(NewsNation) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law Thursday a bill that would make more documents from the 2006 grand jury investigation into disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein public.
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” DeSantis said at a news conference. “I think in many respects this whole ordeal has proven that to be true.”
The bipartisan bill, which would become effective July 1, creates a narrowly tailored exception for a judge to order the release of the grand jury records from a 2006 criminal investigation into Epstein.
Under the legislation, a judge could release the transcripts sooner than July as part of a lawsuit filed by the Palm Beach Post. In 2019, the newspaper sued the Palm Beach County state attorney and court clerk for a court order to unseal the grand jury proceedings and reveal why it returned only minimal charges.
Asked when the documents could be made available, DeSantis said he doesn’t think it should take “forever and a day.”
“I think the legal hurdles will be cleared,” DeSantis said.
Authorities say Epstein killed himself in a New York City federal jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges filed in 2019, a decade after he took a plea deal in the Florida criminal case. Federal prosecutors accused him of paying underage girls hundreds of dollars for massages at his homes in Florida and New York and molesting them.
Florida’s treatment of Epstein and the relatively lenient punishment he received in the initial case came under scrutiny in 2018 following a series of Miami Herald articles. His girlfriend, socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2021 of luring girls to his homes.
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.