Bankman-Fried Asks the Supreme Court to Undo an $11B Forfeiture

Sam Bankman-Fried has asked the US Supreme Court to undo his seven-count fraud conviction and the $11 billion forfeiture ordered with it. The petition for a writ of certiorari was filed on Thursday. It carries two questions: whether the trial court was wrong to keep out evidence that FTX and Alameda Research held enough assets to repay customers in full, and whether a forfeiture that size is an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment. A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit rejected both arguments in June. The justices now decide only whether to hear the case, and they are expected to answer later in 2026.

The evidence the jury never saw

The first question turns on a decision the Supreme Court handed down in 2025. In Kousisis v. United States the court held that wire fraud does not require proof of net economic harm to the victim. The Second Circuit leaned on Kousisis when it upheld the trial judge's evidentiary rulings, and the petition now takes the same case and runs it in the other direction. If the government does not have to prove loss, the filing argues, then loss evidence has no business in front of a jury either. Bitcoin.com News quotes the document putting it this way: "evidence of economic loss should not be admissible at trial either". The Block, Unchained and Bitcoin.com News all describe the same pair of questions, in slightly different words.

"Where the government pursues a theory of fraud under which it doesn't matter whether any victims lost money, introducing evidence suggesting that people actually lost money is distracting and prejudicial," said Jeffrey Fisher, the Stanford law professor Unchained names as counsel on the petition.

That name and that sentence appear in Unchained's account alone. Neither is confirmed anywhere else in this sweep.

Dates that do not line up

Two of the three accounts put the filing on 11 September. The Block, publishing the same day, says only that it went in during September and gives no date. The appellate history has the same gap in miniature. Unchained dates the Second Circuit panel ruling to 12 June and says it upheld Judge Lewis Kaplan's decisions on evidence; The Block gives June with no day attached. Neither version contradicts the other, and each claim here is used at the level its source supports.

What the estate has paid out

The repayment figures sit oddly beside the forfeiture, and they rest on one account. Bitcoin.com News reports that FTX estate distributions since early 2025 approach $10 billion, with a fifth tranche of about $900 million starting in July. The same account puts cumulative recovery on dotcom and US customer claims at 105%. No other outlet in this sweep carries those numbers. How the petition uses the estate's record, if at all, is not described in any of the three accounts, and none of them reports a response from prosecutors.

Almost nothing gets heard

Certiorari is a long shot by construction. Unchained and Bitcoin.com News both put the share of petitions the court agrees to take at roughly 1%. The rulebook written after FTX collapsed has kept moving in the meantime, and the SEC's crypto custody rule for investment advisers is still working through White House review. Money penalties in the sector have their own scale: Europe's first published MiCA fine came to 70,000 euros, five orders of magnitude below the sum at issue here. Against that, an $11 billion forfeiture is in a class of its own. What comes next is a one-line order from the court, or silence, and no date has been set for either.