Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison for his role in defrauding users of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan called the defense argument misleading, logically flawed and speculative. He said Bankman-Fried had obstructed justice and tampered with witnesses in mounting his defense — something Kaplan said he weighed in his sentencing decision. Bankman-Fried, wearing a beige jailhouse jumpsuit, struck an apologetic tone, saying he had made a series of ‘selfish’ decisions while leading FTX and ‘threw it all away.’ ‘It haunts me every day,’ he said in his statement. Prosecutors had sought as much as 50 years, while Bankman-Fried’s legal team argued for no more than 6½ years. He was convicted on seven criminal counts in November and had been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since. In a statement following Thursday’s sentencing,…
