Bankman-Fried filed on day 90 of a 90-day window, at 1% odds

Sam Bankman-Fried asked the US Supreme Court on Thursday to review his seven-count fraud conviction and the $11 billion forfeiture that followed FTX's collapse, Unchained reports. Two numbers frame the filing better than the legal argument does: ninety and one.

The ninety is the calendar. A petition for review must reach the court within ninety days of the judgment below, and the Second Circuit ruled against him on 12 June. Count the days from that date to Thursday and you get exactly ninety. The filing went in on the last day the rule allows.

The one is the odds. FTX was the second-largest crypto exchange in the world when it failed, and that does not change the arithmetic: the court takes roughly 1% of the thousands of petitions it receives each term, and that base rate applies to cases without the complications this one carries.

How the case reached this point:

• 12 June: a three-judge Second Circuit panel rejects the same arguments and upholds the exclusion of the repayment evidence.
• June: he formally asks President Trump for a pardon, after Trump said he would not consider one.
• July: the Senate unanimously backs a resolution against clemency, led by Cynthia Lummis and Ruben Gallego.
• 10 September: the petition reaches the Supreme Court, exactly ninety days after the appeal was lost.

The argument, and what stands in its way

The argument itself is narrow and evidentiary. Stanford law professor Jeffrey Fisher, who filed the petition, says the trial let prosecutors suggest customers lost large sums while the defence was barred from showing that FTX and Alameda Research held enough assets to repay them.

“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.”

— Jeffrey Fisher, Petition for certiorari, 10 September 2026

Jeffrey Fisher, quoted by CNN via Unchained, 11 September 2026

Read the second half of that sentence against what the estate has actually done. The fifth payout round this summer meant some creditors received more than their claims were worth on the day FTX failed, which is the factual core of the defence's position. The dispute is not whether money came back. It is whether a jury was entitled to hear that it would.

The obstacle is a decision by the same court he is petitioning. The Second Circuit leaned on Kousisis v. United States, the Supreme Court's own 2025 ruling that conduct can be wire fraud without any intent to cause net economic harm. To win on this ground, Bankman-Fried needs the justices to narrow a precedent they set a year ago.

The quieter of the two claims

His second argument is separate and less discussed. He says the $11 billion forfeiture violates the Eighth Amendment's Excessive Fines Clause, which asks whether a penalty is grossly disproportionate to the offence. That question does not depend on the evidence ruling at all, and it is the part of the petition with the cleaner path to a hearing.

Everything else has already been tried. The pardon request went to the White House in June and drew a Senate resolution against it in July, passed unanimously. The collapse itself produced a 25-year sentence in 2024. The Supreme Court petition is the last formal route left, and it opened and closed on the same day.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.