According to new court documents, lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell complained on Monday that the jury that had indicted her was not diverse enough.
“The fact that Miss Maxwell herself is neither Black nor Hispanic does not deprive of her of standing to raise this challenge,” they wrote in court documents. The continued to argue that the constitution “entitles every defendant to object to a [pool] that is not designed to represent a fair cross section of the community, whether or not the systematically excluded groups are groups to which he himself belongs.”
Maxwell is currently facing several charges due to her connection to Jeffrey Epstein, who ran a sex trafficking ring of underage girls.
The jury that indicted her after her July 2 arrest were gathered from White Plains, New York. Her attorneys claimed that they were “drawn from a community in which Black and Hispanic residents are significantly underrepresented by comparison.”
Imprisoned since her arrest, Maxwell’s trial is set for July 2021. The charges that she was indicted on, which she has plead not guilty to, state that she had recruited three underage girls for Epstein to sexually abuse in the late ’90s. The indictment also stated that Maxwell occasionally joined in the abuse.
Prosecutors have not yet commented on Maxwell’s case, but lawyers have continued to make requests that would reduce the amount of charges she faces.
