Lawyers for Sam Bankman-Fried claim in an appeal filed Friday that the imprisoned FTX founder was the victim of a rush to judgment by a public that wrongly believed he was guilty of stealing billions of dollars from his customers and investors before he was even arrested.

The lawyers filed papers with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals asking a three-judge panel to reverse his conviction and assign the case to a new judge for a retrial, saying the trial judge “imposed a draconian quarter-century sentence on this first-time, non-violent offender” after they contend he hurried the jury into reaching a one-day verdict to cap off a complex four-week trial.

“Sam Bankman-Fried was never presumed innocent. He was presumed guilty — before he was even charged. He was presumed guilty by the media. He was presumed guilty by the FTX debtor estate and its lawyers. He was presumed guilty by federal prosecutors eager for quick headlines. And he was presumed guilty by the judge who presided over his trial,” the lawyers wrote.

They said the passing of time has cast Bankman-Fried in a better light. “From day one, the prevailing narrative — initially spun by the lawyers who took over FTX, quickly adopted by their contacts at the U.S. Attorney’s Office — was that Bankman-Fried had stolen billions of dollars of customer funds, driven FTX to insolvency, and caused billions in losses,” the attorney said.

“Now, nearly two years later, a very different picture is emerging — one confirming FTX was never insolvent, and in fact had assets worth billions to repay its customers. But the jury at Bankman-Fried’s trial never got to see that picture,” they added.

Bankman-Fried, 32, was convicted last November of fraud and conspiracy a year after his companies collapsed into bankruptcy as investors rushed to withdraw funds. A jury concluded that some of their money had been improperly spent on real estate, investments, celebrity endorsements, political contributions and lavish lifestyles.

At its height, FTX was treated as a pioneer and darling in the emerging cryptocurrency industry, with a Super Bowl advertisement, testimony by Bankman-Fried before Congress and endorsements from celebrities such as quarterback Tom Brady and comedian Larry David.

Bankman-Fried was arrested in December 2022 following his extradition from the Bahamas, just weeks after his company filed for bankruptcy and days after some of his former top executives began cooperating with federal prosecutors. Some of them testified against him at trial.

He initially remained under strict bail conditions at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California, but Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in Manhattan revoked his bail shortly before the trial after concluding that Bankman-Fried was trying to influence likely witnesses, including an ex-girlfriend who had served as chief executive at Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund.

The fallen mogul is serving a 25-year sentence after he was sentenced in March in what a prosecutor once described as one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history.

A prosecutor’s spokesperson declined to comment Friday.

After two jetliner crashes killed 346 people, a $2.5 billion settlement that let Boeing avoid criminal prosecution failed to resolve questions about the safety of the aerospace giant’s planes.

Federal prosecutors now accuse the company of failing to live up to terms of the 2021 settlement. Boeing has agreed to plead guilty to a felony fraud charge in a new deal with the Justice Department. The department said Thursday that it expects to file the detailed plea agreement no sooner than the middle of next week.

Experts on corporate behavior say whether the new agreement has a more lasting impact on safety than the earlier settlement could come down to how much power is placed in the hands of an independent monitor who is assigned to oversee Boeing for three years. Prosecutors made the appointment of such a monitor a condition of the plea deal, which also calls for Boeing to pay a new $243.6 million fine.

“Your real concern is protecting against the loss of future lives in future crashes, and that is something that the monitor can have more impact on than simply the amount of the fine,” said John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University who studies corporate governance and white-collar crime.

The finalized plea and sentence are due to be filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Worth, Texas. The filing will give a more precise description of how the compliance monitor will be chosen and the scope of the monitor’s duties. Already, the government appears to have backed away from a plan that would given Boeing the biggest role in picking the watchdog.

Families of some of the passengers who died in the crashes have said they plan to oppose the agreement. They want a trial, not a plea deal, and they say Boeing should pay a $24 billion fine. Paul Cassell, a lawyer for the families, said the relatives of crash victims should have the right to propose a monitor for the judge to appoint.

The Justice Department initially planned to select a monitor from a list of three nominees submitted by Boeing, and would ask the company for more names if necessary, according to participants in a June 30 briefing that department officials gave to passengers’ families and their lawyers.

The deal that Boeing agreed to “in principle” a week later said the Justice Department would seek candidates through a public job posting on its website and then select one “with feedback from Boeing.” The precise extent of the company’s role was left unclear.

Once the department and Boeing settle on a choice, prosecutors will tell U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor. If he doesn’t object within 10 days, the appointment would go through. The person picked would need to meet “specific qualifications” laid out in the posting and the department’s guidelines on selecting monitors in criminal cases, according to the filing.

The monitor will oversee Boeing’s compliance with the plea agreement during a three-year probation period, during which the official will write “a confidential annual report for the government,” and file an executive summary with the court.

New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas is calling on lawmakers to strengthen the state’s anti-corruption law.

A recent ruling by the New Mexico Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of criminal charges against four defendants, and Balderas told the Albuquerque Journal that the court “took away from citizens a very necessary tool to prosecute public officials who use their public office for their own personal gain.”

