A Manhattan federal judge known for his quick decisions and no-nonsense attitude was assigned to the Sam Bankman Fried cryptocurrency case.
The case was relegated to Judge Lewis A Kaplan after the originally assigned judge reassigned himself because her husband worked for a law firm that did work related to FTX, Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto exchange.
Kaplan is now presiding over a civil case brought by former Elle E magazine advice columnist Jean Carroll against Donald Trump. Carroll says Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan luxury department store in 1995 or 1996. Trump denies the charge. A trial is scheduled for April.
Kaplan also presided over an American woman’s sexual abuse complaints against Prince Andrew before the two sides settled earlier this year, with Andrew saying he never intended to denigrate the woman’s character and agreeing to donate to his charity. Before the settlement, Kaplan refused Andrew’s request to start the lawsuit.
Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas two weeks ago and brought to the United States last week to face charges of deceiving investors and looting customer deposits on his trading platform.
He was released on a personal pledge of $250m (£208m) on Thursday, to live with his parents in Palo Alto, California, with an electronic monitoring bracelet attached.
Kaplan, 78, held a high-level position in Manhattan federal court for more than a decade. He was appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton in 1994.
He oversaw high-profile trials and several notable cases in the financial world, including what authorities described as the first federal prosecution for Bitcoin securities fraud. Kaplan sentenced the defendant to 18 months in prison.
In 2014, he blocked US courts from being used to collect a $9billion (£7billion) Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron for rainforest damage, saying lawyers in the case had poisoned an honorable quest with unlawful and wrongful conduct.
In 2012, he delayed his acceptance of a guilty plea by a Utah banker, ordering prosecutors to explain why they were letting the banker plead guilty to a misdemeanor gambling banking charge rather than a felony.
Kaplan is notorious for getting testy with lawyers of all stripes.
In 1997, he criticized the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for not acting quickly enough in an asylum case.
“It’s about as fast as a rising glacier,” he said.
Calling the agency’s behavior “absolutely outrageous”, he added: “The INS has acquitted itself disastrously in the three years that I have been on the bench more than once, but the one this takes the cake and I won’t endure for it much longer.
In 2000, Kaplan came out in favor of the motion picture industry, granting it legal protection to protect DVDs from being copied onto computers.
“Computer code is no more purely expressive than the assassination of a political figure is purely a political statement,” he said.
More recently, Kaplan presided over Kevin Spacey’s civil trial after another actor accused him of trying to molest him in his apartment after a party when he was 14 and Spacey was 26. jury sided with Spacey, finding Anthony Rapp had failed to prove his case.
In 2019, Kaplan sent three men to prison after they were convicted in a college basketball scandal in which a former Adidas executive and two others paid families to persuade top recruits to play for the schools sponsored by the shoemaker.
Nearly a dozen years ago, Kaplan sentenced Ahmed Ghailani, a former inmate of the US prison of Guantánamo Bay, to life in prison. Kaplan presided over a trial in which Ghailani was found guilty of conspiring to destroy US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Americans were among the 224 people killed in the attacks.
In 2015, Kaplan sentenced Adel Abdul Bary, an Egyptian lawyer, to 25 years in prison for his role in attacks on US embassies.
In 2014, Kaplan sentenced Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, to life in prison for serving as an al-Qaeda spokesman after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Kaplan also presided over sentence reduction efforts for men convicted in the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people and injured more than 1,000.
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