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https://www.axios.com/2023/10/03/sam-bankman-fried-trial-ftx-crypto

During the morning session, the U.S. government said there were no discussions of a plea deal and that no such offers had been given.

I think the answer is NO

A few questions:

• What happens if we don't know whether he was offered a deal and he doesn't tell the press whether he was or not? Will you resolve N/A?

• What happens if he is offered a deal with the SEC but is not offered a deal with the DOJ?

Offering to buy 5k NO at 88%

I quickly googled Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, Trevor Milton, and Kenneth Lay. I found no evidence that any of them was ever offered a plea deal. So 89% seems too high. My reference class is closer to the issue at hand than "all federal cases" or "all federal fraud cases" and I think that matters a lot more than sample size.

@JonathanRay It may be closer but comparatively it falls prey to the law of small numbers.

@NicoDelon For n=4 and p=0.89 the binomial probability was 0.00015. That's plenty of sample size to bet NO

@JonathanRay n=4

@mr22222222 Exactly. No one should make inferences, much less expensive ones, based on n=4 samples.

So shut up and fill my limit order then :p

@JonathanRay LOL no. I didn’t say I should expend more on my own inferences.

@NicoDelon I'm anticipating that the Feds will make a deal involving his parents. SBF makes a deal and one part of the quid pro quo is that his parents don't do any time.

Also, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because you can't find any evidence of a deal being offered doesn't mean that a deal wasn't offered.

I suspect that if the Feds offer SBF a deal, he will mention it in one of the several interviews he does each day on YouTube.

@mr22222222 Other defendants in my reference class didn’t give interviews on YouTube so I don’t think it’ll happen 😉

@mr22222222 I haven't heard of any basis for prosecuting SBF's parents

@JonathanRay Maybe, maybe not. I don’t have access to what the prosecution knows. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/technology/sbf-parents-ftx-collapse.html

Anything less than 90% is silly on this. Look at the base rates. Everyone is offered a plea bargain deal.

@mr22222222 Yup. That’s one of those weird markets where I realize a lot more people than I thought understand much less than I thought.

@NicoDelon The only way to rationalize buying NO at 10% or greater is if you think the feds are going to make an example out of SBF with a trial. It doesn't seem likely. Most federal prosecutors are terrified of losing a jury case.

How will we know if he is offered a deal or not? Is this public information?

"He could get off easier if he is offered and chooses to accept a plea deal from prosecutors, but even such a deal would almost certainly involve many years of prison time. A plea deal would normally be quite likely, but there are two headwinds here. First, Bankman-Fried appears to be in a self-induced state of delusion; specifically, he seems to think he really did nothing wrong. That may lead him to pursue a jury trial instead of a deal, which is certainly what I’d love to see, too.

But there’s also no guarantee that Justice will offer a plea deal. It’s common for even very serious crimes, but public outrage about FTX has been so intense that the Biden administration could conceivably push for a high-profile prosecution to appease a furious public."

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2022/12/14/understanding-the-charges-brought-against-sam-bankman-fried/

I still think it should be higher given how high the base rate is.

I’m curious why this is so low. The overwhelming majority of criminal cases end up in plea bargains, or ‘deals’. Is there reason to think the US attorney would not want to offer SBF at least some deal? The question is not whether he’ll take it.

@NicoDelon +1. The deal may not be worth taking, and we may not know it, but I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that he will be offered one at some point.

@Radicalia One question is whether Wang and Ellison taking guilty pleas makes it less likely that SBF will. But it’s still much more efficient for the prosecution to have a deal than go to trial. Unless they really want to put on a show I don’t see why they wouldn’t at least put a deal on the table. The deal might be 10 years in prison for all we know. That’s still a deal.