Good day everyone,
I hope you are all having a good day, welcome to CryptoGod-1's blog on all things crypto. In this post I will be looking at the recent appeal lodged by Sam Bankman-Fried as he requests a new trial.
SBF Appeal
The legal team for Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) have filed a request for a new trial. This comes as they claim their client was denied a fair hearing during his criminal conviction. As part of the appeal for a new trial they have accused the judge overseeing the case of being unfairly biased against SBF. In a brief filed with the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Friday the 13th of September 2024, the legal team argued that federal prosecutors were more focused on securing quick headlines than ensuring a just trial. The filing read:
“He was presumed guilty by federal prosecutors eager for quick headlines.”
SBF was given a sentence of 25 years in prison last March after a New York jury convicted Bankman-Fried on seven counts of fraud and money laundering related to the collapse of FTX. The case was one of the most significant financial fraud cases in recent years and drew comparisons to infamous scandals like Enron and Bernie Madoff. SNF's lawyers argue that the narrative presented during the trial was inaccurate and incomplete. The filing noted:
“From day one, the prevailing narrative—initially spun by the lawyers who took over FTX, quickly adopted by their contacts at the U.S. Attorney’s Office—was that Bankman-Fried had stolen billions of dollars of customer funds, driven FTX to insolvency, and caused billions in losses.”
The attorneys also claim that new evidence has become available which proves that FTX was never insolvent, and that the company was in possession of assets which were worth billions of dollars and would have been able to repay their customers from these funds. According to SBF's legal representatives the jury never had access to this evidence. During the trial prosecutors argued that SBF had orchestrated a massive fraud scheme by diverting funds from FTX customers account to help cover financial shortfalls in his hedge fund, Alameda Research. At the time of FTX's collapse in November 2022 it was one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.
The legal team of SBF believe this new information, along with the rushed nature of the trial, is sufficient to demand reconsideration and a new trial. They believe their client was shown as the sole cause of FTX’s collapse when in reality, other factors were at play. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York had presided over the case.
The 102-page appeal document noted that Judge Kaplan was unfair to the FTX founder throughout the trial. It states the judge made “biting comments undermining the defence” and “deriding” his testimony in front of the jury. A lawyer for SBF, Alexandra Shapiro, wrote in the filing:
“Sam Bankman-Fried was never presumed innocent. He was presumed guilty by the judge who presided over his trial.”
During his trial SBF had used Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell as his trial lawyers, but changed his counsel to Alexandra Shapiro after his conviction. SBF’s defence, as well as his supposed grounds for appeal, have heavily rested on the customer recovery achieved by the FTX estate. SBF claims he was pushed into filing for bankruptcy prematurely by the estate team, including turnaround CEO John J. Ray III and white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.
The filing also states that lawyers at John Ray and Sullivan & Cromwell did an enormous amount of investigative work for the prosecution. It claims that by February 2023 they had collected over twenty-seven million documents along with providing an analysis of several hundred thousand documents” to the government. The filing states:
“S&C—which billed hundreds of millions of dollars in this case—performed prosecutorial tasks that had nothing to do with bankruptcy. Moreover, the Debtors and S&C were motivated to place all blame squarely on Bankman-Fried—to avoid scrutiny of their own business decisions, their own conflicts of interest, their own exorbitant billing, and their own misconduct.”
A number of SBF's closest friends and colleagues, which included his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, Gary Wang, and Ryan Salame, all testified against him during his trial while pleading guilty to their own counts of fraud. It is believed many did this in hopes and aims of getting reduced sentences for their own crimes. Salame was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison back in May of this year while Ellison is due to be sentenced later this month. Her legal team has urged the court to forego prison time and have advocated for a sentence of time served combined with supervised release. Ellison’s lawyers said that the U.S. Probation Department has recommended time served with three years of supervised release due to her cooperation with authorities.
Have a great day.
Peace. CryptoGod-1.
Referral Links and Follow Me:
