Key takeaways:
- Prior to Sam Bankman-Fried going on trial in October, US prosecutors presented their suggested jury instructions.
- There were suggested directions outlining how the jury should review the proof, deliberate, and reach a verdict on whether to find SBF guilty or not on each count.
Prior to Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), co-founder of FTX, going on trial in October, US prosecutors have presented their suggested jury instructions.
According to prior jury instructions the New York district judge has provided in other instances, the prosecution outlined how they would like SBF’s case’s presiding, Judge Lewis Kaplan, to advise the jury in the hefty 100-page August 21 file.
Each of the seven accusations SBF is facing—fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, wire fraud, commodities fraud, and securities fraud—was broken down.
Prosecutors recommended how Judge Kaplan should present the charges, the burden of proof or criteria the jury should meet in order to find SBF guilty, and the relevant evidence for each accusation.
Additionally, there were suggested directions outlining how the jury should review the proof, deliberate, and reach a verdict on whether to find SBF guilty or not on each count.
Following that, a different filing made by SBF’s own solicitors suggests that he can contend that he genuinely believed his use of customer funds was legal.
The brief plays with the idea that cryptocurrency, which is still unregulated, constitutes a legal grey area and claims that his actions amounted to honest errors in judgment and management rather than crimes. SBF’s filing stated:
“If Mr. Bankman-Fried acted in good faith with respect to the use of FTX customer funds and with the belief that as a business matter, FTX would be able to cover all customer withdrawal requests, he did not act with specific intent to defraud,”
The DOJ has already questioned SBF’s alleged reliance on the “advice of counsel” defense, according to which he claimed that his belief that his conduct was legal was based on his own conversations with attorneys.
According to the DOJ proposal, substantive crimes “charge a defendant with the actual commission or attempted commission… of an offense,” whereas conspiracy charges call for an understanding with another person.
The former FTX CEO has been imprisoned before his trial, which is scheduled to start on October 2. He will also stand trial again in March 2024 on five additional counts; he has pled not guilty to all of them.
The Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Centre houses SBF. On August 11, Judge Kaplan withdrew his bail after the prosecution claimed that he had given The New York Times access to Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research,’s diaries.
