Prosecutors Say SBF’s Lawyers Are Trying to Taint Juror Pool

Juror choice is underway forward of the upcoming felony trial of disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, and federal prosecutors are accusing SBF’s attorneys of making an attempt to unfairly affect potential jurors within the case. 

In a submitting submitted on Friday, prosecutors for the Southern District of New York requested choose overseeing the case to throw out a line of questioning proposed by the protection for voir dire—the preliminary examination of jurors earlier than a trial. The prosecutors allege that the protection’s questions will drag out the choice course of and bias jurors in direction of their consumer. 

“The defendant’s proposed voir dire incorporates quite a few pointless and time-consuming questions, typically soliciting open-ended dialogue, in addition to questions which might be repetitive, prejudicial, and argumentative,” wrote the prosecutors.

Final Monday, each the prosecutors and the protection submitted their proposed inquiries to potential jurors for consideration. For probably the most half, there was overlap within the questions on whether or not jurors had any connections to both aspect within the case or had their minds made up beforehand.

Nevertheless, prosecutors took subject with a set of open-ended questions proposed by SBF’s attorneys that requested whether or not jurors might “fully ignore” earlier protection of the case if chosen. The federal government stated that such a questioning was “unnecessarily intrusive,” and argued that prior data was not disqualifying. 

Prosecutors particularly rejected a query on Web page 3 of the defendant’s checklist of questions that requested whether or not jurors imagine SBF can be “beginning off a little bit bit behind” or in the event that they thought that the “authorities may need a little bit head begin” within the case. 

“It’s likewise inappropriate to recommend to potential jurors that press protection, or the rest, has given the federal government an unfair benefit or to intimate that the Authorities needs to be topic to a heightened burden of proof,” stated the prosecutors. “Such a query is particularly unjustifiable right here, the place the defendant has performed an energetic hand in fomenting press protection about himself and the case, each earlier than and after his arrest.”

Earlier this week, Bankman-Fried’s writings about his state of affairs had been leaked by a journalist, during which he’s reported to say that he’s “one of the crucial hated folks on the planet,” and that “there’ll in all probability by no means be something I can do to make my lifetime influence internet constructive.”

Prosecutors additionally took subject with the protection’s questions round SBF’s embrace of efficient altruism, a philosophical motion based mostly on figuring out probably the most objectively efficient methods to make use of charitable assets, and SBF’s ADHD prognosis. 

On the previous, prosecutors accused SBF’s attorneys of creating a “thinly veiled try and advance a protection narrative” that their consumer was seeking to “enhance the world” by amassing his wealth. Concerning the ADHD prognosis, they stated the protection is “foreclosed” from elevating it in court docket and that the objective was to forged SBF in a “sympathetic gentle” on the trial’s onset. 

For his or her half, SBF’s attorneys have additionally taken subject with how the federal government has performed itself forward of the anticipated trial, scheduled to start October 6. 

After prosecutors turned over greater than 4 million pages of proof on August 28, the protection stated the load was an excessive amount of to overview within the run-up to any trial. After SBF was ordered incarcerated on August 11, his attorneys accused the federal government of failing to permit him sufficient entry to the web for reviewing the fabric in his case on the Metropolitan Detention Middle in Manhattan.

Bankman-Fried’s protection crew has made a number of requests for early launch in order that he can adequately put together for trial.