Sam Bankman-Fried tries to avoid a hundred-year prison sentence.
The disgraced founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX is working with lawyers, family and friends to get his fraud conviction shortened or completely overturned. New York Times reported on Tuesday. That same day, his legal team filed a transient in U.S. District Court arguing that he should receive a prison sentence of just five and a quarter to 6 and a half years in prison. (The charges against him carry a maximum sentence of 110 years.)
Bankman-Fried is “very, very sorry” for “the pain he has caused over the last two years,” the memo said. “After the collapse, FTX focused solely on keeping customers whole.”
Following the collapse of FTX in November 2022, the previous crypto billionaire was convicted in October of stealing $8 billion from his clients, which he used for political donations, investments and real estate purchases. However, he maintains that he’s innocent and plans to appeal against the decision after the decision is announced. This is scheduled to happen on March 28, as beneficial by federal prosecutors within the March 15 sentencing.
After last 12 months’s trial, Bankman-Fried shook up his legal team by hiring attorney Marc Mukasey, known for his courtroom appearances and representing Donald Trump. Notably, he also defended Trevor Milton, the founder of Nikola who was convicted of defrauding investors. Prosecutors wanted Milton to spend 11 years in prison, but he was only sentenced to 4.
Bankman-Fried also recruited his parents, Stanford law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, who encouraged former employees and friends to jot down letters in Bankman-Fried’s defense. (A spokesman for Bankman-Fried declined to comment Times(while representatives for his parents didn’t reply to the newspaper’s requests for comment.) Those letters were included in Tuesday’s memo and included writings from his younger brother and a former assistant.
It’s unclear what Judge Lewis A. Kaplan will choose sentencing, but even when he doesn’t comply with the utmost sentence of 110 years, Bankman-Fried still faces a potentially life-changing prison sentence. Kaplan “could still impose a very serious sentence given how young Mr. Bankman-Fried is – say 30 to 35 years in prison,” said Miriam Baer, associate dean of Brooklyn Law School. Times.
We’ll discover in a month how long this sentence is.
Credit : robbreport.com
