Crime

MANHATTAN (CN) — A New York jury returned a guilty verdict Wednesday in the sex trafficking trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, convicting the British heiress of recruiting vulnerable teenage girls for predatory sexual abuse by the late millionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

She was convicted on five of six counts, offering what attorneys for dozens of women have framed as a measure of justice robbed from them when Epstein was found dead in August 2019 — ruled to have hanged himself in his jail cell while awaiting federal charges that came over a decade after the cushy plea deal in Florida that massively limited his initial criminal exposure.

Ghislaine Maxwell, 60, is found GUILTY of five of the six charges in sex trafficking trial: Jury convicts Jeffrey Epstein’s madam and she now faces up to 65 years in prison

She still faces trial on two perjury charges.

Approximately 2,200 people have been shot during 2021 in Mayor Jim Kenney’s (D) troubled Philadelphia.

6 ABC reports “nearly 1,800” people had been shot and wounded and another 473 had been shot and killed as of December 22, 2021.

Overall, Philadelphia witnessed 547 homicides by December 22 as well.

Ever since Toronto Police street checks were shut down after 2014 on the orders of the provincial government and City Council, gun violence on Toronto streets has skyrocketed.

Not even the pandemic, including two years of so-called lockdowns, has put a significant dent in the mayhem.

Progressive reporters often prattle about “mass incarceration,” as if incarceration rates were somehow excessive. But polls show most Americans don’t think prison sentences are too long for violent criminals, and many offenders spend little or no time in jail.

Jeffrey Epstein’s green massage table was rolled into the courtroom as evidence in Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial — because it’s key to the top charge the accused madam faces.

The unorthodox piece of evidence was raised by Assistant US Attorney Alison Moe in her closing argument Monday as she explained the lone sex-trafficking charge against Maxwell, which involves an element of interstate commerce.

The sex-trafficking count relates only to testimony from Maxwell accuser Carolyn, who said she was groped by the disgraced socialite at age 14 while preparing to massage Epstein.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Jurors weighing the case of the suburban Minneapolis police officer who shot and killed Black motorist Daunte Wright asked the judge after a full day of deliberations Tuesday what they should do if they can’t reach a verdict.

Judge Regina Chu told them to continue working, as was explained in the initial instructions she gave them. The jury also deliberated for about five hours on Monday.

Former Brooklyn Center officer Kim Potter, who is white, is charged with first- and second-degree manslaughter. If convicted of the most serious charge, Potter, 49, would face a sentence of about seven years under state guidelines, though prosecutors have said they will seek more.

The jury in Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial asked on Tuesday to review transcripts of testimony from three accusers.

Jurors in Manhattan federal court sent the judge a note around 10.10am, saying: “We would like the transcripts, testimony of Jane, Annie and Carolyn.”

Jane, who testified under a pseudonym, said Epstein started to sexually abuse her when she was 14. She told jurors Maxwell was sometimes present for, and participated in, such abuse.

She also discussed alleged group sexual encounters and recalled meeting Maxwell in summer 1994, at a youth arts camp in Michigan.

Defending a client charged with crimes modern society finds more terrible than murder, who might face the rest of her life in prison, Ghislaine Maxwell’s defence in New York opened with a nice lady who hadn’t seen anything, a travel agent who booked flights years after they mattered and a professor of BugsBunnyology – and none of them cut the mustard.

At the end of the defence’s first day, Maxwell was seen holding her hands up in despair at her fancy attorneys who have cost her, according to her own estimate, some $7m. Juries in US federal trials must be unanimous and there are legal grounds for knocking out some of the charges, but it looks bleak for Maxwell.

Prosecutor Jeffrey Schenk opened his closing arguments in the case against Elizabeth Holmes by talking about a banker. Holmes knew Theranos, the company she founded, was running out of money, and she was on the phone asking her banker to clear a check early.

“Holmes had a choice to make,” Schenk said. She could figure out a way to raise funds to keep the company moving, or risk seeing it wither away. And her choice, he said, was to raise the funds through fraud.

The prosecution’s closing statement on Thursday was a reminder of what this trial is really about: money, and mostly rich people’s money. Those rich people, who gave their money to Theranos after Holmes pitched them on the promise of the company, are who the prosecutor referred to as ‘victims.’ Their money is what, according to the legal system, was manipulated during the years Theranos was the hottest startup in Silicon Valley.

It was the opening day of Ghislaine Maxwell’s defence and her lawyers had called to the stand an expert on “false memories” whose testimony once helped acquit OJ Simpson.

But if anyone had been waiting for a ‘black leather glove’ moment – akin to that defining moment in OJ Simpson’s ultimately successful defence case where a pair of blood-stained gloves ‘didn’t fit’ – they would have been disappointed.

What a sorry parade of witnesses for the defense.

“… Last month, a local investigation by an independent media organization called Coastal Front revealed that a freedom-of-information request it filed a year earlier had obliged the City of Vancouver to disgorge 750 pages of documents showing that between 2012 and January of this year, city officials had accepted nearly 2,000 payments totalling $13.1 million for everything from property tax payments to municipal cemetery plots — all in stacks of cash.”