Sam Bankman-Fried Petitions Supreme Court to Overturn 25-Year Sentence in FTX (FTT) Case

Supreme Court Cert Petition Filed

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed FTX exchange, has formally asked the United States Supreme Court to review the fraud conviction and 25-year prison sentence that followed the platform's 2022 insolvency, according to Bloomberg Law. The certiorari petition is widely viewed as one of the last direct legal remedies available to Bankman-Fried after a federal appeals court rejected his earlier challenge in June. The move lands on a market that still carries the scars of the collapse: FTX's native exchange token FTT, which once anchored the platform's valuation, remains a fraction of its former range. Court records show Bankman-Fried was convicted in November 2023 of orchestrating one of the largest frauds in financial history, siphoning billions of dollars in customer deposits to plug losses at his DeFi-adjacent hedge fund Alameda Research and channeling the funds into real estate purchases, political contributions and venture investments. In March 2024, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York sentenced him to 25 years in prison and imposed a forfeiture order of roughly $11 billion. The Supreme Court petition comes roughly three months after the Second Circuit let the verdict stand, and the odds of the high court taking the case remain historically slim, leaving the pardon process as the only parallel path on the table.

Evidence Deemed Overwhelming

The appellate record the Supreme Court is now being asked to revisit is unusually detailed. On June 12, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously denied Bankman-Fried's bid to undo the conviction, holding that the government's evidence was overwhelming. In the panel's written opinion, Judge Barrington Parker pointed out that Bankman-Fried reassured customers their balances were safe while treating the exchange as a personal treasury, diverting client funds into property, political donations and speculative bets. The panel followed settled precedent that fraud is complete the moment a victim is deceived into parting with money or property, regardless of whether the defendant later intended to make victims whole. Bankman-Fried's defense team had argued that trial judge Lewis Kaplan improperly restricted evidence, stripping him of a fair opportunity to prove that FTX held sufficient assets to cover customer withdrawals. The three-judge panel rejected that argument, reasoning that the trial record — including cooperating testimony from Alameda co-CEO Caroline Ellison, FTX co-founder Gary Wang and former engineering director Nishad Singh — overwhelmingly established that Bankman-Fried directed the misuse of customer funds to absorb Alameda's losses. With the appeals court's ruling now final, Bankman-Fried has separately submitted a pardon application to the Justice Department's Pardon Attorney addressed to President Donald Trump, though Trump has publicly signaled he does not intend to grant clemency, making that route similarly unlikely to succeed. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bybit.

Cert Grant Remains a Long Shot

Details of the filing itself have since emerged: the petition was prepared by Stanford law professor Jeffrey Fisher and seeks a new trial, arguing that jurors heard extensive evidence of customer losses while the defense was barred from showing that FTX and Alameda Research held more than enough assets to repay them — a point the filing says has since been proven, as customers were repaid with substantial interest through the bankruptcy plan. The petition describes review as "urgently necessary" and separately attacks the roughly $11 billion forfeiture as a "crushing fine" that violates the Eighth Amendment's Excessive Fines Clause. The Office of the Pardon Attorney still lists Bankman-Fried's clemency request as pending, filed as a pardon after completion of sentence, though the Senate unanimously approved a resolution in July opposing any clemency.

The filing leans on two further lines of argument detailed in the new paperwork. Bankman-Fried's lawyers contend the Second Circuit approved evidence that customers lost "large sums of money" while barring him from showing there were always more than enough assets to repay them — noting that customers have since been repaid, with substantial interest. On the forfeiture, the petition argues the Constitution's excessive-fines language "enshrines the historical protection — dating back to Magna Carta — that fines 'should not deprive a wrongdoer of his livelihood.'" The appeals panel, for its part, rejected the notion that customer consent mattered: "No one opted into having their money transferred under false pretenses to Alameda." Meanwhile, the once-imprisoned executive, who previously funded Democratic candidates, has publicly backed President Trump's economic and military moves on X in a continuing clemency bid that Trump has openly rebuffed.

(as of 12:12 UTC) Read together, the certiorari petition and the Second Circuit's June 12 affirmance close out a three-year legal arc over who bears responsibility when customer balances become an exchange's exit liquidity. The load-bearing document here is the appeals court's own order, not secondhand summaries: a unanimous merits panel, on direct review of a Southern District of New York conviction, found the government's proof powerful enough that any claimed evidentiary restriction could not have changed the outcome. COINOTAG's reading is that the Supreme Court grants cert in only a small fraction of criminal petitions each term, and nothing in the appellate posture — no circuit split, no novel constitutional question squarely preserved — signals a realistic path to review. FTT slipped 3.2% in spot trading over the past 24 hours as the filing circulated.