This will resolve to YES if Sam Bankman-Fried or his defence team claim that he is neurodivergent (eg autistic, ADHD) and use this as a defence of his actions at trial.
This needs to be more than simply noting or claiming that he is neurodivergent - it needs to be a specific part of his defence.
For instance:
"I see things differently to other people" or "I have trouble focusing on one thing at a time" would not qualify
"I was unable to appreciate the risks due to my autism" or "I was on a lot of meds for my ADHD, which is why this all went wrong" would qualify
The resolution does not depend on any mental health or neurodivergent diagnosis for SBF, only whether it is used as part of the defence.
This will resolve at the end of the trial
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I was shocked how many times I read about his inability to get his full Adderall dose while in prison. Maybe the whole idea was to present him as effectively unpresentable and irritable and like, you know, base SBF and he did a good job, even getting the judge to make multiple comments on the record about his highly unusual word salad answers??
The "blame the lawyers" defense was a dead end, and you have to assume he isn't like totally giving up, so I think he is going to blame the doctors and the prison system and the court for his inability to prepare to defend himself due to lack of meds. Meds he relied on throughout the entire time he was supposedly committing an incredibly complicated fraud alongside his really fucking smart friends dealing with numbers and deals that all exist in his undermedicated brain. I think they will argue that if only he were given the full daily dose, which was only like one additional 10mg pill I believe, not to mention having no access to the internet or a laptop with the government's discovery that only he could plausibly understand blah blah blah, he would have been better able to make his case.
I just can't believe this was all they could do, but it might be that his inability to shut up roasted him long before the jury was seated in Manhattan. What if Trump's trials go down like this one did, with a whimper basically. They shot all their shots prematurely and had no bullets left when it came time to duel with the devil.
I don’t think this should qualify as “us[ing] neurodivergence as a defense,” and I’ve sold my position so no personal stake, but just noting this was said during the defense closing (as paraphrased by the writer of the tweet):
“SBF's Cohen: They showed him shuffling a deck of cards. They implied he's a gambler. Well, we asked the why. He shuffled to control his natural fidgeting. He doesn't even play poker. They said he looked away. What does that show? Nothing.“
https://x.com/innercitypress/status/1719791655862075887?s=46
@NicoDelon I agree, but given this also extends to his defence team I am going to keep this open until the end of the trial in case it is raised in eg closing arguments
Purely by base-rate this is quite overvalued.
Neurodivergence is rarely used in fraud cases, I could not find any. It is mainly used for homocide, sexual assault and assault (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5034394/) .
Also: "A key issue is the extent to which the symptomatology of ADHD played a causative or at least contributing role to the commission of a criminal offence.133 If there is clear evidence of premeditation and planning, that will go a considerable distance to negating the relevance of an ADHD diagnosis" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7033699/). I would say that allocating billions of dollars to an investment firm without consent of users is not easily blamable on ADHD or autism, and seems to be quite premeditated to me.
And lastly, it is rarely used to positive effect. The following text is in answer to the question:
Does neuroscientific expert testimony affect juror decisions?
"Importantly, across studies, neuroscientific testimony does not appear to have a consistently mitigating effect on guilty/not guilty decisions (Mowle et al., 2016; Schweitzer et al., 2011), or on sentencing (LaDuke et al., 2018; Marshall et al., 2017; Mowle et al., 2016; Schweitzer et al., 2011). Notably, this was the case even for defendants who posed a high risk of future dangerousness (LaDuke et al., 2018) and those with diagnoses of mental illness (Marshall et al., 2017; Mowle et al., 2016). Indeed, only a single study (Allen et al., 2019) found a mitigating effect of neuroscientific testimony on prison sentences. Overall, one plausible explanation is that the effects of neuroscientific testimony are strong enough to prevent a death sentence for some defendants (or reduce the prison sentence in one study), but too weak to introduce reasonable doubt of guilt.".
TLDR: Neurodivergence is (to my knowledge) never used in cases comparably to that of SBF's. When it is used, it is not necessarily that effective, and specifically for SBF's case, it seems rather unbelievable.