Since a federal judge revoked Sam Bankman-Fried’s bail in early August and sent him to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the disgraced FTX founder has been petitioning the courts for pretrial release, claiming he was unable to internally prepare for the October arrest. Get ready for trial in jail.
On Friday, Bankman-Fried’s attorneys filed a New Letter The judge claimed prosecutors failed to provide the defendant with the computer resources necessary to parse millions of pages of material related to last November’s stunning collapse of a cryptocurrency exchange.
The Justice Department charged Bankman-Fried in December, and the cryptocurrency founder agreed to be extradited from his residence in the Bahamas, where FTX is headquartered. The judge granted Bankman-Fried bail and agreed to let him live with his parents in Palo Alto.
The bail conditions quickly became controversial, with Bankman-Fried contacting key figures at FTX, allegedly attempting to tamper with witnesses, and using a VPN to watch football matches.After he leaked the private diaries of FTX executives and his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison to a New York Times In July, a judge revoked Bankman-Fried’s bail and sent him to a detention center in Brooklyn.
Due to the complex nature of the cases, which range from alleged wire fraud to campaign finance violations to money laundering, Bankman-Fried’s trial will include millions of pages Evidence that prosecutors collected and shared with his attorneys over the past few months.Bankman-Fried’s team argued that he did not have sufficient internet access to the discovery to prepare his defense, which was a constitutional rights.
The two sides argued over Bankman-Fried’s use of computers. These include disputes over battery life and a provision that would send him to court to use an internet-connected laptop two days a week. Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is presiding over the case, ordered both sides to reach an agreement at a hearing in late August.
Those measures are not enough, according to Friday’s filing. Bankman-Fried’s attorneys wrote that delays by other inmates prevented him from arriving at the courthouse in enough time, shaving hours off the review. At one point, he was locked in a cell without a laptop connected to the internet. In another test, the internet connection on the provided laptop was so slow that he could only load one document in an hour and a half.
“The defendant is unable to prepare for trial under these restrictions,” his attorneys said in the letter, which also complained that he was unable to bring food and water to a visitor’s passage.
While Kaplan said Bankman-Fried’s team could have requested a delay in the trial at the last hearing, they declined to do so by the recommended deadline. Instead, they asked the judge to temporarily release Bankman-Fried. The trial is scheduled to begin on October 3.
Svlook
