In this case, Adderall
I think upthread it was mentioned that the prosecution planned a reply witness.
If they’re not calling one, my guess is that they think they got all they need from SBF’s own testimony, and don’t need anything further to rebut him.
They had an FBI agent on tap to testify and that person was still potentially scheduled as of this morning. I agree with you that they decided that they didn’t need to bother. He rebutted his own self enough.
Not calling a rebuttal witness seems to be the equivalent of a mic drop.
Are rebuttal witnesses common in US criminal cases? They’re very rare in Canada; the basic principle is that the Crown can’t split its case.
Yes!
And it was a total flex to say in the morning that they were calling one more person and then at then end to say, “nah, we good”.
Pretty rare. Usually limited to “unanticipated” evidence.
It’s not “very rare.” I’d say “somewhat rare.”
It probably varies by jurisdiction too. Each courthouse has its own culture about some things.
SBF gets wrecked again and Lopatto is there for it:
This young man has doomed himself.
He did that when he started into crypto, not when he chose less-than-optimal escape-from-justice tactics at his trial.
His goose is almost certainly cooked but it was, I think, just as cooked before he testified. It was a huge long shot with no downside.
I gotta wonder about how SBF thought it would be any kind of shot. There are no answers a defendant could give to the huge body of evidence arrayed against him that wasn’t either (a) confession, (b) blatant perjury, or (c) obfuscation. The first clearly out, because SBF can’t admit he’s wrong, ever. The second isn’t an option because he’s still smart enough (in a “low cunning” way) to see the lies wouldn’t work and would only deepen the shit he’s fully in.
So Plan C, Word Salad? Did he really think doubletalk and circumlocution would confuse the jury and somehow prevent the prosecution and the judge from forcing him to pare his logorrhea down to comprehensible (but unhelpful to him) answers?
This was never going to work. What kinds of delusions was he laboring under that made him think it could?
I don’t disagree with you in general. Maybe he thought he could get one juror to be sympathetic or confused. It’s possible that he thought that it couldn’t hurt so what the hell. It’s also possible that he changed a possible sympathetic juror to hate him.
He has been incredibly successful at manipulating people for his entire life - conning them into giving him billions of dollars based on smoke, mirrors and his personal charisma. I think he probably cannot come to terms with this just not working any more.
Seeing him now, it’s really hard to understand how it ever worked. I guess it’s because (like with Madoff) the effect is not so much based on his personal charm and charisma, but on a reaching some critical mass of believers above which people assume he must be the real thing because everyone else seems to believe.
The article below backs you up a bit. If the judge thinks that he perjured himself of the stand, it could result in a harsher sentence.
If he’s as neuro-atypical as it appears he is, his ability to really deeply grok how other people will “read” his testimony.
Or he may have been angling for the “I’m just so confused, it wasn’t my fault, take pity on poor pitiful neuro-atypical me who’s not really an evil bad person.”
A lot of con men and pyramid schemers start out with a legit business, cheat a smidgen, are rewarded for it and slippery-slope themselves into a disaster. Madoff may have been one such, I don’t recall his details well enough. They can probably readily convince themselves they didn’t start out bad, so they’re in a whole different category than somebody who started out intending to steal.
“Circumstances forced me into it” sounds like a great excuse in your head. It carries little water in court, but might well in a jury room.
I hope his lawyers hammered him with “actually it could hurt a whole hell of a lot because if you refuse to accept the inevitable by pleading out, if you force everyone to go through the charade of a trial you will certainly lose, then the government is going to ask the jury to sentence you to nine million years in prison and the jury is likely to oblige.”
The lawyers certainly told him of the risks and he decided to roll the dice. However, the jury decides guilt or innocence on the various charges. The judge imposes the sentence.
Yeah, you’re right. There are a few states where the jury decides the result in the sentencing phase, but the majority of states (and the federal courts) leave it to the judge. I was misremembering.
Still a very bad call to roll these dice.
Well, then it was a gambit well-player, because I’m sure he impressed the judge. 