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Defense Attorney Requests Hearing on Missing Epstein Footage

Associated Press

   NEW YORK - A defense attorney wants a federal judge to hold a hearing
   to determine whether the federal government intentionally deleted video
   of the area around Jeffrey Epstein's cell from the day he survived an
   apparent suicide attempt inside a New York jail.
   The attorney for Epstein's former cellmate filed a motion late Monday
   saying the missing footage would show Nicholas Tartaglione tried to
   help Epstein on July 23 when guards found the wealthy financier with
   bruises on his neck. Epstein later hanged himself Aug. 10 while
   awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
   The request came days after federal prosecutors told U.S. District
   Judge Kenneth Karas that video from the hallway outside the cell
   Epstein shared with Tartaglione "no longer exists.''
   Officials at the Metropolitan Correctional Center believed they had
   preserved the footage, prosecutors said, but they actually saved a
   video from a different part of the jail. The FBI determined the footage
   also does not exist on the jail's backup video system "as a result of
   technical errors,'' they wrote in a court filing.
   Defense attorney Bruce Barket asked Karas to hold a hearing to
   determine how the video was destroyed and "whether there was any bad
   faith on the part of the Government in connection with the video's
   destruction."
   The U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan declined to comment on the
   motion.
   Barket told The Associated Press last week the government's ``various
   and inconsistent accounts of what happened to (the jailhouse) video are
   deeply troubling.''
   He argued Monday the video could convince a federal jury that
   Tartaglione does not deserve the death penalty in his case because he
   "demonstrated concern for the life of his cellmate, took steps to aid a
   fellow inmate in distress and summoned staff for assistance."
   Tartaglione, a former police officer, is charged in what prosecutors
   have described as the "gangland-style" killings of four men who
   disappeared during a cocaine-related dispute.