Sam Bankman-Fried asked to remain in prison in Brooklyn to appeal
Former FTX CEO Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried, who was recently sentenced to 25 years in federal prison, asked the judge to temporarily allow him to stay in the New York City area instead of California.
In a lawsuit filed April 8 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Bankuman-Fried's attorneys asked Judge Lewis Kaplan to approve an order allowing the former FTX CEO to remain at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. August 2023. According to his legal team, SBF wanted to remain in prison in Brooklyn “to facilitate access to appellate counsel” as part of his appeal of his conviction and sentence.
Before Judge Kaplan announced Bankman-Fried's 25-year sentence on March 28, attorney Mark Mukasey said his team planned to appeal SBF's conviction on seven felony counts. At the time of publication, no filings were available on the online portal for the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Some legal experts also suggested that the former FTX CEO could spend years in prison based on good behavior.
The judge initially decided that Banman-Fried would serve his sentence in a medium- or low-security prison in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before Judge Kaplan revoked SBF's bail in August 2023, the former FTX CEO was primarily confined to his parents' California home near Stanford University.
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Bankman-Fried was the only one of the individuals connected to the failure of FTX and Alameda Research to plead not guilty. Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, Nishad Singh and Ryan Salameh — others associated with the same crypto firms charged with SBF — pleaded guilty and accepted deals.
Salameh was scheduled to be sentenced on May 28, but it was unclear when Wang, Ellison and Singh would appear before a judge. Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to a felony charge at separate cryptocurrency exchange Binance, will be sentenced on April 30.
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