NEW YORK — The Manhattan jury tasked with deciding Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm’s fate told the court on Wednesday morning that they were deadlocked, unable to reach a unanimous verdict on at least one of the charges.
The note to District Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York came on the fourth day of jury deliberations. According to reports from Inner City Press, Storm’s lawyers suggested that the court accept a partial verdict, while prosecutors requested that the jury be given an Allen charge — essentially, an instruction from the court to continue deliberating in an attempt to reach a unanimous verdict on all charges.
Failla sided with prosecutors, bringing the jury into the courtroom and instructing them to try to reach a verdict, but telling them that it is their right not to agree or change their opinions, if an agreement truly cannot be reached.
The jury’s notes over the past several days of deliberations have indicated that the jurors are carefully considering all facets of the case, including some of the more procedural aspects like venue. On the first day of deliberations, the jury asked what evidence of venue (basically, the prosecutors’ justification to bring the case in the Southern District of New York) the prosecutors showed the grand jury in 2023 to obtain their indictment.
Yesterday, the jury asked the judge for transcripts from the testimony of an FBI agent who did cell-site analysis on venture capitalist Tom Schmidt of Dragonfly Capital, who invested $900,000 in Tornado Cash’s parent company PepperSec Inc. The fact that Schmidt is based in New York was used by prosecutors to establish venue — but the jury, according to their note, seemed hesitant to accept this logic. In their note, they asked for transcripts of the agent’s testimony “to prove venue.”
The jury has also asked questions about whether Storm was legally required to respond to requests for help from foreign law enforcement, and whether intermediary wallets were also included on the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s (OFAC) specially-designated nationals (SDN) list.
Storm has been charged with one count each of conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, and conspiracy to violate international sanctions. If Storm is found guilty on all charges, he faces a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison. Prosecutors say that, through Tornado Cash, Storm and his colleagues Alexey Pertsev and Roman Semenov, helped hackers and other cyber criminals — including North Korea’s state-sanctioned hacking squad, the Lazarus Group — launder over $1 billion in criminal proceeds.
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