The lawyers filed papers with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals asking a three-judge panel to reverse his conviction and assign the case to a new judge for a retrial, saying the trial judge “imposed a draconian quarter-century sentence on this first-time, non-violent offender” after they contend he hurried the jury into reaching a one-day verdict to cap off a complex four-week trial.

“Sam Bankman-Fried was never presumed innocent. He was presumed guilty — before he was even charged. He was presumed guilty by the media. He was presumed guilty by the FTX debtor estate and its lawyers. He was presumed guilty by federal prosecutors eager for quick headlines. And he was presumed guilty by the judge who presided over his trial,” the lawyers wrote.

They said the passing of time has cast Bankman-Fried in a better light.

“From day one, the prevailing narrative — initially spun by the lawyers who took over FTX, quickly adopted by their contacts at the U.S. Attorney’s Office — was that Bankman-Fried had stolen billions of dollars of customer funds, driven FTX to insolvency, and caused billions in losses,” the attorney said.

“Now, nearly two years later, a very different picture is emerging — one confirming FTX was never insolvent, and in fact had assets worth billions to repay its customers. But the jury at Bankman-Fried’s trial never got to see that picture,” they added.

Bankman-Fried, 32, was convicted last November of fraud and conspiracy a year after his companies collapsed into bankruptcy as investors rushed to withdraw funds. A jury concluded that some of their money had been improperly spent on real estate, investments, celebrity endorsements, political contributions and lavish lifestyles.

At its height, FTX was treated as a pioneer and darling in the emerging cryptocurrency industry, with a Super Bowl advertisement, testimony by Bankman-Fried before Congress and endorsements from celebrities such as quarterback Tom Brady and comedian Larry David.

Bankman-Fried was arrested in December 2022 following his extradition from the Bahamas, just weeks after his company filed for bankruptcy and days after some of his former top executives began cooperating with federal prosecutors. Some of them testified against him at trial.

He initially remained under strict bail conditions at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California, but Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in Manhattan revoked his bail shortly before the trial after concluding that Bankman-Fried was trying to influence likely witnesses, including an ex-girlfriend who had served as chief executive at Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund.

The fallen mogul is serving a 25-year sentence after he was sentenced in March in what a prosecutor once described as one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history.

A prosecutor’s spokesperson declined to comment Friday.

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Crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison for a massive fraud on hundreds of thousands of customers that unraveled with the collapse of FTX, once one of the world’s most popular platforms for exchanging digital currency.

Though he described Bankman-Fried as “extremely smart,” U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan delivered a blistering analysis of Bankman-Fried and his crimes before announcing a sentence that was half of what prosecutors sought and less than a quarter of the 105 years recommended by the court’s probation officers.

“There is absolutely no doubt that Mr. Bankman-Fried’s name right now is pretty much mud around the world,” Kaplan said of the 32-year-old California man who seemed atop the cryptocurrency universe before his businesses collapsed in November 2022, leaving customers, investors and lenders short over $11 billion, which the judge ordered him to forfeit.

He was convicted in November of fraud and conspiracy — a dramatic fall from a crest of success that included a Super Bowl advertisement, testimony before Congress and celebrity endorsements from stars like quarterback Tom Brady, basketball point guard Stephen Curry and comedian Larry David.

Kaplan imposed the sentence in the same Manhattan courtroom where, four months previously, Bankman-Fried testified that he had intended to revolutionize the emerging cryptocurrency market with his innovative and altruistic ideas, not steal.

The judge said Bankman-Fried repeatedly committed perjury on the witness stand in testimony that was “often evasive, hair-splitting, dodging questions.”

Kaplan said the sentence reflected the risk that Bankman-Fried “will be in position to do something very bad in the future. And it’s not a trivial risk at all.” He added that the sentence was fashioned “for the purpose of disabling him to the extent that can appropriately be done for a significant period of time.”

Kaplan said he would advise the Federal Bureau of Prisons to send Bankman-Fried to a medium-security prison near San Francisco because his notoriety, his association with vast wealth, his autism and his social awkwardness are likely to make him especially vulnerable at a high-security facility.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos had recommended a prison sentence of 40 to 50 years, saying it was the only way to ensure “the defendant doesn’t do it again.”

Prosecutors said tens of thousands of people and companies worldwide lost billions of dollars since 2017 after Bankman-Fried looted FTX customer accounts that he promised were safe to make millions of dollars of illegal political donations, bribe Chinese officials, make risky investments, buy luxury real estate in the Caribbean and live lavishly.

Kaplan agreed with prosecutors Thursday that Bankman-Fried should not be credited because some investors and customers might recover some money. He noted that customers lost about $8 billion, investors lost $1.7 billion and lenders were shorted by $1.3 billion.

When he spoke, Bankman-Fried stood and apologized in a rambling statement: “A lot of people feel really let down. And they were very let down. And I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about what happened at every stage.”

He added, “My useful life is probably over. It’s been over for a while now, from before my arrest.”

Wearing his khaki-colored prison uniform and chained at the ankles, Bankman-Fried seemed to briefly get emotional as he spoke for about 20 minutes, expressing regret about “a lot of mistakes” but casting some blame onto others. His trademark messy and bushy hair had returned from the trimmer look he displayed at trial.

He praised some of his former executives and workmates, saying: “They threw themselves into it and then I threw all of that away. It haunts me every day.”

Kaplan later criticized Bankman-Fried’s remarks, saying he expressed “never a word of remorse for the commission of terrible crimes.”

As his misty-eyed client looked on, defense attorney Marc Mukasey said the portrayal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate as an “arrogant greedy swindler who thought he would get away with fleecing the hard-earned money of hard-working people” was wrong.

