 WL 12131300, at *7 (D. Utah Aug. 27, 2013); United States v. Cohen, No. C 10-00547, 2010 WL 5387757, at *9 n.11 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 20, 2010); United States v. Bohn, 330 F. Supp. 2d 960, 961 (W.D. Tenn. 2004); United States v. Stroh, No. 396 Cr. 139, 2000 WL 1832956, at *5 (D. Conn. Nov. 3, 2000); United States v. Botero, 604 F. Supp. 1028, 1035 (S.D. Fla. 1985). . The Department of Justice’s Office of International Affairs is unaware of any country anywhere in the world that would consider an anticipatory extradition waiver binding. And, of course, the defendant could choose to flee to a jurisdiction with which the United States does not have an extradition treaty.

Beyond being impossible to guarantee, extradition is typically a lengthy, complicated and expensive process, and the possibility that it would be successful neither provides any real deterrent to the defendant’s incentive to flee nor any measure of justice to the victims who would be required to wait years for his return.

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