New York
CNN
—
Legal professionals for Sam Bankman-Fried filed a memo in Manhattan federal court docket Tuesday arguing that their consumer doesn’t should spend the remainder of his life in jail, calling a really helpful 100-year sentence “barbaric” and “grotesque.”
Bankman-Fried, who’s 31, was convicted in November on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy for his position within the collapse of FTX, the bankrupt cryptocurrency trade he co-founded. Beneath federal sentencing pointers, he may face a most of 110 years.
Within the memo, Bankman-Fried’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey, asks the choose overseeing the case to reject the pre-sentencing report ready by the Probation Division, which recommends a 100-year sentence.
“That suggestion is grotesque,” he says, noting that Bankman-Fried is a nonviolent offender who was abetted by “no less than 4 different culpable people.” Mukasey additionally notes victims — roughly a million whose funds have been frozen whereas FTX goes via chapter court docket — are anticipated to be made whole.
Contemplating Bankman-Fried’s “charitable works and demonstrated dedication to others” Mukasey recommends a jail sentence between 5 and six-and-a-half years.
His sentencing is scheduled for March 28. Bankman-Fried stays in a Brooklyn jail, the place he has resided since his bail was revoked in August.
Till the autumn of 2022, Bankman-Fried had been driving excessive because the billionaire prodigy behind FTX, the startup that boasted A-list superstar backers and a modern interface that attracted hundreds of thousands of individuals to strive their hand at crypto buying and selling. However within the year-plus since FTX folded, Bankman-Fried has been held up by some as an emblem of a largely unregulated business constructed on the shaky basis of extremely speculative assets.
The memo is a normal submitting forward of sentencing. The choose overseeing the case, Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York, will weigh a number of elements in deciding Bankman-Fried’s sentence, together with arguments from prosecutors, protection counsel and the suggestions from the Probation Division.
One space in dispute is the calculation of losses incurred by victims. Sometimes, in white-collar crimes, the larger the monetary loss, the longer the sentence. It’s frequent for defendants to dispute the federal government’s calculations of such losses.
Mukasey writes within the memo that the pre-sentencing report is flawed and “adopts the federal government’s narrative wholesale.”
Legal professionals for FTX’s property advised a chapter court docket earlier this month that clients and collectors have been doubtless, although not assured, to get better a lot of the cash that was misplaced within the trade’s collapse.
“I believe it’s one thing that shall be contested,” stated Jordan Estes, a former federal prosecutor with the US Lawyer’s Workplace who’s now a companion at Kramer Levin. “The federal government could say that doesn’t matter — that what issues is the meant loss, or what the loss was on the time.”
Finally, the choice comes all the way down to Kaplan’s discretion.
“It’s frequent in white-collar instances within the Southern District for defendants to be sentenced to under pointers, and positively not 110 years,” stated Estes. “However it is a little little bit of an uncommon crime. So it’s laborious to inform what’s going to occur.”