His lawyers contend the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in June that the trial judge had made reasonable decisions about evidence that could be raised in court, agreed with allowing evidence of customers losing “large sums of money” while stopping Bankman-Fried “from rebutting that suggestion — that is, showing that there were always more than enough assets available to repay customers (as they now have been repaid, with substantial interest).”
The filing added that the appeals court’s “approval of the crushing fine here also warrants this Court’s consideration,” arguing that the Constitution’s language on excessive fines “enshrines the historical protection — dating back to Magna Carta — that fines ‘should not deprive a wrongdoer of his livelihood.'”
The Supreme Court was once on track to be the decider in the legal definition of a crypto security, but those cases were all tossed out or resolved after the arrival of industry-friendly regulators at the federal agencies. So now its authority looms over two current points in the digital-assets field: Will it decide whether state gambling regulations have authority over the prediction markets and can or can’t shape that massively growing industry’s surge forward with its financial betting, and will it decide Bankman-Fried’s legal fate?
