The Roman Storm Verdict | Peter Van Valkenburgh & David Morris
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Alright. Banklist Nation, we are live with Peter Van Valkenberg from Coin Center and David Morris from The Rage. Peter, you've been on the show before. David, you're brand new. David, you have been reporting doing some of the most in-depth reporting in the front lines in the courtroom, with the Roman storm case. We are I think this took four plus weeks for all of this to wrap up, and we just got the verdict, just a few hours ago.
About three and a half weeks.
Yeah. Three and a half weeks. Yeah. Just as a, naive nonlingual legal minded person, my summary of the verdict so far is mixed with definitely cause for concern. I think if we are, primarily concerned with Roman Storm, the individual, we are happy. He is flying home to Seattle tomorrow to spend time with his daughter, and but the story is not over. As, as an industry, a crypto industry, there are things to be concerned about and the fight continues. That's kind of my summation of everything. Maybe you can give me your immediate thoughts and reflections since you were just there and you watched
Yeah. I I think that, the verdict reflects sort of a really thorough chaos at every level of this proceeding from start to finish. There were really constant fights and constant uncertainty about which witnesses would be admitted, what they would be allowed to talk about within some very fine grained lines. Just to pick one example off the top of my head, there was considerable discussion and debate over whether evidence could be allowed that crypto holders were threatened with kidnap or physical danger because of the public nature of blockchain addresses. And in fact, one, witness for the def
So maybe just to provide maybe a map for listeners to really understand and navigate this question, there are three counts that we need to pay attention to, and each one of these things is a conversation in and of itself. And on each one of these things is there's just confusion generally. So maybe I'll I'll turn to Peter. Peter, can you talk about the three counts that Roman was up against and what happened on the outcome of each individual one? We'll just keep it high level at first and we'll kind of dive into them, as we go on.
So simply stated, all three counts are conspiracy charges. I want to say that off the bat, which means you don't have to prove that they did the target offense. You have to prove that they agreed with others. So it'd be Roman, it might be Alexei Pertsov, the developer that's charged in The Netherlands, it might be other co conspirators unnamed as well. You need to prove that Roman agreed with these other co conspirators to do the offence and took one tangible step towards that offence. And then what are the three offences? The first one is money laundering. So that's knowingly and with intent
So just just to recap those three counts. Right? So the first count was Hungary, not unanimous. The third count was I I thought it was
not guilty, but was the same. It was to the yeah. It was misreported. The what I'm sharing on the screen was misreported.
So Okay.
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