In 2007 and 2008, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida (SDFL), then led by Alexander Acosta, negotiated a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with Jeffrey Epstein. The agreement ended a federal investigation that had identified dozens of underage victims and instead sent the case to Florida state court, where Epstein pleaded guilty to two state-level prostitution offenses. He served 13 months in the Palm Beach County Stockade with extensive work-release privileges.

For the next decade, the NPA was at the center of public controversy, congressional inquiry, and litigation by victims who said they had not been notified of the agreement.

What the agreement did

The NPA — signed in late September 2007 and finalized in mid-2008 — granted Epstein and any “potential co-conspirators” immunity from federal prosecution in the SDFL for the conduct under investigation, in exchange for his guilty pleas in state court and his agreement to register as a sex offender.

Two features of the agreement drew sustained criticism in later years:

Co-conspirator immunity. The deal extended its protections beyond Epstein himself to unnamed associates, an unusual provision in a federal sex-trafficking-related investigation.
Lack of victim notification. The agreement was negotiated and signed without informing identified victims, who later sued the federal government under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (CVRA).

The CVRA litigation

In 2008, two victims represented by attorneys Bradley Edwards and Paul Cassell filed suit in federal court alleging that the government had violated the CVRA by concealing the NPA from them. The litigation continued for more than a decade. In February 2019, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra ruled that prosecutors had violated the CVRA. In September 2019, after Epstein’s death, the case was effectively dismissed as moot because no further prosecution could occur, but the underlying findings remained part of the public record.

The Miami Herald investigation

In November 2018, the Miami Herald published “Perversion of Justice,” a multi-part investigation by reporter Julie K. Brown that documented the scope of the original federal investigation, identified additional victims, and detailed how the NPA was negotiated. The series prompted renewed public attention and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

The DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility report

After Acosta resigned as U.S. Secretary of Labor in July 2019, the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) opened a review of the 2008 prosecutorial decisions. The OPR’s November 2020 report concluded that Acosta exercised “poor judgment” in his handling of the case but did not find that any federal prosecutor had engaged in “professional misconduct” as defined by DOJ standards. The report’s findings, criticisms, and the underlying timeline are extensively cited in the document corpus indexed by this tool.

Why the NPA still matters

The 2008 agreement is foundational to almost every subsequent legal proceeding in the case. The 2019 SDNY indictment was constructed in part to circumvent the NPA’s geographic and substantive limitations (the NPA bound only the SDFL). Civil litigation by victims through the 2010s relied heavily on records first surfaced in the SDFL investigation. The agreement also shaped congressional oversight inquiries in 2019 and beyond.

What documents are available

The corpus indexed by this assistant includes:

The text of the NPA itself and related correspondence between defense counsel and SDFL prosecutors
Pleadings and orders from the CVRA litigation in the Southern District of Florida
Excerpts from the OPR report, including its public summary
Witness statements collected during the original federal investigation that were later unsealed

Use the chat to search for specific clauses, dates, named correspondents, or how individual documents fit into the timeline above. Every cited document ID links directly to the original PDF on justice.gov.

The 2008 Non-Prosecution Agreement