The case dealt with the dismissal of ethics charges against a series of former public officials, including a former Doña Ana County treasurer, an ex-district attorney and a former taxation and revenue official.

The Journal reported that the state Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion centered on the enforcement of three provisions in the Governmental Conduct Act — subsections that direct officials to treat their positions as a public trust, conduct themselves in a way that justifies the confidence placed in them by the people and disclose conflicts of interest.

The high court ruled the sections were never intended by legislators to be enforced as criminal statutes and the language doesn’t “spell out what act or omission is required for its violation and does not establish criminal elements that could inform clear jury instructions.”

The state Legislature is set to open a 60-day session in January when lawmakers may take up legislation revising ethics laws and other statutes, according to the Journal.

Balderas, a Democrat whose term ends this year, told the newspaper that he’s urging lawmakers to work with the ethics agency to “strengthen these laws in order to build public trust with our community which has grown skeptical and tired of corruption.”

Kara Trainor composed herself, looked into a camera and began to speak to the drugmakers she holds responsible for two decades of suffering that has extended from her to a son born dependent on opioids.

Three members of the family that owns OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma watched silently or listened to the virtual court hearing as Trainor described giving birth to a baby who rapidly plunged into withdrawal — “the screaming will haunt you for the rest of your life” — and what it’s been like to raise him. At 11, he still uses a sippy cup and diapers.

Trainor and others who have suffered from or lost relatives to opioid addiction had waited years for this moment: a direct, if virtual, confrontation with members of the Sackler family in court over the consequences of the painkiller that made them a fortune while helping fuel a deadly drug epidemic. The opportunity finally came for about two dozen victims or their relatives at an extraordinary bankruptcy court hearing Thursday.

Some emerged exhausted, others angry, others relieved, and all unsure whether the Sacklers, who weren’t allowed to respond during the session, had been moved. Still, several people who gave statements said they valued being able to speak for their lost loved ones and show solidarity, and that they had gotten a grain of resolution.

A Georgia man has been sentenced to five years in federal prison for setting fire to a Savannah city government office building.

Stephen Charles Setter, 19, was sentenced by a U.S. District Court judge after pleading guilty to a charge of arson, federal prosecutors said in a news release. In his plea, Setter admitted to setting a blaze that destroyed the city’s code enforcement office last year on May 3.

Setter also told the court he had activated a fire alarm at a local marina that same night to draw firefighters away from their station. He said that allowed him to slip into the station and steal a radio, which he used to listen to fire department communications.

The fire at the code enforcement office spread to the attic and the roof. The building was declared a total loss with damage estimated at nearly $1 million. The fire was set late at night, when the building was unoccupied. No one was injured.

In addition to the prison sentence, the judge ordered Setter to pay $1.2 million in restitution.

The Supreme Court will decide whether California can collect the names and addresses of top donors to two conservative nonprofit groups, including one with links to billionaire Charles Koch.

The justices on Friday agreed to hear an appeal from the two groups, Americans for Prosperity Foundation and Thomas More Law Center, that argue the state’s policy violates the First Amendment and would deter people from giving.

A federal appeals court in San Francisco had ruled that the information serves the important state goal of preventing charities from committing fraud and was unlikely to be released publicly.

California requires all charities that collect money from state residents to give the state an Internal Revenue Service form identifying their largest contributors. The state is not allowed to disclose the names publicly, but state officials say they need the names to determine whether a group is really doing charitable work and is not involved in illegal business activity.

Americans for Prosperity Foundation is a charitable organization connected to the primary political organization supported by Koch and his brother, David, who died in 2019. Koch’s organizations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Republican candidates and conservative policies, making them frequent targets of attacks by Democrats.

Jacob Blake, the Black man shot multiple times by police in Wisconsin, is paralyzed, and it would “take a miracle” for him to walk again, his family’s attorney said Tuesday, while calling for the officer who opened fire to be arrested and others involved to lose their jobs.

The shooting of Blake on Sunday in Kenosha — apparently in the back while three of his children looked on — was captured on cellphone video and ignited new protests over racial injustice in several cities, coming just three months after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police touched off a wider reckoning on race.

Some demonstrations devolved into unrest, including for a third night in Kenosha, where multiple gunshots could be heard in social media posts from at least one neighborhood where residents and people carrying long guns and other weapons remained in the streets hours after they city’s 8 p.m. curfew. Kenosha Police were investigating after videos appeared to show at least two people with gunshot wounds, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel  reported.

Earlier Tuesday, Blake’s father spoke alongside other family members and lawyers, telling reporters that police shot his son “seven times, seven times, like he didn’t matter.”

“But my son matters. He’s a human being and he matters,” said Blake’s father, who is also named Jacob Blake.

The 29-year-old was in surgery Tuesday, said attorney Ben Crump, adding that the bullets severed Blake’s spinal cord and shattered his vertebrae. Another attorney said there was also severe damage to organs.

Prosecutors can obtain a person’s banking records using a warrantless grand jury subpoena without violating the individual’s right to privacy under New Mexico’s Constitution, the state Supreme Court has ruled.

