NEW YORK – A MANHATTAN jury will soon begin its deliberations in the Roman Storm trial, deciding whether the cash tornado developer is guilty of helping computer pirates and other cybercriminals to wash more than $ 1 billion in dirty money.
Early in the day, the jurors heard the final arguments of the prosecutor and the Storm defense team, who spent hours talking to the jury trying to mark and contextualize the evidence obtained through the testimony of the witnesses during the last three weeks of judgment. The sum of each side followed the form of its general cases.
Prosecutors tried to paint Storm and his co -founders as participants arranged in a criminal conspiracy to wash money for bad actors (even for North Korea computer pirates). They knew that the criminals were using their platform, prosecutors said, because they received dozens and dozens of emails from victims who asked for help. They did not respond to those emails, or sent them an answer of actions telling the victims that they could not recover their money because the tornado cash groups were immutable, an answer that prosecutors described as a “script full of lies.” Although the pools were immutable (a fact that the expert witnesses on both sides agreed), Storm and their co -workers had total control of the cash user interface and regularly made changes. Therefore, prosecutors argued that they could have done, if they wanted, to have made changes that would have dissuaded the computer pirates to use it, such as implementing a user registry that kept records of the Tornado Trando Data Cash. Because they did not, prosecutors said, Storm and their colleagues knew that they were building a tool for computer pirates, calling for the privacy requests of Tornado Cash a mere “cover story” for the true purpose: earn a lot of money with criminals.
When it was the turn of the defense for the closure of the arguments, Storm’s lawyers retreated against the government’s narrative, pointing out numerous cases in which the Prosecutor’s Office had selected data, text messages and other important evidence for Storm and their co -founders to seem badly. For example, prosecutors said in their final arguments that Storm knew that Tornado Cash was doing something wrong, because he lied to his bank about what he was doing in a routine commercial account survey. But Storm’s lawyers told the jury that prosecutors had left a complete section of responses on Storm’s response to the bank, where he told them that he was working on a decentralized finance project (Defi), that his company had cryptography investments, and that he received money from Gitcoin, a crypto financing platform. Storm, said his lawyers, did not believe he was doing anything illegal in the construction of tornado cash: he developed outpatient, left a 2019 Ethboston Hackboston project that attracted the interest of legitimate investors.
“This [wasn’t] It happens in some alley somewhere, ”said David Patton, a partner of Hecker Fink and Storm lawyer.
Tornado Cash, said Storm’s lawyers, was developed to meet a real and important need for privacy in the Ethereum community. To have implemented a user registry that tracked the transactions and personal information of the user, a “solution” floated by the expert testimony of the Prosecutor’s Office, Philip Werlau, which, according to him, could have prevented the computer pirates from using the platform, may have dissuaded the computer pirates, but would also have completely defeated the purposes of privacy of the privacy of the privacy of the privacy of the privacy. First place.
“It’s easy for the Prosecutor’s Office … for the field marshal on Monday morning,” Patton said. “” You should have done something different, we believe you should have done it more like Google or Spotify … The software was not illegal. It was not obliged to close it or change the front. “
Patton rejected the idea of the Prosecutor’s Office that the storm was, therefore, complicit in criminal activity because it did not voluntarily made changes to make its product less attractive to criminals.
“That’s a jump,” he said.
Storm has been accused of a conspiracy charge to commit money laundering, conspiracy to operate money without a license that transmits businesses and conspiracy to violate international sanctions, so, if he is declared guilty of all aspects, he faces a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison.
At the time of the publication, the judge who supervises the case, the American district judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) is accusing the jury before freeing the group to start deliberating.
