Roman Storm’s money laundering trial has been delayed. Despite the objections of the prosecution, a US district court judge from the Southern District of New York proceeded to delay the trial.
Judge Katherine Polk Failla issued a ruling last week in which she granted the request of the defense to delay the trial of the Tornado Cash co-founder by three months.
The Request
The defense had requested that the trial be pushed back, citing ‘novel and complex’ factual and legal issues. It also said that millions of pages of documents had been uncovered in the discovery process.
Moreover, the defense said that many of these documents were in Russian and had to be translated. A filing was also submitted by the prosecution to object to the request from the defense to delay the trial.
According to the prosecution, a quick trial is in the best interest of the public. They also said that the defense had significantly inflated the volume of documents that were produced in discovery.
Storm had been arrested last year. The charges against him include evading sanctions, facilitating money laundering, and operating an unlicensed money transmitter business.
This is all due to the role he played in setting up and co-founding Tornado Cash, a coin mixing service.
The Legal Questions
According to a report, the court hearing that happened last week saw the prosecution and defense present their arguments.
These were related to some important legal questions that are under discussion.
These include whether the founders of an autonomous and decentralized service that runs on smart contracts have any control over it.
Keri Axel, Storm’s defense lawyer, had reportedly asserted that his client had not co-founded Tornado Cash with criminal intent.
He added that Storm did not have any control over the user funds. He had not entered into any agreement with the criminals who used the service to launder money.
The Ruling
Reports said that this is the question that Judge Failla had also asked of the prosecutors. She had asked what action Tornado Cash co-founders should have taken after discovering criminals were using their service.
The judge said that if the service has a thousand customers and one is a malicious actor, does that make the service criminally liable?
Back in May, a Dutch court had found Alexey Pertsev, another Tornado Cash developer, guilty of money laundering. He was sentenced to prison for a period of 64 months.
A Dutch court has denied his bail and he has already appealed his conviction. Coin mixers like Tornado Cash allow users to hide the origin and destination of transactions.
According to supporters, the service has legitimate uses, but critics believe that they are only beneficial to cyber criminals.
Tornado Cash had been sanctioned back in 2022 by the US Treasury Department. It claimed criminals had used the service to launder more than $7 billion in digital currency.
This included the Lazarus Group, a group of North Korean hackers. Several coin mixer operators, including Storm and Pertsev, have been arrested.
A number of privacy-preserving services have either exited the US or have shut down.