Sam Bankman-Fried pleads for lenient prison sentence after fraud conviction

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Sam Bankman-Fried deserves to spend just a few years in prison, lawyers for the convicted FTX founder have argued in a last-ditch appeal for clemency, portraying him as a “selfless” and “altruistic” young man who “committed his life to philanthropy”.

The former crypto tycoon, who was found guilty on seven charges of fraud and money laundering last year, is a “first-time, non-violent offender . . . in a matter where victims are poised to recover — were always poised to recover — a hundred cents on the dollar”, they said in a court filing on Tuesday.

Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said an appropriate sentence would range from five and a half to six and a half years. They called a 100-year sentence recommended by probation officers “grotesque” and “barbaric” and said that as a person with autism spectrum disorder, their client was “uniquely vulnerable in a prison population”.

Bankman-Fried was accused of raiding FTX depositors’ accounts to make a series of risky bets, repay loans and buy property, leaving an $8bn hole in the company’s balance sheet when it collapsed into bankruptcy in November 2022, with customers unable to withdraw their funds.

But a team of lawyers including Marc Mukasey, who was hired by Bankman-Fried to help him appeal for a lighter sentence, called for the court to consider how the 31-year-old had been “misunderstood” and wrongly compared to criminals such as Bernard Madoff, who had confessed to operating a massive Ponzi scheme.

They said the “best comparison” to Bankman-Fried was the “junk bond king” Michael Milken, who served just two years after pleading guilty in 1990 to violating US security laws before going on to become a “tremendous force for good in the world” through charitable works.

At the time of FTX’s founding, “Sam, although brilliant, was 28 years old,…