Roman Storm reacts as U.S. prosecutors push for October retrial in Tornado Cash case

Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm reacted after federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York asked a judge to schedule an October retrial on two criminal counts that a jury previously failed to resolve.

U.S. prosecutors push for second trial of Roman Storm after jury deadlock

In a letter filed with U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla, prosecutors requested that the court set a new trial date in October to retry Storm on conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions. These are the two charges on which jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict after weeks of testimony and deliberation.

The filing follows Storm’s earlier trial in Manhattan, which lasted roughly four weeks. At the conclusion of the proceedings, a 12-member jury returned a split outcome, reaching a verdict on one count while deadlocking on the two remaining charges.

As the jury could not reach a unanimous decision on those counts, the court declared a mistrial on them.

Prosecutors now argue that the unresolved charges should be retried before a new jury and proposed October as the timeframe for the proceedings.

Storm publicly responded to the filing in a social media post, saying the government was seeking another trial despite the earlier jury deadlock. He noted that jurors had been unable to reach a unanimous decision on the money-laundering and sanctions-related counts after hearing the full case presented by prosecutors.

According to Storm, the two unresolved counts together carry a potential sentence of up to 40 years in federal prison if a future jury were to convict.

“The 2 counts = up to 40 years in federal prison. For writing open-source code. For a protocol I don’t control. For transactions I never touched. A jury already couldn’t agree this was criminal. But the SDNY prosecutors want to keep trying with the hope of getting a different answer,” Storm wrote on Twitter.

Storm, who helped develop the privacy protocol Tornado Cash, also said the prospect of another trial poses significant financial challenges for his defense. He stated that his legal defense funds had largely been exhausted after the initial four-week trial.

Judge Failla has not yet ruled on the prosecutors’ request to set a new trial date or issued a schedule for how the case will proceed.