Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, has offered some jury questions, but the US Department of Justice deems them to be “unnecessarily intrusive” and possibly biassed in favour of him.
Earlier this week, Bankman-Fried and the DOJ separately offered voir dire questions, ranging from general inquiries about possible jurors’ familiarity with the case to more specific inquiries regarding their knowledge of individuals with ADHD. These inquiries will assist the prosecution and defence in selecting a jury that is impartial and fair.
Prosecutors said in a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York that several of Bankman-Fried’s suggested inquiries are “intrusive.” They called out inquiries into potential jurors’ perceptions of FTX, the purportedly dishonest cryptocurrency exchange that spectacularly crashed last November.
The letter stated that “the defence demands multiple open-ended inquiries on what impressions potential jurors have about the case, the defendant, and the defendant’s enterprises, and asks whether potential jurors can ‘totally ignore’ what they have already seen. This is excessively intrusive and serves no legitimate purpose other than voir dire.
Questions regarding Sam Bankman-Fried’s purported philosophical foundation, effective altruism, are not only pointless, but they also “are a thinly veiled attempt to advance a defence narrative that the defendant was simply ‘amassing wealth’ in order to ‘improve the world,'” the letter stated.
In the same way, inquiries regarding Bankman-Fried’s ADHD, for which she takes medication, are “irrelevant and prejudicial,” the document claimed.
The petition stated that the defence was barred from bringing up a mental sickness, defect, or condition defence since no notice of such a defence was filed by the deadline set by the court. “Telling the jury that the defendant has ADHD would only serve to improperly cast the defendant at the outset of the trial in a sympathetic light.”