Bread, water and peanut butter: Sam Bankman-Fried’s life in jail

A eating regimen of bread, water and peanut butter. A laptop computer with no web connection. And intermittent entry to hundreds of thousands of pages of digital proof.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the 31-year-old cryptocurrency mogul, has spent practically a month on the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, since a federal choose revoked his bail in August. As Bankman-Fried prepares for a fraud trial subsequent month over the collapse of his crypto alternate FTX, his attorneys have supplied an image of the circumstances he has confronted on the jail – a far cry from the Bahamas penthouse he as soon as shared with different billionaire executives.

In a sequence of courtroom filings, Bankman-Fried’s attorneys have raised points such because the disruption to his vegan eating regimen in jail, in addition to his dwindling provides of prescribed treatment reminiscent of Adderall, which treats ADHD. They have additionally stated he has not been getting sufficient entry to the web to organize for his trial and needs to be launched.

On Tuesday, these attorneys and the prosecutors bringing the case continued to argue in letters to the choose over whether or not sufficient lodging have been made in order that Bankman-Fried has entry to a laptop computer and constant web service to evaluation supplies for trial. They didn’t attain a decision, leaving it for the choose to determine.

A consultant for Bankman-Fried declined to remark. A spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which oversees the Brooklyn facility, declined to touch upon Bankman-Fried’s circumstances however stated that the MDC supplied “access to health care, telephones, a law library for legal research, hot meals,” and that the folks held there lived in “certified environmental conditions.”

FTX collapsed in November, an emblem of crypto hubris gone awry. Since then, Bankman-Fried had spent months in relative consolation. After his arrest on fraud expenses in December, he pleaded not responsible and was granted bail, permitting him to dwell in his dad and mom’ dwelling in Palo Alto, California. He was capable of play video video games and watch sports activities, whereas assembly with reporters and dealing with attorneys to assemble a protection.

Last month, the choose overseeing his case, Lewis Kaplan, revoked Bankman-Fried’s bail after ruling that the FTX founder had twice tried to intervene with witnesses within the case. Bankman-Fried was taken from the courthouse to the MDC, a jail that has struggled with staffing shortages, freezing circumstances and different issues. Bankman-Fried’s attorneys have filed an attraction in search of to have his bail reinstated. At a listening to final month, Mark Cohen, one in all his attorneys, stated the jail was not accommodating Bankman-Fried’s vegan eating regimen, forcing him to subsist on bread, water and peanut butter.

“Notwithstanding multiple requests for a vegan diet, he continues to be served a flesh diet,” Cohen stated in courtroom.

Cohen additionally requested Kaplan in a submitting to present Bankman-Fried entry to 2 medicines which have been prescribed to him – Adderall and Emsam, a transdermal patch that treats despair. Bankman-Fried had taken only some days’ price of the medicines with him to the jail, Cohen stated.

Recently, many of the backwards and forwards in courtroom has targeted on Bankman-Fried’s entry to the hundreds of thousands of pages of digital proof within the case.

In filings final month, his attorneys argued that the MDC’s circumstances had made it just about unattainable for him to organize for the trial. Bankman-Fried has entry to an offline laptop computer that he can use throughout visiting hours, along with his attorneys current, the filings stated. But he can’t attain a key database of supplies that’s out there solely through the web.

Twice per week, Bankman-Fried is allowed to depart the jail and meet along with his attorneys on the federal courthouse in Manhattan, in accordance with the filings. But an internet-enabled laptop computer he was given for these conferences has restricted battery life, and Bankman-Fried has not been permitted an extension twine to cost it, the attorneys stated. The web connection has additionally been shaky.

“Time and again the government’s promises around providing him bona fide access to discovery have proven empty,” Bankman-Fried’s attorneys wrote in a submitting.

In their very own submitting, the prosecutors have stated the Bureau of Prisons’ “nationwide security policies prohibit the use of any internet-enabled electronic device within the prison.”

In a Tuesday letter to the choose, prosecutors stated that to get round that prohibition, that they had allowed Bankman-Fried to make use of a laptop computer that would connect with the web two days per week at a particular inmate holding facility within the federal courtroom in Manhattan. They stated that usually, web service had been “sufficient for most internet review activities.”

But his attorneys disputed that characterization in their very own letter and stated they have been “skeptical that the cellblock procedures will work as promised.”

The general circumstances on the MDC, which homes greater than 1,500 female and male detainees in conventional cells and dormitory-style rooms, have lengthy been a supply of concern. When he revoked Bankman-Fried’s bail, Kaplan acknowledged that the MDC was “not on anyone’s list of five-star facilities.”

In February 2019, MDC detainees endured subfreezing temperatures when a virtually weeklong energy outage left the jail with restricted warmth and electrical energy. Last yr, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers issued an announcement that stated MDC’s circumstances have been “inhumane” and famous that it had “the highest number of COVID-19 positive detainees in the nation” through the pandemic.

Ghislaine Maxwell, a former affiliate of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, continuously complained concerning the jail’s harsh residing circumstances when she was detained there earlier than her trial on intercourse trafficking expenses. She described it as “a living hell.”

The Bureau of Prisons spokesperson stated the MDC offered “essential medical, dental and mental health services” and adopted protocols designed to make sure applicable temperatures for winter and summer season.

Before they began working for Bankman-Fried, Cohen and his companion, Christian Everdell, helped characterize Maxwell. While she was within the MDC, they argued that Maxwell wanted entry to a laptop computer to evaluation discovery supplies on weekends and holidays.

A choose granted that request over an objection from the Bureau of Prisons.