Sam Bankman-Fried has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out his fraud conviction and cancel the $11 billion a court ordered him to forfeit, the last stage of his direct appeal. The former crypto billionaire filed the petition on Thursday, seeking a new trial and asking the justices to drop the forfeiture tied to his sentence for stealing billions from customers of the collapsed FTX exchange.
The petition, which CNN reviewed, turns on a single question about evidence rather than the whole case. Bankman-Fried says the trial court wrongly barred him from showing jurors that his investments were sound and would have covered any losses FTX customers suffered. He also argues that the $11 billion forfeiture is an excessive fine, which the 8th Amendment bans.
Turning the Precedent Around
Bankman-Fried leans on the same Supreme Court ruling that sank his earlier appeal. That 2025 decision came from a different case, where defendants convicted of wire fraud told the justices their lies could not be fraud because they never meant to cause financial harm and had done the work they promised. The Court disagreed and ruled that prosecutors do not need to prove victims lost money. The Second Circuit used that ruling to reject his appeal earlier this year.
His petition accepts that ruling but flips it, arguing that if losses do not matter to proving guilt, then prosecutors should not have been allowed to tell the jury about customer losses while the defense could not respond. He is not asking the Court to overturn its own ruling, only to decide what evidence a jury should hear under it.
Jeffrey Fisher, the veteran Supreme Court lawyer now representing him, called the imbalance unfair. He said that when the government’s theory treats customer losses as irrelevant, showing those losses to the jury only confuses and prejudices them, which he described as “distracting and prejudicial.” The unfairness is worse, he added, because the customers ended up whole and the defense could not say so.
Investor Takeaway
Bankman-Fried argues that prosecutors unfairly presented customer losses to the jury while preventing his defense from showing that his investments could have covered those losses and that customers ultimately recovered their funds.
The Last Direct Appeal
The Second Circuit ended Bankman-Fried’s direct appeal earlier this year when a three-judge panel affirmed both his conviction and the forfeiture, which sent the fight to the Supreme Court. The filing does not pause his sentence in the meantime. The justices will decide whether to take the case, and any review would come next year. If they decline, the conviction and the forfeiture stay in place.
A jury found Bankman-Fried guilty on seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering tied to the misuse of customer funds, and the court sentenced him to 25 years. His petition now asks the Supreme Court to undo both the verdict and the forfeiture.
Source: TradingViewFTX’s native token, FTT, has lost more than 99% of its value since the exchange collapsed in November 2022, falling from $26.40 to about $0.21 at the time of writing. The Accumulation/Distribution indicator, a volume-based tool that shows whether an asset is being bought or sold, points to steady selling over that period, with a volume reading of about -2.3 billion.
Investor Takeaway
After the Second Circuit upheld his conviction and $11 billion forfeiture, Bankman-Fried’s Supreme Court petition is his final direct appeal. His 25-year sentence stays in place unless the justices take the case and rule for him.