Bankman-Fried asks Supreme Court to overturn FTX conviction
Regulation & Gov ·
Sam Bankman-Fried has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate his fraud conviction and the $11B forfeiture order tied to the collapse of FTX.
The petition, reported by The Block, centers on a procedural claim rather than a dispute over the underlying facts of the case. Bankman-Fried argues that during his trial he was barred from presenting evidence showing that FTX customers were ultimately repaid, a restriction he says undermined his ability to mount a full defense against the fraud charges. The $11B figure at the heart of the forfeiture order reflects the scale of funds prosecutors say were misappropriated in the exchange's collapse.
Multiple accounts of the filing describe the same core argument: that the trial court's exclusion of repayment evidence prevented jurors from weighing information relevant to whether FTX had the assets to make customers whole. Three distinct sources are tracking the story, with corroborating summaries confirming both the $11B figure and the evidentiary-exclusion argument as the basis for the appeal.
The case sits within a broader pattern of crypto-related disputes reaching the Supreme Court, which has increasingly become a venue where rulings on agency authority, evidentiary standards, and corporate accountability ripple into how digital-asset cases are prosecuted and defended. FTX-related matters have already drawn scrutiny from the nation's highest court on other fronts, underscoring how the exchange's collapse continues to generate legal questions well beyond the original trial.
It remains unresolved whether the Supreme Court will agree to hear the case at all, since the justices exercise discretion over which petitions to take up and typically decline the large majority of them. Also unclear is how the repayment evidence Bankman-Fried says was excluded would have been assessed by jurors, and whether any subsequent recoveries for FTX customers have factored into his legal argument. No timeline for a decision on whether the Court will grant certiorari has been indicated.