The fallen crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried’s appeal of his 25-year sentence for fraud will be heard next week to the Second United States Appeal Court, but his arguments for why he is owed a reversal are already coming into view, courtesy of a legal legend, Barbara Fried — who also happens to be his mother.

Ms. Fried, a long-time professor at Stanford Law School — where she is now emerita — has written a 64-page argument on Substack making the case for her son’s innocence. Titled “The Trial of Sam Bankman-Fried,” it argues that “the prosecution presented no evidence that Sam had ever formed a plan to defraud customers or had ever discussed doing so with his alleged co-conspirators, or established any motive for the alleged crime.”

Ms. Fried reckons that the “spectacle that has surrounded the FTX case since day one has not been conducive to serious, independent thought or attention to facts. It has also imposed a very high cost on anyone who publicly expressed doubts about whether justice has been done in this case.” She reflects that “someday I may write about what it has been like to live through this experience as a parent. Today I write as a lawyer.”

Bankman-Fried was convicted on seven felony counts stemming from the implosion of his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, and a related hedge fund, Alameda Research. The lead prosecutor in the case was Danelle Sassoon, who subsequently resigned as acting United States attorney for the Southern District of New York after she objected to demands from Main Justice that she drop criminal bribery charges against Mayor Eric Adams.

Bankman-Fried’s attorneys contend that their client “was never presumed innocent … he was presumed guilty by the judge who presided over his trial,” meaning Judge Lewis Kaplan. The appeal argues that the government “presented a false narrative that FTX’s customers, lenders, and investors had permanently lost their money. The jury was only allowed to see half the picture.” Bankman-Fried wants a new trial before a new judge. 

Bankman-Fried argues that Judge Kaplan “repeatedly made biting comments undermining the defense” and that he was hit with a “sentence first-verdict afterwards tsunami.” Judge Kaplan has also locked horns with President Trump in the defamation and sexual abuse cases brought by the romance advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. Mr. Trump has been found liable for a total of $88 million. He calls Judge Kaplan a “bully” and “totally biased.” 

Ms. Sassoon’s case against Bankman-Fried was built on cooperation agreements reached with his deputies. One of them, Caroline Ellison — also his former girlfriend — was sentenced to two years after cooperating extensively with prosecutors. Her sentence was later reduced to 16 months. Another, Gary Wang, who built the code that ran FTX, received no prison time at all as did another employee, Nishad Singh. A third lieutenant, Ryan Salame, though, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison afer he refused to testify against Bankman-Fried wihout, as he put it, “lying.” 

Salame’s wife, Michelle Bond, is also facing charges for alleged campaign finance violations that came to light when she came under scrutiny in the Bankman-Fried case. She was pregnant with Salame’s child during plea negotiations, and alleges that Ms. Sassoon and government prosecutors promised that she would not be prosecuted if her husband pleaded guilty. 

Salame did plead guilty, but Ms. Bond has nevertheless been charged on four counts for what she calls a “short, unsuccessful campaign that the government now turns from mole hill to mountain.” She sought to represent the First Congressional District on Long Island, which includes the Hamptons.

Ms. Fried contends that her son’s fate was sealed by the evidence extracted from his erstwhile allies, who “testified pursuant to a cooperation agreement, which all but guaranteed them minimal or no jail time in return for their testifying against Sam at trial, provided that the government, after the fact, judged their testimony to have significantly helped its case against Sam.”

Bankman-Fried was proposed as a possible candidate to become the planet’s first trillionaire. Now his mother writes that “businesses fail all the time through bad luck, mismanagement, or a combination of the two, without anyone having committed a crime. The distinction matters profoundly to justice. For Sam, it is the difference between twenty-five years in prison and freedom.”

In “The Trial of Sam Bankman-Fried” Ms. Fried acknowledges that it “is hard to win a criminal appeal—not because the appellants are all guilty (some are, some aren’t), but because the function of an appeal is not to decide guilt. That is the jury’s province. It is to decide whether the trial was conducted in such an egregiously unfair manner as to throw into question the jury’s verdict.”

Ms. Fried, though, judges that “Sam has a much better chance than most” to secure a reversal on appeal “because the judicial errors and bias in his trial were so extreme.” She reasons that “any modestly robust defense should have blown the government’s case out of the water” but that Judge Kaplan’s rulings about what evidence could be admitted “left Sam unable to defend himself,” which ensured that the “government’s unsubstantiated allegations were sufficient to carry the day.” Some 98 percent of FTX’s creditors have already been paid back in full.

Bankman-Fried’s fate could eventually be decided far from a Manhattan courtroom. Last week Mr. Trump pardoned the co-founder of the crypto exchange Binance, Changpeng Zhao. He played a major role in the downfall of FTX when he announced, in 2022, that Binance was selling its positions in the firm. Forbes has Mr. Zhao ranked as the 21st richest man in the world, and the Wall Street Journal reports that Binance has been involved in business dealings with the Trump family. The Binance billionaire had been sentenced to four months in prison for money laundering.