US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan dominated on Friday that Bankman-Fried, the founding father of bankrupt cryptocurrency alternate FTX, should be jailed for tampering with witnesses whereas free on $250 million bond at his dad and mom’ dwelling in Palo Alto, California.
Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not responsible to fraud prices over FTX’s collapse, will now be housed earlier than his Oct. 2 trial in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, a far cry from the luxurious Bahamas resort the place he lived till his December 2022 arrest and extradition to the United States.
In current years, MDC has been stricken by persistent staffing shortages, energy outages and maggots in inmates’ meals. Earlier this 12 months, a guard pleaded responsible to accepting bribes to smuggle in medication. Public defenders have known as circumstances “inhumane.”
In the winter of 2019, {an electrical} fireplace reduce off the jail’s lighting and warmth for days as temperatures fell to close zero Fahrenheit (minus 18 Celsius).
Lawyers for Maxwell, who was convicted of recruiting and grooming teenage women for abuse by the late financier and intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein, mentioned uncooked sewage seeped into her MDC cell. Her attorneys in contrast the “reprehensible and utterly inappropriate” circumstances there to Hannibal Lecter’s incarceration within the 1991 film “The Silence of the Lambs”, “despite the absence of the cage and plastic face guard.”
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They additionally cited “hyper-surveillance” by overbearing guards, a nasty weight loss program, and sleep deprivation. Maxwell was sentenced final 12 months to twenty years and is being held at a jail in Florida.
The US Bureau of Prisons, which runs MDC, didn’t reply to a request for remark. The company beforehand has mentioned it’s dedicated to the protection of inmates and employees, and that humane therapy of inmates is a prime precedence.
Founded in 1994, MDC at present hosts 1,608 inmates. It is now the jail housing detainees awaiting federal trials in New York City, after the Manhattan Correctional Center closed in 2021 for enhancements. Epstein killed himself in his MCC cell whereas awaiting trial on intercourse trafficking prices.
Bankman-Fried’s attorneys had urged Kaplan to not jail the 31-year-old former billionaire, partially as a result of a “staffing crisis” at MDC meant there can be too few guards to escort him to a room the place he may entry computer systems to evaluate prosecutors’ proof in opposition to him.
Kaplan mentioned in the course of the listening to that whereas MDC “is not on anybody’s list of five star facilities,” he was unsure whether or not housing Bankman-Fried at a minimal safety jail in Putnam County, about 50 miles (80 km) north of New York City, as prosecutors had requested, was “doable.”
It will not be Bankman-Fried’s first time behind bars. In the Bahamas, he was held for almost every week on the Fox Hill Prison, which a 2021 US State Department report mentioned was stricken by rodents and a scarcity of bogs. Local authorities mentioned in December circumstances had improved.
Other high-profile inmates at present being held at MDC embody Juan Orlando Hernandez, the previous president of Honduras who has pleaded not responsible to drug trafficking prices, and Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese businessman who has pleaded not responsible to fraud prices.
Hernandez’ attorneys have likened his confinement circumstances to these of a “prisoner of war.” Guo’s attorneys in March known as MDC “an extraordinarily dangerous environment,” citing a current lockdown in response to a rise in contraband together with weapons.
Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com