Judge Denies Motion For Sanctions Against Craig Wright, Accepts Autism Defense

Kleiman’s legal team motion for sanctions against the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto Craig Wright has been ruled against, documents filed on 24 June show.

According to the document, U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom ruled against an omnibus motion the Kleiman legal team filed on 21 May, requesting that sanctions be made against Craig Wright, and claiming that he “committed perjury, produced forgeries, and engaged in judicial abuse”. Though the accusations were against Wright’s credibility and behaviour, the judge ruled in favor of Wright to dismiss the motion, saying the matter was best left “for a jury to make as fact finder at trial”.

Wright also responded to the Kleiman omnibus motion with a motion of his own, requesting a licensed “clinical psychologist” appear in court as an expert witness. According to Wright, a clinical professional who has studied Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) for “more than 35 years” can testify that he has been diagnosed with “Autism Spectrum Disorder with high intellectual skills”. He claims that this diagnosis needs to be taken into account when assessing his inconsistent statements to the court.

The Wednesday documents show that Judge Bloom has cleared Wright to proceed with his autism defense, saying that the psychologist could provide testimony that could explain how his condition “could be incorrectly perceived as having provided untruthful testimony”.

She said:

“For instance, as Plaintiffs note, Defendant’s testimony has been glaringly inconsistent at numerous junctures. Defendant, however, stresses that he has been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, and thus his testimony needs to be evaluated in that light.”

As such, the court case against Craig Wright is clear to proceed to jury trial in two months. The whole Wright fiasco started in February 2018, when the brother of the deceased David Kleiman claimed that Wright stole a considerable amount of BTC and “valuable intellectual property rights of various blockchain technologies” after his brother’s death in 2013. Throughout the lawsuit, Wright has continued to claim that the 1.1 million Bitcoin (BTC) in question are locked up in an encrypted trust, to which he does not have access.