Plaintiff in Kleiman-Wright Case Apparently Have No Money to Pay Expert Witness
With a Miami jury unable to come up with a decision in the infamous Ira Kleiman vs. Dr. Craig Wright trial, things just got a little more bizarre.
Jurors are expected to determine the legal owner of nearly $69 billion in Bitcoin as well as the legal identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, author of the Bitcoin white paper. Ira Kleiman's is the brother of a man Wright claims worked with him on the creation of Bitcoin. Dave Kleiman passed away in 2014.
Now we are learning that the plaintiffs in this case apparently do not have enough funds to pay Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan to testify on their behalf. He was among a slew of fact and expert witnesses brought in for depositions last year.
Looks like Ira Kleiman & his lawyers are broke because they can't pay the agreed amount to Andrew O'Hagan for his testimony!!! Lol pic.twitter.com/xAtb8Uj9nY
— $SirToshi - Defender of Bitcoin u/1208 (@SirToshiTV) December 1, 2021
O’Hagan is a popular and award-winning Scottish author known for his non-fiction novels. In June 2016, he published “The Satoshi Affair'', which chronicled first-hand interviews and situations he had with Wright.
“I was the main part of it. Other people helped. At the end of the day, none of this would have happened without Dave Kleiman, without Hal Finney, and without those who took over–like Gavin and Mike,” Wright was quoted as saying in “The Satoshi Affair” when he was being interviewed by BBC. Only the first two sentences were aired by the BBC.
Wright never denied that he had help from Dave Kleiman with the creation of Bitcoin, but the concept was his own. O’Hagan testified that everything written in “The Satoshi Affair” is accurate by journalistic standards.
On Wednesday, Judge Beth Bloom issued an Allen charge in the hopes it might secure a verdict. This is only a temporary remedy however. An Allen charge is additional instructions given by the judge to a deadlocked jury to encourage the minority to reach an agreement.