A federal judge has sided with the U.S. Department of Justice in a motion aimed at blocking seven witnesses from testifying on behalf of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried (SBF).
In a Sept. 21 filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge Lewis Kaplan granted the motion. at the limit Motion by the prosecution to prohibit certain witnesses from testifying in the SBF criminal trial. Mr. Kaplan offered other legal grounds for granting the Justice Department’s motion against certain witnesses, including that the proposed testimony was “not clear at all” or irrelevant to the trial; It involved making the facts of the case appear to be confusing to the jury.
Witnesses at issue in this criminal case include Thomas Bishop, Brian Kim, Bradley Smith, Lawrence Akka, Joseph Pimbrey, Peter Vinella, and Andrew Di Wu. Many are experts in the legal field. An Aug. 28 court filing suggests SBF’s legal team may have been paid more than $1,200 per hour for testimony.
Mr. Kaplan left the door open for SBF’s defense team to call some individuals to testify to U.S. government witnesses. But he denied a motion from Bankman Freed’s lawyers that could exclude testimony from University of Notre Dame accounting professor Peter Easton, who is scheduled to speak about FTX clients’ fiat accounts.
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Bankman Fried is scheduled to appear in Kaplan’s first criminal trial on October 3rd, facing seven criminal charges related to the alleged misuse of user funds at FTX and Alameda Research. Become. He faces five additional criminal charges at trial in March 2024. SBF has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Since a federal judge revoked his bail in August, SBF has been largely remanded to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn pending trial. On September 21, a three-judge panel rejected an appeal from the former FTX CEO’s legal team that argued for early release primarily on First Amendment grounds.
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