Sam Bankman-Fried's legal file has a new document on top, and this one carries the letterhead of the highest court in the country. The former FTX chief, now three years into a 25-year sentence, is asking the US Supreme Court to do what the appeals court wouldn't: unwind his case.
His lawyers are challenging two things at once. First, the underlying conviction itself — seven counts including wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, handed down by a jury back in 2023. Their argument: trial judge Lewis Kaplan blocked the defense from showing jurors that FTX and Alameda Research actually held enough assets to make customers whole, framing the collapse as a liquidity crunch rather than a hole in the balance sheet. Prosecutors, meanwhile, were free to walk the jury through loss figures without the defense countering with recovery numbers.
The second piece of the petition is about money — specifically the $11.02 billion the court ordered forfeited. Bankman-Fried's team says a penalty that size violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on excessive fines. It's not a new argument: a Second Circuit panel rejected a similar version of it back in June, leaning on last year's Supreme Court ruling in Kousisis, which held that a wire fraud conviction doesn't require proof the defendant intended to leave victims financially worse off.
Getting here took a while. Kaplan denied a retrial motion in April, the Second Circuit upheld the conviction in June, and in between, reports surfaced of a pardon request that President Trump reportedly turned down twice. Now it's down to the last door: at least four of the nine justices need to agree to even hear the case. The Supreme Court fields thousands of these petitions a year and takes up roughly one in a hundred, so the odds are long — but the filing alone keeps FTX's collapse in the news cycle nearly three years after the exchange went under.
