Sam Bankman-Fried awaits final legal decisions in fraud case

Sam Bankman-Fried’s legal playbook is running out of pages. The disgraced FTX founder, currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for fraud, has taken his case to the US Supreme Court after an appeals court upheld his conviction in June 2026. A pardon application filed around the same time has gone nowhere. The Supreme Court long shot Bankman-Fried’s legal team filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court on September 10, 2026. The petition challenges his November 2023 conviction on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering, along with the $11.02 billion forfeiture order handed down by Judge Lewis Kaplan at sentencing on March 28, 2024. The defense argument hinges on two core claims. First, that the trial court erred by allowing prosecutors to present evidence of customer losses while simultaneously blocking the defense from introducing evidence that FTX and Alameda Research held sufficient assets to repay customers, with interest. Second, that the $11 billion forfeiture constitutes excessive punishment under the Eighth Amendment’s protections against disproportionate penalties. The court accepts roughly 1-2% of the cases brought before it each term. The US...