- Ryan Salame, a former FTX executive, tried to withdraw his guilty plea.
- Then, he asked to withdraw his withdrawal.
- His original petition cited a rarely used legal concept.
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Salutations! Ben here.
Ryan Salame, the former FTX executive sentenced to over seven years in prison, likes to play legal yo-yo.
In September 2023, he pleaded guilty to a campaign-finance violation and the unlicensed operation of a money-transmitting business.
Then, almost one year later, he tried to withdraw his guilty plea. And, on Thursday, he withdrew his request to withdraw his guilty plea.
Confused? So is Lewis Kaplan, the judge presiding over Salame’s case.
Despite the former FTX executive’s cold feet, Kaplan ordered the Department of Justice to stay the course and submit its brief in opposition to Salame’s attempt to void his guilty plea.
And Kaplan still wants both sides to appear before the court on September 10.
“The defendant here has what we defence lawyers call ‘pleader’s remorse,’” Joel Hirschhorn, a longtime defence attorney, told me.
Star-crossed lovers
Salame was key to a straw donor scheme — or when funders obscure their political donations through intermediaries — allegedly run by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
Amid his political wheeling and dealing, Salame linked up with Michelle Bond, who allegedly accepted donations from Salame to fuel her unsuccessful bid for Congress in 2022.
The federal government investigated the couple, and Salame alleged that a prosecutor implied that the DOJ would lay off Bond if he pleaded guilty.
Still, the government indicted her on August 22.
So, Salame petitioned for a writ of error coram nobis, a legal order in which an undetained convict can seek to overturn a sentence when evidence not available at the time of conviction comes to light.
Unsurprisingly, the government swung back and said Salame’s petition was “self-serving” and flat-out wrong.
Coram nobis
Lost in the legal fracas was the history behind the rarely successful legal manoeuvre Salame tried to use.
“It’s a desperation move,” Hirschhorn, the defence attorney, said of the former FTX executive’s attempt to void his guilty plea.
Hirschhorn said that, to his knowledge, the last time lawyers successfully invoked coram nobis was in the case of civil rights activist Fred Korematsu, who resisted imprisonment in a Japanese internment camp in the US during World War II.
The Supreme Court ruled against Korematsu in 1943 for his refusal to move to the internment camp, but a pro-bono legal team was able to overturn his conviction in 1983 through a coram nobis petition.
And, in 2014, a South Carolina judge granted a petition for coram nobis when he exonerated George Stinney Jr, a Black 14-year-old executed in 1944 for allegedly murdering two young white girls.
I don’t know if I’d put Salame in the same category as victims of state-sanctioned violence.
And perhaps, given his attempt to withdraw his petition for a writ of error coram nobis, Salame knows this, too.
Reach out to me at bweiss@dlnews.com.