What the Roman Storm Filing Teaches Us About Winning for Samourai

A new defense filing just dropped in the Roman Storm case, and it matters far beyond one developer in the Southern District of New York. The filing argues against the prosecutors’ plan for a retroactive Speedy Trial Act exclusion, asks the court to deny that request outright, and asks for two counts to be dismissed with prejudice — meaning the government would not get to bring them again.

“In sum, the balance of the factors heavily weighs in favor of dismissal with prejudice.”

Storm was convicted on the comparable transmitting count — the unlicensed money-transmitting charge — while the jury deadlocked on the more serious charges. That guilty verdict still stands. What is now being fought over is whether the government gets a second bite at the counts it could not win the first time.

You can read the filing yourself: gov.uscourts.nysd.604938.302.0.pdf (CourtListener). We link primary documents on purpose. Read the source, not the summary — ours included.

Infographic 1 — The Storm scoreboard

Why a “retroactive exclusion” is the whole ballgame

The Speedy Trial Act exists because a prosecution is itself a punishment. Clocks run. Time is excludable only for specific reasons, and the exclusion is supposed to be decided in the open, on the record, at the time — not reconstructed later once the calendar has become inconvenient.

When the government asks a court to bless excluded time after the fact, it is asking for the clock to be rewound. The defense position is that the record does not support it, that the delay is the government’s to own, and that the remedy for a violated clock is not a do-over but dismissal — and, weighing the statutory factors, dismissal with prejudice.

Infographic 2 — How the dismissal factors stack up

The Samourai parallel — and where it diverges

It would be a mistake to read Storm as a proxy verdict for Samourai. The cases share a legal theory and a political climate, but they are not the same case, the same record, or the same facts. Two things are true at once: the government has shown it can persuade a jury on a transmitting count, and it has also shown it can fail to persuade a jury on the charges it cares most about.

Why Samourai still has the better hope

A deadlocked jury on the most serious charges is not a technicality. It is evidence that ordinary people, shown the actual mechanics of non-custodial software, did not agree that writing and publishing that software is the crime the government says it is. That is the terrain Samourai fights on too — and it is more favourable terrain than the headlines suggest.

Samourai’s defenders have three advantages Storm’s team did not have on day one: a public record of how these prosecutions actually play out, a growing body of technical explanation the courts have already been forced to engage with, and time to organise attention before it is needed rather than after. We should use all three.

Infographic 3 — What “doing better” looks like

What to watch next

• Whether the court grants or denies the government’s retroactive exclusion request.
• If dismissal is granted, whether it is with or without prejudice — that single word decides whether the two counts can return.
• How the surviving transmitting conviction is treated at sentencing, and what that implies for comparable charges elsewhere.
• Any reasoning the court gives about non-custodial software, which will be quoted in every case that follows.

How to help

Read the filing. Share the primary source, not a screenshot of a screenshot. Correct the record when you see “mixer” used as a synonym for “money transmitter”. And join the discussion — the Telegram group in our footer is where updates and analysis get sorted out in the open.

The verdict on the comparable count is real, and we should not pretend otherwise. But a deadlock on the serious charges is a crack of daylight. Samourai’s best chance is that we fight well, argue precisely, and refuse to let the attention fade.