Sam Bankman-Fried Pushes Back on Jail Time, Files Request To Leave Prison Five Days a Week: Report

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is reportedly asking for a more lenient prison schedule to allow him to prepare for his defense ahead of the October trial.

Bloomberg reports that Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have written a letter to the U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan making the case for the former FTX CEO to be let out five days a week to review documents.

The report quotes Bankman-Fried’s lawyer Christian Everdell saying that the FTX co-founder will have “no hope of reviewing” the massive trove of documents under the existing prison schedule.

Bloomberg cites Everdell saying,

“Just last week the government produced three-quarters of a million pages of Slack communications, which were supposed to be produced months ago…”

The Bloomberg report says that Everdell in his letter to Judge Kaplan sought to have Bankman-Fried get access to an internet-enabled laptop and time to meet with his lawyers. Prison officials have reportedly resisted the idea of transferring the FTX co-founder to a smaller facility where he could access an internet-enabled laptop, which the prosecutors had initially suggested.

According to the report, prosecutors have said it’s impractical to load all the documents onto a laptop but have offered to load them onto hard drives which Bankman-Fried can then use on computers available at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the main prison for defendants awaiting federal trials in the state of New York.

Bankman-Fried was arrested in December of 2022 and various criminal charges including wire fraud, commodities fraud and securities fraud filed against him. He was initially placed under house arrest on a $250 million bail but his terms were revoked earlier this month after he allegedly tampered with a witness. His trial is set to kick off on October 2nd.

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