“Sam was not a ruthless financial serial killer who set out every morning to hurt people,” Mukasey said in court after urging in court papers that any prison sentence be in the single digits. “Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t make decisions with malice in his heart. He makes decisions with math in his head.”

The judge later criticized Bankman-Fried’s calculations, saying he was indeed “a math nerd, who looked at decisions in terms of math, expected value.”

He cited trial testimony in which Bankman-Fried’s former girlfriend and fellow executive Caroline Ellison said Bankman-Fried once told her that his willingness to embrace risk was such that he’d be happy to flip a coin if it came up tails and the world was destroyed — as long as if it came up heads, the world would be twice as good.

The judge said Bankman-Fried utilized that risk-taking nature at his companies, “betting on expected value” and weighing the risk of getting caught with the probability of large gains.

“That was the game,” Kaplan said. “It’s his nature.”

Bankman-Fried’s attorneys, friends and family had urged leniency, saying he was unlikely to re-offend. They also said FTX’s investors have largely recovered their funds — a claim disputed by bankruptcy lawyers, FTX and its creditors.

“Mr. Bankman-Fried continues to live a life of delusion,” wrote John Ray, the CEO of FTX who has been cleaning up the bankrupt company. “The ‘business’ he left on November 11, 2022 was neither solvent nor safe.”

One FTX customer, Sunil Kavuri, spoke at sentencing, saying he’d traveled from London on behalf of over 200 victims who had sent impact statements to the judge.

He said he’d spoken to other “victims just like myself who had their dreams destroyed” and had lived “the FTX nightmare every day for almost two years, every day, every night, a lot of crying, sleepless nights.”

Bankman-Fried’s parents, both Stanford Law School professors, did not speak as they left the courthouse Thursday, but later issued a statement: “We are heartbroken and will continue to fight for our son.”

Bankman-Fried, of Palo Alto, California, was once worth billions of dollars on paper as the co-founder and CEO of FTX, which was the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world at one time.

FTX let investors buy dozens of virtual currencies, from Bitcoin to more obscure ones like Shiba Inu Coin. Flush with billions of dollars of investors’ cash, Bankman-Fried took out a Super Bowl advertisement to promote his business and bought the naming rights to an arena in Miami.

But the collapse of cryptocurrency prices in 2022 took its toll on FTX, ultimately leading to its downfall. FTX’s hedge fund affiliate, Alameda Research, had bought billions of dollars of various crypto investments that lost considerable amounts of value in 2022. Bankman-Fried tried to plug the holes in Alameda’s balance sheet with FTX customer funds.

Three people from Bankman-Fried’s inner circle pleaded guilty to related crimes and testified at his trial.

Besides Ellison, two onetime friends of Bankman-Fried — Gary Wang and Nishad Singh — testified they felt they were directed by Bankman-Fried to commit fraud.

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NEW YORK (AP) — A prosecutor opened a fraud trial Wednesday by telling jurors that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was on top of the world a year ago, hobnobbing with celebrities, before his historic fraud was exposed, leaving customers and investors without at least $10 billion they thought was secure. A defense lawyer insisted his client didn’t steal from anyone.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathan Rehn repeatedly pointed at Bankman-Fried, sitting with his lawyers in a suit, and accused him of “committing a massive fraud.”

He said Bankman-Fried told lies to his investors while he spent their money on himself, his friends and family, buying lavish homes and beachfront property in the Bahamas, spending millions of dollars on political donations to gain influence in Washington.

Bankman-Fried, 31, maintains he was not to blame for a massive fraud that prosecutors allege in seven charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy, brought against him since his arrest last December in the Bahamas. In court Wednesday, he sat with a water bottle and a laptop computer in front of him.

They say the California man defrauded thousands of investors and customers in his businesses of billions of dollars by siphoning off their money for his own uses, including financing his businesses and making big political contributions to try to influence government regulation of cryptocurrency.

Defense lawyers insist their client had no criminal intent as he became famous in the crypto world while growing FTX and a related business, Alameda Research, into multibillion dollar heavyweights in the cryptocurrency industry.

Defense attorney Mark Cohen, in his opening statement, insisted that his client had “a very different story” to tell than prosecutors about what happened as Bankman-Fried built his cryptocurrency empire between 2017 and 2022.

“Sam didn’t defraud anyone, didn’t intend to defraud anyone,” he told jurors.

He called Bankman-Fried a “math nerd who didn’t drink or party,” someone who launched his businesses after being educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and working on Wall Street for several years.

Cohen said Bankman-Fried’s actions in the final days as head of his companies prove that he believed he was managing a liquidity crisis caused by cryptocurrency values that collapsed by over 70 percent and criticism from one of his biggest competitors that caused a run on his companies by customers seeking to recover their deposits.

Seated in the first row at the trial was U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who said months ago that the fraud surrounding FTX was one of the biggest in U.S. history.

Bankman-Fried became a target of investigators when FTX collapsed last November amid a rush of customers seeking to recover their deposits, less than a year after Bankman-Fried spent millions of dollars on the 2022 Super Bowl with celebrity advertisements promoting FTX as the “safest and easiest way to buy and sell crypto.”

Comedian Larry David, along with other celebrities such as football quarterback Tom Brady and basketball star Stephen Curry, have been named in a lawsuit that argued their celebrity status made them culpable for promoting the firm’s failed business model.

Bankman-Fried was extradited to the United States from the Bahamas after his arrest last December.

He was first ordered to remain at home with his parents in Palo Alto, California, as part of a $250 million bail package, but his bond was revoked and he was jailed in August after Judge Lewis A. Kaplan concluded he’d tried to influence trial witnesses.

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