In a unanimous decision Thursday, the justices concluded that a district court properly allowed the use of five years of personal financial records as evidence in a pending criminal case against a Taos couple facing charges of tax evasion and other finance-related offenses.

The high court rejected the married couple’s argument that the state’s Constitution provided greater privacy protections for their financial records than offered under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. The couple contended that a court-authorized warrant should have been required to obtain bank records.

The justices adhered to a decadesold legal doctrine established by the U.S. Supreme Court that people have no constitutionally protected privacy interest in the financial account records they voluntarily share with third parties.

Nebraska prison officials cannot withhold public records that reveal where they purchased their supply of lethal injection drugs, the state's highest court ruled Friday.

In ordering the documents to be disclosed for public scrutiny, the Nebraska Supreme Court sided with two newspapers and a prisoner advocacy group that had sued the Department of Correctional Services after it refused to release records related to its supply of execution drugs in 2017.

The department previously had regularly disclosed such records without objection to anyone who requested them. Department officials at the time were under increasing pressure to obtain lethal injection drugs as death-penalty critics questioned whether Nebraska would ever carry out another execution.

Media outlets including The Associated Press, The Omaha World-Herald and The Lincoln Journal Star filed formal requests in 2017 for records including purchase orders for the lethal injection drugs that would have identified the supplier. The American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska filed a similar request. The Omaha World-Herald, the Lincoln Journal Star and the ACLU of Nebraska sued after the request was denied, arguing that the department had violated Nebraska's open-records laws.

Prison officials said the state's supplier should be considered a member of the official “execution team,” whose identities are confidential under Nebraska law.

A district court judge ordered the department to release the records in 2018, and the case has been under appeal ever since. That same year, Nebraska executed its first inmate since 1997, using the drugs prison officials had obtained from the unknown supplier.

A court on Wednesday upheld a corruption conviction against former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was released from prison earlier this month.

A three-judge panel in Porto Alegre also ruled that da Silva’s prison sentence should be raised by four years to 17 years.

Da Silva remains free for now. He was released Nov. 8 after 19 months in jail when the Supreme Court ruled a person can be imprisoned only after all appeals have been exhausted.

Da Silva, who governed Brazil from 2003 to 2010, denies wrongdoing and says corruption cases against him are politically motivated.

The judges in Porto Alegre were ruling on a case in which da Silva allegedly benefited from upgrades that the Odebrecht and OAS firms made to a Sao Paulo farm.

Former Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock is scheduled to appear in court for the first time since the U.S. Supreme Court declined to get involved in his corruption case.

A federal judge in Chicago set a Wednesday hearing for the 37-year-old, who once was a rising star of the Republican Party.

Schock resigned from Congress in 2015 amid scrutiny of his spending, including redecorating his office in the style of the "Downton Abbey" TV series. He was indicted in 2016 on 22 counts, i ncluding wire fraud and falsification of election commission filings.

Schock has pleaded not guilty. His attorneys argued the case should be dismissed, saying his prosecution violated separation-of-powers clauses. The Supreme Court declined last month to consider it.

The case was originally filed in central Illinois. The Justice Department transferred it to prosecutors in Chicago last year.

Former Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn will be detained at least through Jan. 11, the Tokyo District Court said Monday, as the once revered auto industry figure faces allegations that have marked a stunning downfall.

Ghosn, who led Nissan Motor Co. for two decades and helped save the Japanese automaker from near bankruptcy, was arrested Nov. 19 on suspicion of falsifying financial reports. He also faces a breach of trust allegation, for which his detention had been approved previously through Jan. 1.

The Tokyo District Court said in a statement that it had approved prosecutors' request for a 10-day extension.

Ghosn has been charged in the first set of allegations, about under-reporting Ghosn's pay by about 5 billion yen ($44 million) in 2011-2015.

Those close to Ghosn and his family say he is asserting his innocence as the alleged underreported amount of money was never really decided or paid, and Nissan never suffered any monetary losses from the alleged breach of trust.

It is unclear when Ghosn may be released on bail. Tokyo prosecutors consider Ghosn, a Brazilian-born Frenchman of Lebanese ancestry, a flight risk.

In Japan, formal charges can mean a suspect will get detained for months, sometimes until the trial starts, because of fears of tampered evidence.

Another Nissan executive, Greg Kelly, was arrested on suspicion of collaborating with Ghosn on the under-reporting of income and was freed Dec. 25 on 70 million yen ($635,600) bail after more than a month of detention.

Kelly said in a statement released through his lawyers he had suffered while in detention because of his neck ailment and hoped to get medical treatment. He also said he was innocent and hoped to regain his reputation.

"I expect that the trial will start soon. I have not been involved in alleged false entry. I believe my innocence will be revealed in the trial," Kelly said.

Falsifying financial reporting is a serious crime in Japan, with a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, a 10 million yen ($89,000) fine, or both. But some experts are puzzled that the allegations against Kelly and Ghosn are about underreporting income from Nissan. Nissan is in charge of filing such financial reports, not individual executives.

Past cases of companies and officials getting charged in Japan with falsifying such reports tend to be about misrepresenting company profits or other numbers that relate to the overall operations of the business, not executive compensation.