Is this believable? Has a crack team of Lawyers really told him "definitely run your mouth on every podcast you can on the off chance that this will cause hung juries or mistrials in your future criminal cases" instead of "shut your damn mouth now"??
It might not cause mistrials, but you might influence public perception enough that jurors are more sympathetic. SBF is painting a picture of young altruistic but inexperienced guy, who got too caught up in things and wasn't paying enough attention and allowed mistakes to happen underneath him which he feels really bad about.
If you figure you're probably going to stand for some sort of trial anyway it might not be a bad approach.
Jurors are told to only take into consideration what evidence is presented at trial.
If he admits to crimes during a podcast it's guaranteed jurors will hear it at trial. If he says he a "werry sorry little boy" during the podcast there's zero guarantee the juror will hear it and zero guarantee they'll take it into account at trial.
I'm having a hard time seeing how it's a good approach.
An extreme example going in the opposite direction would be Martin Shkreli. Finding a completely impartial jury was very difficult[1], as even if someone hadn't followed the particulars of the case, they had probably seen headlines or heard opinions from friends and family during small talk, creating a negative overall sentiment that reaches jurors. Finding jurors who can have their perspective not colored at all when many other jurors are dismissed for hating the guy is a tall order.
This assumes that the average potential juror knows who SBF is, or what he's done. Yes, the average HN reader, or Twitter user, knows all about crypto and the players, but they do not represent the average U.S. citizen at all, even if the trial was held in SF.
I wonder if he's that unknown to the average citizen now partially thanks to the interviews he's done and the resulting media attention.
For example this Yahoo News article about Caroline Ellison[1] has 1912 comments, which is fairly high engagement for Yahoo.
The top comment is somewhat telling for the layman's reaction: "It doesn't seem most of these people were anywhere near qualified or experienced enough to perform the roles they held."
I watched it, am plugged into the crypto universe and still have no memory of it. Do we expect people to remember every obscure commercial they saw? Coinbase is another story because the QR code was memorable but I think it's also higher profile than FTX ever was in the US.
I wouldn't expect them to remember it, but I think there's a non zero chance the average US citizen/juror has heard of FTX/SBF, given how heavily they advertised. MLB umpires wore a FTX logo for example, and was to replace American Airlines as the sponsor (FTX Arena) of the Miami heat's stadium.
There's a big difference between "I've seen an FTX commercial/Logo on TV" and "I know who SBF is and what FTX's value prop as a company was" and yet another difference between that and "I know who SBF is, I had money on FTX, I know what Alameda Research was and I know what podcasts SBF has been on lately."
The later group is extremely small and is most likely not going to get called into a jury.
He's playing chess you're playing checkers. His lawyers told him to say that too. (according to the 5-heads who think he is doing this on purpose and not out of ego/stupidity.)
