By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Sam Bankman-Fried will put together for his fraud trial from a Brooklyn jail the place inmates starting from convicted intercourse trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to Honduras’ former president have complained of subpar circumstances.
U.S. District Decide Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan dominated on Friday that Bankman-Fried, the founding father of bankrupt cryptocurrency trade FTX, should be jailed for tampering with witnesses whereas free on $250 million bond at his dad and mom’ dwelling in Palo Alto, California.
Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not responsible to fraud fees over FTX’s collapse, will now be housed earlier than his Oct. 2 trial in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Heart, a far cry from the luxurious Bahamas resort the place he lived till his December 2022 arrest and extradition to america.
Lately, MDC has been stricken by persistent staffing shortages, energy outages and maggots in inmates’ meals. Earlier this yr, a guard pleaded responsible to accepting bribes to smuggle in medication. Public defenders have known as circumstances “inhumane.”
Within the winter of 2019, {an electrical} fireplace reduce off the jail’s lighting and warmth for days as temperatures fell to close zero Fahrenheit (minus 18 Celsius).
Legal professionals for Maxwell, who was convicted of recruiting and grooming teenage women for abuse by the late financier and intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein, mentioned uncooked sewage seeped into her MDC cell. Her attorneys in contrast the “reprehensible and completely inappropriate” circumstances there to Hannibal Lecter’s incarceration within the 1991 film “The Silence of the Lambs”, “regardless of the absence of the cage and plastic face guard.”
In addition they cited “hyper-surveillance” by overbearing guards, a foul weight-reduction plan and sleep deprivation.
Maxwell was sentenced final yr to twenty years and is being held at a jail in Florida.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which runs MDC, mentioned in an announcement the company makes “each effort to make sure the bodily security of people confined to our amenities by a managed setting that’s safe and humane.”
Based in 1994, MDC presently hosts 1,608 inmates. It’s now the jail housing detainees awaiting federal trials in New York Metropolis, after the Manhattan Correctional Heart closed in 2021 for enhancements. Epstein killed himself in his MCC cell whereas awaiting trial on intercourse trafficking fees.
Bankman-Fried’s attorneys had urged Kaplan to not jail the 31-year-old former billionaire, partially as a result of a “staffing disaster” at MDC meant there could be too few guards to escort him to a room the place he may entry computer systems to evaluation prosecutors’ proof in opposition to him.
Kaplan mentioned in the course of the listening to that whereas MDC “just isn’t on anyone’s listing of 5 star amenities,” he was unsure whether or not housing Bankman-Fried at a minimal safety jail in Putnam County, about 50 miles (80 km) north of New York Metropolis, as prosecutors had requested, was “doable.”
In a letter on Monday, Bankman-Fried’s attorneys requested Kaplan to order MDC to offer their shopper with each day prescription medicines for melancholy and a spotlight deficit hyperactive dysfunction.
It’s not Bankman-Fried’s first time behind bars. Within the Bahamas, he was held for almost per week on the Fox Hill Jail, which a 2021 U.S. State Division report mentioned was stricken by rodents and an absence of bogs. Native authorities mentioned in December circumstances had improved.
Different high-profile inmates presently being held at MDC embody Juan Orlando Hernandez, the previous president of Honduras who has pleaded not responsible to drug trafficking fees, and Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese language businessman who has pleaded not responsible to fraud fees.
Hernandez’ attorneys have likened his confinement circumstances to these of a “prisoner of warfare.” Guo’s attorneys in March known as MDC “a very harmful setting,” citing a current lockdown in response to a rise in contraband together with weapons.
