Sam Bankman Fried goes on the attack

“It’s a PR campaign, of course,” says Joshua Naftalis, a former prosecutor, now a partner at the law firm Palace Partners. “It’s a strategy that leaves no stone unturned.”

To date, Bankman-Fried has not filed a formal request for a pardon, a White House spokesperson told WIRED. “We do not discuss speculation on sensitive issues, such as pardons, on the record,” the spokesperson says.

Bankman Fried’s appeal case hinges on claim That the jury was “only allowed to see half the picture,” because of rulings by Judge Lewis Kaplan, which prevented the defense from presenting evidence that allegedly would have helped undermine the prosecution’s case.

“At every turn, the judge kept his thumb on the scale,” Bankman Fried’s attorney wrote in a letter. Appeal brief In January. “The result was a one-sided trial in which the district court allowed the government to provide false information, concealed contrary information from the jury, incorrectly instructed the jury on the law, and effectively returned a guilty verdict.”

On November 4, one of Bankman-Fried’s lawyers, Alexandra Shapiro, who is also handling the appeals cases in Sean “Diddy” Combs And the businessman Charlie Javis-He presented these arguments to a panel of judges on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Judges It is said He seemed skeptical of the idea that Bankman-Fried did not get a fair trial. “You seem to be spending more ink on Judge Kaplan than on him marginalizing the merits of the case,” one of them told Shapiro.

“I’m sure they didn’t take lightly the possibility of criticism of Kaplan’s exercise of discretion,” says Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University who previously served as a federal prosecutor. “But I think they made the professional judgment that this was one of the few paths worth taking.”

Both Naftali and Richman caution against trying to predict the outcome of the appeal based on comments the justices made in oral arguments. However, the odds of a criminal appeal being successful are generally somewhere in the low Between five and 10 percent. The specific arguments made by Bankman-Fried, relating to questions of judicial discretion, are particularly difficult to accept.