{"id":366463,"date":"2025-11-09T08:33:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-09T08:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/366463\/"},"modified":"2025-11-09T08:33:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T08:33:13","slug":"crypto-bros-mistrial-was-such-an-emotional-burden-for-deadlocked-jurors-that-half-of-them-cried","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/366463\/","title":{"rendered":"Crypto Bros\u2019 Mistrial Was Such an \u2018Emotional Burden\u2019 for Deadlocked Jurors That ‘Half’ of Them Cried"},"content":{"rendered":"

In May of last year, two brothers in their 20s were arrested for what the Justice Department at the time called<\/a> \u201cattacking the Ethereum blockchain and stealing $25 million.\u201d Attacking the blockchain does sound like a cool, sci-fi crime, but the brothers maintained that they were just aggressive traders, not criminals, and yesterday, their prosecution culminated in what sounds like a very stressful mistrial. <\/p>\n

The prosecution\u2019s case was that Anton Peraire-Bueno and James Pepaire-Bueno set a trap that amounted to fraud. Prosecutors said they preyed upon crypto trading bots that moved digital money around on behalf of, apparently, three entities tied to actual human beings\u2014although only one, David Yakira<\/a>, ever came forward as an alleged victim. The trading bots were targeted because they were performing what are known as \u201csandwich transactions<\/a>,\u201d and were allegedly lured into situations that caused them to glitch out and release valuable tokens in exchange for, well, shitcoins<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then the brothers allegedly tried to launder their winnings<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Performing digital muggings (allegedly!) on bots that perform sandwich transactions required extreme sophistication, and the ability to spot an exploit that wasn\u2019t expressly forbidden in the Wild West universe that is crypto land.<\/p>\n

The nature of the scheme also seems like a bid for a Robin Hood-type vigilante reputation. Sandwich transactions are legal, but are perceived as parasitic arbitrage plays, or at the very least extremely irritating\u2014essentially just gaming unsuspecting people\u2019s transactions to set the price where the, if you will, sandwich artisan wants it in order to make a quick buck at the expense of a sucker with no recourse. In other words, it appears the brothers correctly predicted the rather nasty behavior of some bots, slipped in some sketchy code, and came away with $25 million.<\/p>\n

So were these brothers grifters, or just aggressive traders with what their lawyer called<\/a> a very good \u201ctrading strategy\u201d? <\/p>\n

According to Business Insider<\/a>, the Pepaire-Bueno brothers faced a Manhattan jury specifically chosen to pry apart these fuzzy distinctions, with half of them holding masters degrees of one sort or another. \u201cAlmost all,\u201d Business Insider noted, were either middle-aged or retirement-aged. <\/p>\n

Welp, in the course of a three week trial, that ambiguity was apparently not resolved to the unanimous satisfaction of the jury, and things sound like they got intense for this unhappy group of 12 people. <\/p>\n

According to Bloomberg\u2019s account of the mistrial declaration<\/a>, while an anonymous juror later explained that the facts of the case were not in dispute, at some point on Friday, the jury pleaded with the judge for help coming to a resolution. Some had lost \u201cmultiple nights\u201d of sleep. Then later in the day, a note from the jury said that coming to a decision was placing them under an \u201cemotional burden\u201d and that half of the jurors had \u201cspontaneously broken down in tears\u201d while they were deliberating.<\/p>\n

So U.S. District Judge Jessica Clarke went ahead and declared a mistrial Friday.<\/p>\n

To be clear, a deadlocked jury doesn\u2019t necessarily free the Peraire-Bueno brothers, but it is unwelcome news for prosecutors, who will naturally want to retry the brothers in the hopes of getting a conviction. But they do so with the burden of having already fought to a stalemate, which can\u2019t be any better for morale than the fact that deliberating on the details of this highly technical case made a jury cry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In May of last year, two brothers in their 20s were arrested for what the Justice Department at…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":366464,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,4219,602,7567,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-366463","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-crime","10":"tag-cryptocurrencies","11":"tag-ethereum","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115518819719691646","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}