Judge Kaplan rejects Sam Bankman-Fried's bid for new trial

Kaplan calls SBF's government-intimidation claims 'wildly conspiratorial'; appeal remains pending.

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Briefing

•U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan denied SBF's February motion for a new trial, ruling the purported new evidence and witness claims were 'baseless on multiple independently sufficient levels.'
•SBF argued three former FTX executives, including Ryan Salame and Daniel Chapsky, could have rebutted the government's insolvency case but were deterred by government threats; Kaplan rejected that assertion as contradicted by the record.
•Kaplan noted SBF could have sought to compel the witnesses' testimony at trial but did not, and characterised the motion as part of a pre-indictment reputational rescue plan SBF had committed to writing.
•SBF filed the motion without consulting his lawyers and later sought to withdraw it, telling Kaplan he would not get a fair hearing; Kaplan refused the withdrawal and ruled on the merits regardless.
•SBF was convicted in November 2023 on all seven counts of fraud and money laundering and sentenced to 25 years in prison in early 2024; a separate appeal of the conviction and sentence remains before a higher court.

→The denial of SBF's new trial motion, combined with an active appellate proceeding, extends the period of legal uncertainty over FTX creditor recoveries and the broader question of whether exchange insolvency constitutes fraud under existing statutes. The appellate court's eventual ruling on the conviction itself carries more market relevance than this procedural denial, as a successful appeal would reopen questions about clawback exposure for FTX counterparties and institutional lenders who received pre-collapse payments.

Nov 2023
SBF was convicted on all seven counts after a trial in which his cooperating co-founders, including Caroline Ellison, testified against him. The current new-trial motion argued those same witnesses were deterred from testifying on his behalf, a claim Kaplan found contradicted by the same trial record.
2023
Bernie Madoff's Ponzi conviction established that failed post-conviction motions for new trials on grounds of newly available witness testimony face an extremely high bar, particularly when the defendant had full opportunity to call witnesses at trial. Kaplan's ruling follows the same procedural logic.