Financial Associated Press, March 29 (Editor Shi Zhengcheng) On Thursday, local time in the United States, the Federal Court in Manhattan, New York, sentenced Sam Bankman-Fried (sbf), the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, for a series of fraud crimes. Sentence - 25 years in prison.
This sentence is definitely not too short. Not only is it much higher than the six and a half years requested by the defense lawyer, it is also enough to make Bankman's name included in the history of financial crimes in the United States. But it is not too long. According to his For this crime, the theoretical maximum prison term can reach 110 years, and the prosecutor also requested a prison sentence of 40-50 years.
In the "repentance" session before sentencing, Bankman once said: "My useful time in this life may be over.".
But judging from the execution of criminal sentences in the United States and the few cases of financial criminals who are as famous as him, the 32-year-old Bankman's words are a bit too pessimistic.
How many years will Bankman serve in prison?
Before discussing individual cases, we first need to understand a general background: How many years will an American prisoner who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for financial fraud spend in prison.
According to former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner, under normal circumstances, the minimum sentence for SBF is 12.5 years, , which is mainly composed of two parts of commutation. First of all, prisoners in the U.S. federal prison system can receive up to 54 days of sentence reduction each year for good behavior, which is equivalent to a 15% sentence reduction.
More importantly, The U.S. Congress passed a criminal justice system reform bill called the First Step Act in 2018, which allows federal prisoners who commit non-violent crimes to have their sentences reduced by up to 50%. While the bill was promoted as helping minority offenders with non-violent drug trafficking offenses, it also became a benefit for white-collar crimes.
Finally, the American judicial system also allows courts to release prisoners early for very important reasons (usually health problems). Since the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. courts have become more willing to use this provision to release prisoners who have been incarcerated for a long time.
In the field of financial fraud crimes, almost all the cases that can be compared with Bankman's are ones that can be written into the history books.
The first is Michael Milken, the former "junk bond king" of Wall Street. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1990 for securities fraud, tax fraud and other crimes. But because he cooperated closely with the regulatory agency's investigation, as a reward, Milken actually only stayed in prison for two years before being released.
But Bankman’s situation obviously does not belong to this kind. In Thursday's verdict, presiding judge Kaplan clearly accused Bankman of blatantly lying on the witness stand. The judge said he only regretted making a bad bet on the possibility of being caught and had never expressed an ounce of remorse for the horrific crime he committed. Kaplan also warned before sentencing that Bankman's risk of committing another crime in the future cannot be ignored.
is another currency circle tycoon. Zhao Changpeng, who will receive the verdict next month, may be more in line with the definition of "cooperating with regulatory agencies."
So as Bankman's "standard ending", the person you can refer to is Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO of Enron when it collapsed. He was sentenced to 24 years in prison in 2006. After appeals and reduced sentences, he ended up spending 12 years in prison.
After the sentencing in Bankman's case, his parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, well-known Stanford law professors, issued a statement saying they were "heartbroken" and would continue to pray for their son. And fight.
As for Madoff, the financial swindler who planned the largest Ponzi scheme in history, he was already in his 70s when he was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009. He eventually died in prison after serving 12 years.
There is another financial criminal who is somewhat similar to Bankman - Elizabeth Holmes, who was once dubbed the "female version of Steve Jobs" by the technology media. The blood testing company Theranos she founded claims that only a small amount of blood is needed to Got a cancer test that was ultimately revealed to be a scam.
She was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in prison in 2022. She reported to prison shortly after her 39th birthday in May last year and is still serving her sentence. It is worth mentioning that according to federal prison records from July last year, her expected release time is December 2032, which has already included the two-year sentence reduction for "good behavior" in advance.
(Financial Associated Press Shi Zhengcheng)
