FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers submitted a letter to District Judge Lewis Kaplan on Tuesday, challenging the sentencing proposal from the Department of Justice last week.
“With marked hostility, the memorandum distorts reality to support its precious ‘loss’ narrative and casts Sam as a depraved super-villain; it attributes to him dark and megalomaniacal motives that fly in the face of the record; it makes apocalyptic prophecies of recidivism; and it adopts a medieval view of punishment to reach what amounts to a death-in-prison sentencing recommendation,” the filing said.
In a memorandum filed last Friday, U.S. prosecutors asked the court to give the former FTX CEO a prison sentence of 40 to 50 years. “That is not justice,” Bankman-Fried’s defense team said in the latest filing.
The filing argued that Bankman-Fried shows no sign of recidivism, noting that the college-educated former crypto mogul has no criminal past. It also claimed FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings would restore any assets lost in the collapse of the crypto exchange, which, it said, is something that the government downplays to vilify Bankman-Fried.
Request for shorter sentence
The court’s sentencing on Sam Bankman-Fried’s charges is expected to take place on March 28. Bankman-Fried’s legal counsel had previously asked the court for a “just sentence” of 63 to 78 months.
“We have yet to identify a federal defendant convicted of a non-violent offense who served a 40-50 year sentence and was released — perhaps because inmates suffer a two-year decline in life expectancy for each year of imprisonment,” the Tuesday filing said. “Crushing Sam in this way is unnecessary.”
Bankman-Fried was found guilty last year of defrauding investors of FTX and Alameda Research in what prosecutors called “one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history.”
