oftentimes, bill, they decide, not a judge, what a sentence is going to be. that s all part of the plea negotiation. judges come into play once the case is set for trial or once there needs to be motions. on the ground what people don t realize what i do every day with prosecutors is hash it out. so if you have a prosecutor who has taken a hands off approach to crime it makes my job easier but our streets more dangerous. bill: he said this in january. he said district attorneys are the people s lawyers. not the lawyer for one group over another. when we are talking about victims, yes, we re there to represent the victim but not there to affect vengeance in the name of one victim. define that as you define his supporters talking about restorative justice. in the year 2021 what does that phrase restorative justice mean? i think in this particular case it means taking a
attorney in southern florida. instead of changing jeffrey epstein with the 53 pages of sex crimes, alex accoosta made a de in a non-prosecution agreement which gave him immunity from all federal charges and he plead guilty to two state charges for prostitution as if the girls like courtney wild were prostitutes and not children being victimized by an accused child molester thanks to the sweet deal he got. he got to leave jail during the day to work in his office. since then he has gone back to living off his millions, jet setting all over the world. alex acosta agreed to do his deal in secret. crime victims have the right to be told when there are plea negotiation going on, but alex acosta did not notify the victims before he granted him
might be discussing a plea negotiation with the prosecuto s prosecutors. i don t think this of maligning and attacking the victims in this way is going to play out very well, especially like when i said there s independent corroborating evidence of dna and a video. he was previously acquitted in 2008 on the other charges. how is that going to play a role in this case? well, in his psyche, if you re r. kelly and you rolled the dice, you rolled the dice and you are emboldened. the key difference is back then in 2008 that victim, she didn t want to cooperate. she refused to testify. she refused to identify herself in another video that was deemed to be child pornography so ultimately r. kelly was quickly acquitted by the jury back then. that was a long time ago. that was before the me too era and that was before women felt like they were empowered to come
that. we re going to find out whether or not the professional prosecutors and the investigators agreed with this. one of the things that s come out over the years is that the whole plea negotiation was very odd. instead of sort of a normal plea negotiation that might take place in the office, all of a sudden, the labor secretary was 70 miles away in a marriott, you know, chatting with his buddy from kirkland & ellis who was the defense attorney and they cut the deal. then they spent a lot of time talking about how to minimize the press coverage. and then they did not inform the victims. at some point, one of the lawyers claimed they did that because there was a chance for the victims to get some restitution from epstein and they didn t want to affect they didn t want to affect that. so there s all kinds of strange things about this. and it really calls into question sort of that basic fundamental problem and question that we all have about our
i could go to jail for the rest of my life. i m 72 years old. i might die in jail. you think what you re doing today increases the risk that you will be charged, convicted, and die in jail? yes, i do. when you look at this plea negotiation, you did enter into some kind of discussions with them. what would you have accepted? what would a plea deal look like that you would take? i would have taken immunity. that s not a plea deal. that s my terms. they proposed this and said we want you to consider it. this first count, which they said you only have to agree to one count, but you have to go in front of a federal judge and swear this on a bible. now, for me to do that, i believe in my heart would have been a lie. that count says i knowingly and willfully presented information i knew to be false with an intent to deceive federal authorities. i do not believe i did that. in my heart, i went in to tell the truth. did my best to tell the truth.