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Comment by az226 | Hacker News Reader

I guess he didn't have the money to pay for a good defense team, or didn't listen. Pretty amateur hour what he did. Made it very easy and quick for the jurors.

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> I guess he didn't have the money to pay for a good defense team, or didn't listen.

He had good lawyers around and immediately after the FTX collapse; he very publicly fired them because they wanted him to stop tweeting extensive descriptions of his crimes as a coping mechanism.

Which was going to be a problem for him no matter how good of lawyers he got later.

No, the problem was the overwhelmingly abundant recorded evidence that also supported the credibility of the many witnesses even though they had plea agreements. In no part of his life has there ever been anything other the copious amounts of money. He could get on bail of 250M, and still broke conditions. This is before you consider where all of the money he stole went.

His defense was always fighting a losing battle here, and likely would have recommended he also try to get a plea deal rather than forcing a trial with this probable outcome.

He was never offered a plea deal, and I doubt that him asking for one would have been successful. I'm about 90% sure that his lawyers asked.

I am sure he could have negotiated a plea deal with the US Government. Well over 90% of cases in the United States never go to trial. I think the reason Sam Bankman-Fried went to trial is he actually thought he could get off.

Its around 98% that plea out in the federal system, but most federal criminal cases aren't notorious, high-profile, mass impacts fraudsters that the feds have dead to rights because the defendant not only decided to publicly recount many of their offenses as a coping mechanism as their scheme fell apart, but also have a bevy of top co-conspirators already pled out and ready to testify against them.

The Feds had no sufficient incentive to agree to a lesser set of charges, and SBF had no incentive to plea guilty to the exact same set of charges he could instead demand that the government prove beyond a reasonable doubt, which at a minimum would delay the process.

The defense team actively declined plea discussions, assuming the quote at [0] is accurate. Several news sites seem to believe in its accuracy, at least.

[0] https://nitter.net/innercitypress/status/1709208392516923435...

Ah, it seemed from everything he said and did that he's the kind of person who actually believed that he couldn't possibly go to jail.

I think that's the case, yes, but I also think that his attorneys would have brought the matter up with the prosecution without his knowledge. No point in bringing it up to him unless there's a real offer he might be persuaded to agree to.

Some of the stuff he was doing and saying before the trial, even Barry Zuckerkorn or Lionel Hutz would have told him to shut the hell up. He just could not stay out of his own way.

His bail was 250M USD, I don't think money is an issue to his family.

What they actually posted was far, far less. Less than 2m if i recall.

It would have to be around 25M

No, it wouldn't, didn't, and wasn't.

It would have had to have been around 10% if it was in state court in many states, because of the way lots of state bail systems work.

The federal system is very different.

It was literally just his parents’ house. And now it’s come out that those same parents were collecting large payments from FTX in the boom times for their supposed services. We’ll see if they ever face any charges themselves.

The email exchange where his dad grumbles about how he's getting only $200k/yr (for doing nothing) and then CCs his mum for comment was quite amusing :)

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