Prison Guards Admit to Falsifying Records Night of Epstein’s Death But Will Avoid Jail Time
The two jail guards who were tasked with watching over Jeffrey Epstein the night he killed himself admitted they falsified records but will likely avoid spending time behind bars after they reached an agreement with prosecutors. The two Bureau of Prisons employees, Michael Thomas and Tova Noel, had been charged with ignoring their duties and lying about it. Specifically, prosecutors accused them of napping and browsing the internet rather than checking on Epstein every 30 minutes like they were supposed to on the night he was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell. Epstein, who was going to face a trial on sex trafficking charges, hanged himself in August 2019. He faced up to 45 years in prison.
The two guards had been charged with lying on prison records to make it seem as though they had made the necessary checks on Epstein before he was found dead. They had pleaded not guilty to making false records and conspiracy to defraud the United States. But now they admitted to having “willfully and knowingly completed materially false” records regarding their rounds. If approved by the judge, the deal would allow Noel and Thomas to avoid jail time as part of a supervised release program that, among other things, would require them to complete 100 hours of community service and cooperate with an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
The deal immediately led to criticism. Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican who is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and has been critical of the way the Justice Department has handled the Epstein case, blasted the deal as “unacceptable,” saying that a fuller accounting is needed of what the prison did wrong. “One hundred hours of community service is a joke—this isn’t traffic court,” Sasse said in a statement. “The leader of an international child sex trafficking ring escaped justice, his co-conspirators had their secrets go to the grave with him, and these guards are going to be picking up trash on the side of the road.”
Lawyers for the guards have said their clients were victims of larger problems in the federal prison system. They had both been working overtime due to staffing shortages. One was working a fifth straight day of overtime while the other was working a second eight-hour shift in one day. Plus, the focus on the guards ignores the fact that Epstein was left without a cellmate even though he had made a suicide attempt three weeks earlier. Thomas’ lawyer, Montell Figgins, said that Epstein had died “because of a system that failed completely.”
In the middle of Ghislaine Maxwell's child-sex-trafficking trial, federal prosecutors quietly dropped their case against two jail guards accused of sleeping on the job and falsifying jail records as Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in his cell.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan signed a nolle prosequi, a document announcing to the judge that they wished to drop the case, on December 13. The document didn't appear on the court's public docket until Thursday, one day after Maxwell was convicted on charges that she trafficked girls to Epstein for sex and participated in sexual abuse herself.
Prosecutors first
filed charges against the guards, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, in November 2019. Prosecutors said the guards napped, caught up on the news, and shopped for motorcycles and furniture instead of doing their rounds at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. Epstein was held at the federal jail while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking and sexual-abuse charges.
Epstein was found dead in his cell on the morning of August 10, 2019, and New York City's head coroner ruled it a suicide. Epstein's brother, Mark Epstein, hired his own coroner who said the financier's broken neck bones were more consistent with a homicide.
Noel and Thomas pleaded not guilty to the charges against them for falsifying records. In May this year, they entered a
deferred prosecution agreement where prosecutors agreed not to bring the guards' case to trial until after they finished cooperating with an investigation into the circumstances of Epstein's death with the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General. The OIG has yet to release a report in connection with the investigation.
A public status conference for the case against Noel and Thomas had been scheduled for December 16, but it was canceled on December 15 without explanation or scheduling of a future meeting.
The December 13 nolle prosequi said Noel and Thomas satisfactorily complied with the terms of the non-prosecution agreement and completed community service. It's unclear why the document wasn't made public until December 30.
While she was prosecuted in Manhattan, Maxwell has been kept in a federal jail in Brooklyn. The Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan was closed in September, after
years of accusations that the building was in poor condition and had been poorly managed, and that its guards were overworked.
Representatives for the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, which oversaw the Epstein, Maxwell, Noel, and Thomas cases, declined to comment for this story.
Law and Crime obtained statements from attorneys representing Noel and Thomas that celebrated the decision to scuttle the case against them.
"Securing a resolution that eliminates both imprisonment and a criminal conviction is the favorable outcome that Ms. Noel prayed for since her arrest," said Jason Foy, Noel's attorney.
