Mr. Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was convicted last fall and is serving a 25-year sentence in prison.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, filed an appeal on Friday, attacking the judge who oversaw his conviction on charges that he orchestrated a sweeping fraud to steal $8 billion from customers.
A federal jury found Mr. Bankman-Fried guilty of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering after a monthlong trial in New York last fall. In March, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan sentenced Mr. Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison.
In the 102-page appeal, a lawyer for Mr. Bankman-Fried called for a new trial, pointing to several rulings by Judge Kaplan that limited the FTX founder’s ability to introduce evidence and hampered his defense.
“Sam Bankman-Fried was never presumed innocent,” wrote the lawyer, Alexandra A.E. Shapiro. “He was presumed guilty by the judge who presided over his trial.”
A spokesman for Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, said the office had no plans to comment on the filing.
An appeal of a federal conviction is always a long shot. Mr. Bankman-Fried, 32, has maintained he is innocent from the moment prosecutors charged him with fraud shortly after FTX collapsed in November 2022. He has been serving his sentence at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where has been held since shortly before his trial.
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