Sam Bankman-Fried Asks Supreme Court to Overturn Conviction

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to overturn his 2023 fraud conviction, his 25-year prison sentence, and an approximately $11 billion forfeiture order. The petition was filed on September 10, 2026, and follows a June 12 decision by a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that unanimously upheld the conviction, sentence, and forfeiture. The appellate court issued its mandate in August, formally returning jurisdiction to the district court and leaving the judgment in effect. At the center of the petition is an evidentiary dispute. Bankman-Fried's lawyers argue that the trial court wrongly excluded evidence that FTX and its affiliated trading firm, Alameda Research, held enough assets to repay customers, while allowing prosecutors to present evidence suggesting customers suffered large losses. The petition contends that because the fraud theory applied at trial did not require proof of economic loss, allowing loss evidence while barring repayment evidence was unfair.