Disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) has allegedly proposed overly lengthy and occasionally intrusive jury selection questions for his upcoming fraud trial, according to United States Prosecutors.
“By contrast, the defendant’s proposed voir dire contains numerous unnecessary and time-consuming questions, often soliciting open-ended discussion, as well as questions that are repetitive, prejudicial, and argumentative,” the prosecutors declared.
SBF Allegedly Seeks to Influence Jury Selection
In a recent court filing, the US government has raised objections to SBF’s proposed voir dire process.
US prosecutors urge the court to adopt its own voir dire process rather than SBF’s proposed one. They allege that SBF’s approach is repetitive, biased, and contentious.
“To ensure that jurors can be fair and impartial irrespective of their prior experience, whether that be, for example, exposure to press about the case, a previous incident as a crime victim, or a career in cryptocurrency.”
The prosecutors claim that SBF is seeking questions that have no relevance to jury selection. The filing states,
“The defense requests numerous open-ended questions about what opinions potential jurors have formed about the case.”
The prosecutors also allege that SBF seeks to clarify whether jurors can disregard news they have encountered regarding FTX’s decline.
Tension Mounts As SBF’s Upcoming Trial Approaches
The filing further explains this is redundant and unwarranted:
“This is unnecessarily intrusive, and goes beyond the purpose of voir dire.”
SBF has made multiple requests to the court for leniency to aid trial preparations in recent times.
Despite SBF and his legal team’s continuous endeavors to secure temporary release from prison for better preparations ahead of his forthcoming fraud trial, Judge Kaplan made the decision on September 13 to deny the request.
Furthermore, the judge informed them that SBF is not entitled to see every piece of evidence against him.
This follows the claim made by his lawyers that the addition of millions of pages of evidence by US prosecutors just weeks before the trial is unjust to SBF and impedes his ability to receive a fair trial.
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