Since Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud final 12 months, 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 workers of FTX, the collapsed cryptocurrency alternate he based.
From a federal detention middle in Brooklyn, Mr. Bankman-Fried, 31, has continued to battle his case behind the scenes, as he goals for a lenient sentence and prepares to attraction his conviction. On Tuesday, his attorneys filed a authorized memo in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, arguing that he ought to obtain a jail sentence of between 5 and 1 / 4 and six and a half years.
Mr. Bankman-Fried is “deeply, deeply sorry” for “the pain he caused over the last two years,” the memo stated. “His sole focus after the collapse of FTX was making customers whole.”
The submitting was an important step earlier than Mr. Bankman-Fried’s sentencing on March 28, when the federal decide overseeing his case, Lewis A. Kaplan, will determine how lengthy to imprison the onetime billionaire on costs that carry a most sentence of 110 years. But it was just one prong of a long-shot technique orchestrated by Mr. Bankman-Fried’s household and mates to reverse his conviction and engineer a public reappraisal of his management at FTX.
Since final 12 months’s trial, Mr. Bankman-Fried has employed Marc Mukasey, who as soon as represented former President Donald J. Trump, to oversee his sentencing, in addition to a separate lawyer on the regulation agency Shapiro Arato Bach to deal with the attraction. 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 folks to write letters vouching for his or her son’s character that have been included within the sentencing memo.
In an interview, Natalie Tien, a former assistant to Mr. Bankman-Fried at FTX, stated she had written a letter for the memo after exchanging emails with Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried.
“I don’t have grudges over him, and I do feel bad for his parents,” Ms. Tien stated.
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 define their very own sentencing suggestion in a submitting due March 15. But in accordance to Mr. Bankman-Fried’s memo, a probation officer has already really useful a 100-year sentence, a punishment his attorneys known as “barbaric.”
Even if Judge Kaplan decides not to impose the utmost sentence, Mr. Bankman-Fried might face many years behind bars.
The decide “could still give a very serious sentence given how young Mr. Bankman-Fried is — say, a 30- or 35-year sentence,” stated Miriam Baer, vice dean at Brooklyn Law School.
A spokesman for Damian Williams, the U.S. legal professional for the Southern District of New York, declined to remark.
Before FTX collapsed in November 2022, Mr. Bankman-Fried was one of the vital outstanding figures within the renegade crypto trade, 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 corporations and lavish actual property purchases.
Mr. Bankman-Fried has maintained he’s harmless and pledged to attraction. This month, he changed his trial attorneys, Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell, with Mr. Mukasey, who’s representing one other fallen crypto mogul in a separate case and has a repute for forceful courtroom shows.
Last 12 months, 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 decide 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, who’s a accomplice at Shapiro Arato Bach. She is predicted to file Mr. Bankman-Fried’s attraction after the sentencing.
Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried have additionally performed a task behind the scenes. Last month, Ms. Tien stated, 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 bought a follow-up e-mail from the FTX founder’s mother and father explaining the sentencing course of and urging her to write “from the heart” about their son.
They have been “kind of like testing the waters,” Ms. Tien stated in an interview. “I pretty much just said ‘yes’ right away.”
Ms. Tien was one in all 29 individuals who wrote letters for the memo, together with Mr. Bankman-Fried’s mother and father, his youthful brother and a number of former colleagues. She known as him type and empathetic and stated he had “never acted out of greed or self-interest.”
In the submitting, Mr. Mukasey cited the letters to paint Mr. Bankman-Fried as a hard-working, altruistic billionaire who eschewed the trimmings of fame and wealth. He additionally argued that some oddities within the mogul’s habits could possibly be defined by “neurodiversity.”
Mr. Bankman-Fried has “outward characteristics typical of neurodiversity, such as inconsistent eye contact,” the memo stated. “He can be perceived as abrupt, dismissive, evasive, detached or uncaring.”
Outside the formal courtroom course of, regulation professors who know Mr. Bankman-Fried’s mother and father have additionally pressed his case.
In January, two shut household mates, 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 along” FTX had sufficient belongings to make its clients entire — some extent that Mr. Mukasey echoed within the memo.
“Whatever else might be said about Bankman-Fried, he was a brilliant businessman,” Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue wrote.
Another regulation professor, Jonathan Lipson at Temple University, stated in an interview that he was working with David Skeel of the University of Pennsylvania regulation college 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 unbiased examiner to overview Sullivan & Cromwell’s actions, together with its shut collaboration with federal prosecutors. He stated that he had spoken with Mr. Bankman-Fried and his mom final 12 months after one other Stanford regulation professor reached out in regards to the case and supplied to put them involved.
In their article, Mr. Lipson and Mr. Skeel argue that Sullivan & Cromwell “may have distorted the criminal justice process” by giving prosecutors wide-ranging entry to FTX’s sources and information, in accordance to an unpublished draft shared with The New York Times.
A Sullivan & Cromwell spokesman declined to remark. In courtroom filings, prosecutors have described the knowledge sharing as “routine practices by companies cooperating in an investigation.”
Mr. Bankman-Fried faces lengthy odds. Criminal convictions are hardly ever overturned on attraction.
Since final summer season, he has been housed on the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the place he has spent a lot of his time engaged on the case, an individual with information of the matter stated. Mr. Bankman-Fried has additionally shared crypto market ideas with the guards, the individual stated, recommending investments within the digital coin Solana.
This month, Mr. Bankman-Fried left the detention middle for his first public courtroom look because the trial, a listening to to authorize his new authorized illustration. In a Manhattan courtroom, he appeared clean-shaven and wore a loosefitting brown jail uniform. At occasions, he circled and smiled on the reporters sitting within the gallery.
J. Edward Moreno contributed reporting.