Huge news broke yesterday about SBF and how the Prosecutorsinformed the court that they won't be moving forward with the second trial. The reaction to this has been swift and loud from both people in and outside the crypto space with both sides agreeing that this is a huge miscarriage of justice. With this update, we need to look into the big questions and see what the future could hold.
What Happened?
As we know originally SBF was facing dozens of charges however, if you look at how the US courts work it is common for Prosecutors to initially charge someone with a ton of crime and then combine some of them later on or agree to drop some of the charges for guilty pleas on other charges. When charges are dropped or the Prosecution stops moving forward with their cases against are cases where the charges overlap.
Here is where the SBF case differs because his initial charges were broken into two groups when they were combined and this roughly equaled a fraud trial and an election/fundraising for politicians case. There were several reasons for this with the biggest being The Bahamas informed the US that it did not consent to SBF being tried on additional charges than the ones that were part of the extradition treaty. To avoid a delay Prosecutors broke the fraud charges off since they were part of the extradition treaty. To me, it also made sense as if for some reason the fraud trial blew up on the Prosecution they then had this second trial in their back pocket to put into play. There have been instances before of charges for two very different things like the ones SBF was facing being split up into two trials because one huge trial takes a considerably longer time and a ton of resources all at once. Since these were not a textbook example of overlapping it also made sense from that aspect since it would not run a risk of running afoul with double jeopardy.
For those that were not aware SBF was convicted by a Jury on November 2, 2023, of seven charges of fraud and from those convictions alone faces up to 115 years in prison. Since the conviction, he has continued to stay in jail awaiting his sentencing which is currently scheduled to be on March 28, 2024. Even though he faces up to 115 years it is highly unlikely he would have to serve all of them. The much more likely outcome is that he is sentenced to X amount of years with a mandatory minimum set that keeps him in jail for a certain amount of time before he can ask for parole. There is nothing odd or special for SBF for this because this is a commonplace process in the US.
Why Did Prosecutors Halt the Second Trial?
The reasoning that the Prosecution gave to the courts was... well convenient is probably the best way to put it. They claim that the evidence that they presented in this first case was almost identical to the second case so prompt resolution outweighed a need for a second trial. Prosecutors also said that since they had used witnesses and evidence of the unlawful political donations the witnesses and evidence could be used during the sentencing portion. Now it should be noted that this was not a decision that a judge issued or that a jury indicated it was 110% on the prosecution.
Personally, I also found it rather interesting that they did not mention The Bahama's comments about the case. If I was a prosecutor I would have brought that up again and highlighted how more and more hoops would have to be jumped through but that was not the case. Another point that they said which I also found interesting and telling from the fraud conviction standpoint is that they stated "a second trial would not affect the United States Sentencing Guidelines range for the Defendant." I think it is safe to say with this statement that they are going to do everything in their power to make sure this guy stays locked up for so long that the years that would have been added to the sentence or served concurrently wouldn't have been enough to shake a stick at.
Many out there think that this was done for political reasons as well. Evidence of this, even if it existed, would likely never see the light of day due to the gross illegal nature of one branch of government covering for the other. When you factor in that the Administration is Democratic and the leading attackers of crypto are Democrats it is a lot harder to wrap your head around. Yes, SBF was one of the largest Democratic donors but this is the type of incident that could blow a party into pieces and take decades for them to recover from. Due to those reasons I just find it highly unlikely that they would do that since again it would lead to so much damage to their party in an election year.
Could Prosecutors Change Their Position?
This is the HUGE unknown right now but something that more people need to know about and that is that the Prosecution could change its mind. It is not completely unheard of for this to occur and in an election year if this starts to become a hot-button issue with people pointing at these charges being dropped as evidence of corruption Prosecutors could easily reverse course and press the charges and move to a trial. This would then help refocus the election on the candidate's stances instead of other outside issues that certain candidates may or may not have been involved in.
Other factors could include if SBF somehow dodges the sword when it comes to sentencing and gets such a light sentence that the Prosecution could file the charges so that he does serve more time. This would cause a huge stir legally speaking but from what I have read and the people I have talked to since it is separate charges with limited to no relation to the fraud charges it should in theory work. With the BINANCE settlement as well if additional improper actions by SBF or FTX come to light this is another avenue that would allow them to either refile these charges or possibly introduce additional ones that we might not even know about yet.
Final Thoughts
Given the sheer number of unknowns and the fact that more time is needed to see how everything plays out, it likely wouldn't be until after sentencing that we see movement from the Prosecution on possibly refilling. If SBF gets hit with a crazy number of minimum years say 65 then we should look at that and look at the fact he is 31 so essentially he is jailed for the rest of his life. This was done with the man behind the largest Ponzi Scheme of all time Bernie Madoff who was sentenced to 150 years and died in jail for his crimes. At that point, it almost becomes moot to even think about having another trial and honestly, it might be better for everyone if the Prosecutors just make public all the evidence that they have against SBF when it comes to illegal campaign financing. Throwing it all on the internet and letting internet sleuths go crazy would get everyone exactly what they need or at least show everyone a pretty clear picture of what was going on.
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