FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried's lawyer asks judge to reject 100-year recommended sentence https://t.co/Wxkkt68Ka6
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 28, 2024
One can’t say this defence is totally worthless, since it has provided some salutatory content for us plebes. Molly White, at her Citation Needed newsletter, on “I am Sam’s low-level culpability”:
Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing is coming up in a month. He has now formally swapped out Mark Cohen and the rest of his rather unimpressive defense team for Mukasey Young [I49]. Concerns over potential conflicts of interest stemming from their simultaneous representation of Celsius’s Alex Mashinsky have been formally acknowledged by both Bankman-Fried and Mashinsky, and both have waived the potential conflicts. It seems Mukasey Young is mostly focusing on Bankman-Fried’s sentencing, because he’s hired a separate attorney — former prosecutor Alexandra Shapiro — to focus on his inevitable post-sentence appeal.
Mukasey and team have been busy on the sentencing side of things, on February 27 filing a 100-page-long sentencing memorandum that ends with a request that Bankman-Fried be sentenced to only 63–78 months imprisonment (5½ to 6½ years). The filing contains a long rebuttal to the as-yet-unfiled pre-sentencing report, which Bankman-Fried’s legal team says recommends he serve 100 years in prison. They describe such a sentence as “grotesque” and “barbaric”, and the kind that should be reserved only for “heinous conduct” like mass murder.
The filing also contains a glowing description of Bankman-Fried, starting at his early life, with headings like “Sam Is Not Motivated By Greed,” “Sam’s Caring For Individuals”, and “Sam’s Remorse”…
A final section on “Sam’s Condition” outlines Bankman-Fried’s neurodiversity, and says that he has already been suffering in jail as a result of harassment from other inmates, poor food options as a result of his vegan diet, and the generally grim conditions of MDC Brooklyn…
Bankman-Fried’s veganism comes up… a lot. Like a lot. In this sort of “ah, well your honor, I know he committed one of the largest financial crimes in history, but have you considered that he is a vegan?” way. One fellow effective altruist and vegan, David Pearce, writes of Bankman-Fried’s veganism: “here we have a person who (literally) wouldn’t hurt a fly incarcerated in a place that wasn’t built for folk with such soft hearts”. [Footnote: He would for sure steal all a fly’s money, though.] I actually found myself looking up if Judge Lewis Kaplan is himself vegan, because it’s so (excuse my phrasing) hamfisted that I wondered if it was an attempt to appeal to a bias of his.My guess is that so many of the letter-writers are effective altruists and vegans themselves that they see it as an impeccable testament to his character, and don’t realize others don’t necessarily assign it the same moral value. That, or they realize that “vegan” is a convenient way to signal “white, wealthy, and well-connected” without having to say it. Probably both…
Jeff John Roberts, at Fortune, on “Sam Bankman-Fried’s final con game”:
If you are a 31-year-old who is charged with major crimes, the normal course of action is to take a plea deal in order to reduce the sentence, and then hope for the best before the judge. You will probably also resign yourself to spending decades in prison. Unless you are rich and connected, of course. Then you may try a different strategy.
Take Sam Bankman-Fried. Even though he faced a mountain of evidence showing he committed one of the biggest frauds in U.S. history, he chose to roll the dice on a three-week trial. For his trouble, Bankman-Fried got rung up by a jury in less than four hours. And now that he faces a maximum sentence of 100 years or more when he goes before a judge next month, he is doing something else only wealthy and entitled people can do. He is trying to spin his way out of the whole mess…