Former FTX CEO, Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried, who was recently sentenced to 25 years in federal prison, has made a request to a judge to allow him to remain temporarily incarcerated in the New York City area instead of being transferred to California.
In a filing on April 8th, Bankman-Fried’s legal team asked Judge Lewis Kaplan to grant an order permitting him to stay at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he has been held since August 2023. The purpose of this request is to ensure easy access to his appellate counsel for his expected appeal against his conviction and sentencing.
Prior to Judge Kaplan’s announcement of Bankman-Fried’s 25-year sentence on March 28th, attorney Marc Mukasey stated that they intended to appeal SBF’s conviction on seven felony counts. However, as of now, there have been no filings on the online portal for the U.S. Court Of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Some legal experts have speculated that Bankman-Fried may have a chance of having some years taken off his sentence based on good behavior.
Initially, Judge Kaplan had ruled that Bankman-Fried would serve his sentence at a medium- or low-security prison in the San Francisco Bay Area, likely due to the proximity of his family. Prior to the revocation of his bail in August 2023, the former FTX CEO had mainly been confined to his parents’ home in California near Stanford University.
Bankman-Fried was one of the few individuals involved in the collapse of FTX and Alameda Research who pleaded not guilty and faced a jury trial. Others connected to the crypto firms, such as Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, Nishad Singh, and Ryan Salame, pleaded guilty and reached plea deals. Salame is scheduled to be sentenced on May 28th, but it remains unclear when Wang, Ellison, and Singh will appear before a judge. Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to one felony count in a separate case involving cryptocurrency exchange Binance, will be sentenced on April 30th.