Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and his attorneys don’t appear to have made any headways of their protection, because the second week of the defendant’s trial ends on October 13. The spotlight of how their case has gone thus far was once more on show when Mark Cohen stepped ahead to cross-examine Caroline Ellison on October 12.
FTX Founder’s Legal professionals Fail To Set up Something On Cross-Examination
Throughout cross-examination, the very first thing Cohen did was ask Ellison if SBF was appropriate about a few of the issues he had advised her in a bid to determine that Sam Bankman-Fried wasn’t incorrect about a few of the selections he made. Nonetheless, the prosecution rebutted on the grounds of relevance. Ellison nonetheless proceeded to reply the query however in a non-definite means.
After that, Cohen appeared to lose the plot as he started asking questions irrelevant to the case or failing to show Sam Bankman-Fried’s innocence. Among the questions he requested associated to how Sam Bankman-Fried and Ellison reacted to emphasize in another way, and one other associated to their completely different kinds.
On one event, Cohen put a query ahead to Ellison as as to whether or not SBF was keen to tackle extra enterprise threat than her, which she answered within the affirmative. Though it’s unclear what the protection was making an attempt to determine with that query, such a line of questioning could possibly be counterproductive.
In some unspecified time in the future, it seemed just like the protection had run out of concepts as Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyer started to ask questions that had already been elucidated throughout direct examination. Following this, AUSA Sassoon hinted to the court docket about this truth, to which Choose Kaplan agreed and requested Cohen to maneuver to one thing else.
Choose Kaplan additionally appeared uninterested in the fixed sidebars as he requested the protection to attempt decreasing them. Cohen had requested for that a number of occasions when he tried to persuade the decide why a query ought to be allowed.
Sam Bankman-Fried Protection May Have Adopted A Completely different Strategy
Noteworthily, Choose Kaplan made an attention-grabbing comment (earlier than the jury returned after the break) when he advised Cohen that he had by no means seen the cross of a cooperator carried out like this. Though one can’t assume what context the decide meant this, there are some believable interpretations.
Considered one of them is that the protection cross-examined Ellison like she was the one standing trial, and so they have been making an attempt to show her guilt, which isn’t the case. As a substitute, she was taking the stand as a witness as a result of she had already pled responsible to fraud expenses in opposition to her.
With this in thoughts, the protection ought to have targeted on discrediting her testimony and proving that Sam Bankman-Fried had no management over Alameda when Ellison was the CEO.
This was one thing that a number of authorized specialists had warned about whereas highlighting the significance of Ellison’s testimony to the case. In hindsight, SBF’s attorneys would most likely really feel they might have carried out extra to determine the FTX founder’s innocence from Ellison’s testimony.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial continues on October 13 with the direct examination of BlockFi’s co-founder, Zac Prince.
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