Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers say proposed 50-year sentence portrays him as ‘supervillain’
NY Post
Sam Bankman-Fried is no “supervillain,” his lawyers argued this week — while ripping federal prosecutors’ request to put the crypto crook away for 40 to 50 years as being “marked with hostility.”
Lawyers for Bankman-Fried — who was convicted in November of stealing $8 billion from customers of his now-defunct FTX cryptocurrency exchange — said the feds’ court papers from Friday unfairly painted their client like a “supervillain” with “megalomaniacal motives.”
Prosecutors have a “medieval view of punishment” in asking for the decades-long sentence that “amounts to a death-in-prison” penalty, Bankman-Fried’s lawyer Marc Mukasey wrote in a letter filed in Manhattan federal court Tuesday.
Bankman-Fried, 32, is set to be sentenced on March 28, when his side will argue he should only be imprisoned for 5¼ to 6½ years.
Mukasey accused the feds of wanting “to break” his client and said he hadn’t found another instance of a non-violent convict serving such a lengthy term and getting set free after.
“Perhaps because inmates suffer a two-year decline in life expectancy for each year of imprisonment,” Mukasey wrote. “Crushing Sam in this way is unnecessary.”
