The start of Sam Bankman-Fried's trial is two weeks away, and his lawyers are pulling out all the stops to tilt the odds in favor of their client. This includes a skirmish with Justice Department lawyers over the scope of voir dire—the processing of screening for biases among potential jurors. Bankman-Fried's team want to expand the usual set of questions to include some unusual ones, including whether would-be jurors have issues with crypto or their client's philosophy of effective altruism.
Most intriguingly, the defense wants to take the temperature of the jury pool when it comes to Bankman-Fried's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and tell them it could affect his behavior, body language, and eye contact. The prosecution, however, told the judge that the off-the-rack set of voir dire questions will do just fine, and warned that proposed queries about effective altruism and ADHD are an attempt by Bankman-Fried to work the refs—the jurors, in this case—before the trial begins.
