Juror choice is underway forward of the upcoming felony trial of disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, and federal prosecutors are accusing SBF’s legal professionals of attempting to unfairly affect potential jurors within the case.
In a submitting submitted on Friday, prosecutors for the Southern District of New York requested decide overseeing the case to throw out a line of questioning proposed by the protection for voir dire—the preliminary examination of jurors earlier than a trial. The prosecutors allege that the protection’s questions will drag out the choice course of and bias jurors in direction of their shopper.
“The defendant’s proposed voir dire incorporates quite a few pointless and time-consuming questions, typically soliciting open-ended dialogue, in addition to questions which can be repetitive, prejudicial, and argumentative,” wrote the prosecutors.
Final Monday, each the prosecutors and the protection submitted their proposed inquiries to potential jurors for consideration. For essentially the most half, there was overlap within the questions on whether or not jurors had any connections to both facet within the case or had their minds made up beforehand.
Nevertheless, prosecutors took concern with a set of open-ended questions proposed by SBF’s legal professionals that requested whether or not jurors might “utterly ignore” earlier protection of the case if chosen. The federal government mentioned that this sort of questioning was “unnecessarily intrusive,” and argued that prior data was not disqualifying.
Prosecutors particularly rejected a query on Web page 3 of the defendant’s listing of questions that requested whether or not jurors imagine SBF can be “beginning off a bit of bit behind” or in the event that they thought that the “authorities might need a bit of head begin” within the case.
“It’s likewise inappropriate to counsel to potential jurors that press protection, or the rest, has given the federal government an unfair benefit or to intimate that the Authorities must be topic to a heightened burden of proof,” mentioned the prosecutors. “Such a query is very unjustifiable right here, the place the defendant has performed an lively hand in fomenting press protection about himself and the case, each earlier than and after his arrest.”
Earlier this week, Bankman-Fried’s writings about his state of affairs have been leaked by a journalist, during which he’s reported to say that he’s “probably the most hated folks on the planet,” and that “there’ll in all probability by no means be something I can do to make my lifetime affect internet optimistic.”
Prosecutors additionally took concern with the protection’s questions round SBF’s embrace of efficient altruism, a philosophical motion based mostly on figuring out essentially the most objectively efficient methods to make use of charitable assets, and SBF’s ADHD analysis.
On the previous, prosecutors accused SBF’s legal professionals of creating a “thinly veiled try to advance a protection narrative” that their shopper was trying to “enhance the world” by amassing his wealth. Concerning the ADHD analysis, they mentioned the protection is “foreclosed” from elevating it in courtroom and that the aim was to forged SBF in a “sympathetic gentle” on the trial’s onset.
For his or her half, SBF’s legal professionals have additionally taken concern with how the federal government has performed itself forward of the anticipated trial, scheduled to start October 6.
After prosecutors turned over greater than 4 million pages of proof on August 28, the protection mentioned the load was an excessive amount of to assessment within the run-up to any trial. After SBF was ordered incarcerated on August 11, his legal professionals accused the federal government of failing to permit him ample entry to the web for reviewing the fabric in his case on the Metropolitan Detention Middle in Manhattan.
Bankman-Fried’s protection staff has made a number of requests for early launch in order that he can adequately put together for trial.
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