Sam Bankman-Fried has asked the US Supreme Court to overturn his FTX fraud conviction and an $11 billion forfeiture order, challenging a trial ruling that kept out evidence about customer losses. The petition, filed on Thursday, also seeks a new trial, Cointelegraph reported. It follows the Second Circuit's decision in June to uphold the conviction and the 25-year prison sentence Bankman-Fried is serving.
What does the petition say? It says the trial court should have let him show there were "always more than enough assets available to repay customers (as they now have been repaid, with substantial interest)." The appeals court, the filing says, approved allowing evidence of customers losing "large sums of money" while stopping Bankman-Fried "from rebutting that suggestion," CoinDesk reported. The petition also calls the forfeiture a "crushing fine" that breaches the Eighth Amendment's bar on excessive fines. That constitutional language, the petition says in a passage CoinDesk reported, "enshrines the historical protection — dating back to Magna Carta — that fines 'should not deprive a wrongdoer of his livelihood.'"
How have prosecutors and the courts responded? Prosecutors said he used billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to repay the debts of his trading firm Alameda Research and to finance investments, political donations and personal spending, Cointelegraph reported. The Justice Department, as Decrypt reported, said at sentencing that he led a scheme to defraud FTX customers by "misappropriating billions of dollars of those customers' funds," whether or not they eventually got it back. The same case covered $1.7 billion defrauded from FTX investors and $1.3 billion from Alameda lenders, neither of them customer deposits. Customer repayments came through FTX's bankruptcy plan, which valued claims in dollars as of November 2022, when bitcoin traded around $16,000. The Second Circuit panel, as CoinDesk reported, said in its ruling: "No one opted into having their money transferred under false pretenses to Alameda."
What other routes has he tried? He has separately applied for a presidential pardon, a request the Office of the Pardon Attorney still lists as pending, Decrypt reported. The president ruled out a pardon in January, and the Senate voted unanimously against clemency in July.
What happens next? Review is discretionary, and the court grants and hears argument in about 1% of the cases filed each term, by its own account, Decrypt reported. It has given no indication of whether it will take the case.
Figures referenced: Sam Bankman-Fried. — JudgeMarket.
