EGN NEWS DESK
Since Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud final yr, he has employed a brand new lawyer identified for courtroom showmanship. A bunch of sympathetic regulation professors has pushed for a reappraisal of his actions. And his mother and father have turned for assist to former staff of FTX, the collapsed cryptocurrency change he based.
From a federal detention heart in Brooklyn, Mr. Bankman-Fried, 31, has continued to battle his case behind the scenes, as he argues for a lenient sentence and prepares to enchantment his conviction. On Tuesday, his legal professionals are scheduled to file a authorized memo within the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, making the case that he doesn’t should go to jail for the remainder of his life.
The submitting is a vital step earlier than Mr. Bankman-Fried’s sentencing on March 28, when the federal judge overseeing his case, Lewis A. Kaplan, will determine how lengthy to imprison the onetime billionaire on expenses that carry a most sentence of 110 years. But it’s just one prong of a long-shot technique orchestrated by Mr. Bankman-Fried’s household and associates to reverse his conviction and engineer a public reappraisal of his management at FTX.
Since final yr’s trial, Mr. Bankman-Fried has employed Marc Mukasey, who as soon as represented former President Donald J. Trump, to supervise his sentencing, in addition to a separate lawyer on the regulation agency Shapiro Arato Bach to deal with the enchantment. His mother and father, the Stanford University regulation professors Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, have additionally been concerned within the protection, serving to line up individuals to write down letters for his or her son that shall be included within the memo.
Natalie Tien, a former assistant to Mr. Bankman-Fried at FTX, mentioned she wrote a letter for his sentencing memo after exchanging emails with Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried.
“I don’t have grudges over him, and I do really feel dangerous for his mother and father,” Ms. Tien mentioned.
A spokesman for Mr. Bankman-Fried declined to remark. Representatives for Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Federal prosecutors are set to stipulate their very own sentencing advice in a submitting due March 15. Even if Judge Kaplan decides to not impose the utmost sentence, Mr. Bankman-Fried might face a long time behind bars.
The judge “might nonetheless give a really critical sentence given how younger Mr. Bankman-Fried is; say, a 30- or 35-year sentence,” mentioned Miriam Baer, vice dean at Brooklyn Law School.
A spokesman for Damian Williams, the U.S. lawyer for the Southern District of New York, declined to remark.
Before FTX collapsed in November 2022, Mr. Bankman-Fried was one of the distinguished figures within the renegade crypto business, a extensively celebrated billionaire whose face was splashed throughout billboards and journal covers.
In October, a federal jury convicted him of stealing $8 billion from FTX’s clients to finance political contributions, investments in different firms and lavish actual property purchases.
Mr. Bankman-Fried has maintained he’s harmless and pledged to enchantment. This month, he changed his trial legal professionals, Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell, with Mr. Mukasey, who has a repute for forceful courtroom displays.
Last yr, Mr. Mukasey scored a victory in his protection of Trevor Milton, the founding father of the electrical truck producer Nikola, who was convicted in 2022 of defrauding buyers. A federal judge sentenced Mr. Milton in December to 4 years in jail, far lower than the 11 years that prosecutors had requested.
Working in parallel to Mr. Mukasey is an appellate lawyer and former prosecutor, Alexandra Shapiro, a accomplice at Shapiro Arato Bach. She is predicted to file Mr. Bankman-Fried’s enchantment after the sentencing.
Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried have additionally performed a task behind the scenes. Last month, Ms. Tien mentioned, she obtained a textual content from one in all Mr. Bankman-Fried’s supporters, asking whether or not she would assist with the memo. Then she acquired a follow-up e-mail from the FTX founder’s mother and father explaining the sentencing course of and urging her to write down “from the center” about their son.
They had been “form of like testing the waters,” Ms. Tien mentioned in an interview. “I just about simply mentioned ‘sure’ instantly.”
Law professors who know Mr. Bankman-Fried’s mother and father have additionally pressed his case.
In January, two shut household associates, the Yale Law professor Ian Ayres and the Stanford Law professor John Donohue, wrote an essay for the web site Project Syndicate, arguing that “all alongside” FTX had sufficient property to make its clients complete.
“Whatever else may be mentioned about Bankman-Fried, he was an excellent businessman,” Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue wrote.
Another regulation professor, Jonathan Lipson at Temple University, mentioned in an interview that he was working with David Skeel of the University of Pennsylvania regulation faculty on an instructional paper criticizing Sullivan & Cromwell, the regulation agency overseeing FTX’s chapter.
In September, Mr. Lipson co-wrote a short within the chapter case arguing for the appointment of an impartial examiner to assessment Sullivan & Cromwell’s actions, together with its shut collaboration with federal prosecutors. He mentioned that he spoke with Mr. Bankman-Fried and his mom final yr after one other Stanford regulation professor reached out in regards to the case and provided to place them involved.
In their article, Mr. Lipson and Mr. Skeel argue that Sullivan & Cromwell “might have distorted the prison justice course of” by giving prosecutors wide-ranging entry to FTX’s assets and knowledge, in accordance with an unpublished draft shared with The New York Times.
A Sullivan & Cromwell spokesman declined to remark. In court docket filings, prosecutors have described the knowledge sharing as “routine practices by firms cooperating in an investigation.”
Mr. Bankman-Fried faces lengthy odds. Criminal convictions are not often overturned on enchantment.
Mr. Bankman-Fried has been housed at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center since final summer season and has spent a lot of his time engaged on the case, an individual with information of the matter mentioned. He has additionally shared crypto market ideas with the guards, the individual mentioned, recommending investments within the digital coin Solana.
This month, Mr. Bankman-Fried left the detention heart for his first public court docket look because the trial, a listening to to authorize his new authorized illustration. In a Manhattan courtroom, Mr. Bankman-Fried was clean-shaven and wore a loosefitting brown jail uniform. At instances, he rotated and smiled on the reporters sitting within the gallery.
J. Edward Moreno contributed reporting.
