On Thursday, a judge closed the door on FTX founder Sam Bankman-Freed Although he extended the trial, he hopes to be free during the trial cryptocurrency The vendor can meet with his attorney in federal court.
During a hearing, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan rejected a request by Bankman-Fried’s attorneys to release his client so he could better prepare his defense against charges that he defrauded cryptocurrency investors.
Bankman-Fried, 31, is scheduled to go on trial in Manhattan on Tuesday. He pleads not guilty.
His attorney, Mark Cohen, told Kaplan that he would be unable to meaningfully negotiate with his client as long as Bankman-Fried was being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
He insisted that Bankman-Fried was not a flight risk, prompting Kaplan to interrupt.
“The closer we get to the trial, the more I wonder about this,” Kaplan said. “If your client is guilty, he could be facing a very long sentence. If things start to look bleak – and maybe he feels that way now – if that happens, if he has the opportunity, maybe he will seek to escape.”
Kaplan Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bond revoked Last month, after concluding that Bankman-Fried was trying to influence potential trial witnesses.
Since Bankman-Fried was brought to the United States from the Bahamas in December, he has been required to live at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California, with severely restricted access to electronics.
Prosecutors say he knowingly defrauded customers and investors to benefit himself and others while playing a central role in the company’s multibillion-dollar collapse that amounted to a bank run.
Kaplan said Bankman-Fried was given more than seven months to prepare for trial, that he had unlimited access to evidence turned over by prosecutors and that federal prisons took “extraordinary” measures to allow him to continue Work his defense.
He said the case against him was “by no means unique” in the challenges it raised to review the evidence. He noted that some drug conspiracy cases involve hundreds of thousands of hours of audio and surveillance tapes, often in foreign languages.
However, the judge said he wanted to do everything possible to accommodate the defendant’s concerns and would order him to be brought to court at 7am on certain days to work with his lawyers before trial day begins in a few hours.
The trial is expected to last up to six weeks.
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