Kleiman v Wright Day 8 recap: Does one of Satoshi Nakamoto trial jurors have COVID?

Court ended early on Day 8 of the Kleiman vs Wright (Satoshi Case) trial because one member of the jury was feeling ill and reported that she had a fever. Judge Beth Bloom presented the plaintiff and defendant legal counsel with two options:

• Dismiss the juror and let the trial continue
• End court early for the day and resume where we left off on Monday

The defendant’s counsel Andres Rivero proposed that the court should let the juror go, citing that we don’t know if she has COVID or not and that if she is ill, then it could have a domino effect on the trial and the date that the court returns to session.

Ultimately, Judge Beth Bloom decided that the Satoshi Nakamoto trial should be adjourned for the day, and dismissed the court roughly three hours before its scheduled end time of 5 p.m. EST.

So what happened in court?

Unfortunately, not much.

Each day court begins at approximately 10 a.m., and then takes a 20-minute “comfort break” around 11:30 a.m., and then by 1 p.m., the court takes a one-hour recess for lunch. That being said, we only saw two hours and 40 minutes of action today as opposed to the typical five hours and 20 minutes that we see when court runs its full duration.

But in the time that court was in session, plaintiff’s lawyer Vel Freedman continued his examination of Dr. Wright. Freedman continued to produce documents, both old and new, to try to prove that Dr. Wright has made some contradictory statements during his testimony given the previous evidence that Dr. Wright provided.

But Dr. Wright continues to argue that he does not recognize the documents being presented, that the email address on some of the documents is not his email address, that Freedman continues to inaccurately express the documents to the court, and that the documents Freedman is showing the court are not authentic. 

For the most part, Dr. Wright has done a good job holding the plaintiffs off, making sure their arguments never penetrated more than the surface. But there were two instances today where it looked like Freedman had Dr. Wright against the ropes.

After Dr. Wright continuously expressed that the evidence being shown from the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) was not authentic, Freedman reintroduced the evidence from Andrew Sommers, the lawyer for Dr. Wright’s company DeMorgan, that stated Sommer’s law firm had to terminate their relationship with their client DeMorgan because they believed Dr. Wright had fabricated documents that were sent to the law office as well as to the ATO.

Freedman also introduced a piece of evidence supporting the claim from Sommers that said:

“ATO records show that these emails were either never sent, or that the content of the emails has been altered from what was originally sent or received to support the contentions of the taxpayer (Dr. Wright) and related entities.” 

Dr. Wright fought back by saying the court will soon learn that the ATO was hacked and that none of the documents related to the ATO will be considered valid for this reason. 

The next instance where Freedman almost had Dr. Wright down for the count was when Freedman tried to show Dr. Wright that he is contradicting himself in regards to a statement he made about Dave Kleiman not being able to code.

“No, Dave did not create software, he edited software…Dave has never written a line of C code in his life,” Dr. Wright said.

To which Freedman produced a piece of evidence—a conversation from Dr. Wright in the MetaNet ICU slack channel in which one individual asked Dr. Wright:

“Dave had very great coding skills right?”

To which Dr. Wright responded, “He (Dave) was ok, Hal was good.”

Afterward, Freedman produced evidence, a message from Dr. Wright that stated:

“Dave took my 2 million lines of code that I had in 2010 and transformed these into a documented set of over 6 million lines of code.”

Then Freedman produced a document that showed that Dr. Wright’s companies were the owner of 6,088,555 lines of code, implying that Dave may have played a role in writing 6 million lines of that code. Dr. Wright responded by saying he always liked to build Dave up in public communications and that other developers (not Dave) added the massive amounts of new lines of code. Dr. Wright says that since Dave was his good friend, he wanted to make Dave look good in the public eye as well as out of respect for Dave’s family.

Where is this all going?

This remains unclear, the court was expecting the plaintiffs to finish their examination of Dr. Wright before lunch—but it didn’t happen. As we approached the lunch recess Freedman brought out a whiteboard and wrote several dates on it which appeared to be dates he was putting on a timeline to make his final argument.

Freedman began to argue that the W&K restructuring, the ATO investigation, and Dr. Wright reaching out to Kleiman’s family all occurred in succession of each other, with Dr. Wright reaching out to Dave’s father, Louis Kleiman, only five days after the ATO investigation incident. Freedman says Dr. Wright only reached out to the Kleimans because he knew that Dave’s family could get him out of trouble with the ATO.

However, Freedman seemed to back away from this argument just when it looked like he was looking to wrap up his examination of Dr. Wright by driving that point home—and then, the court broke for lunch and never went back into session because a juror felt feverish.

In conclusion

Today Dr. Wright continued to do a great job holding the plaintiffs off, although there were instances when it appeared the plaintiff’s lawyers had Dr. Wright against the ropes, Dr. Wright continued to skillfully escape. 

The real story today was the juror that got sick causing the court to dismiss early. If this juror does have COVID, it could throw the entire court schedule out of whack, delaying the Kleiman v Wright Satoshi case. We will find out what happens on Monday when the court is back in session.

CoinGeek will feature Kurt Wuckert Jr. in daily recap coverage which will be livestreamed on a daily basis at 6:30 p.m. EST on our YouTube Channel.

Watch our Day 8 Special Report from the Kleiman v Wright trial here:

Check out all of the CoinGeek special reports on the Kleiman v Wright YouTube playlist.

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