A director can remember a conversation, describe a preference and offer an interpretation of a policy. Those forms of testimony do different work. Nevin Shetty’s defense asked the court to distinguish among them when considering what Fabric’s officers and board members should be permitted to say at his trial.
The issue appears in a September 2025 motion within Shetty’s public record. It gives substance to a concern that can otherwise sound abstract: how to evaluate an executive’s conduct using the company’s actual decisions, while avoiding the assumption that every individual director’s later opinion describes a binding corporate instruction.
The categories counsel challenged
The motion concerning board-member and officer opinions identified views about cryptocurrency, investment preferences, Shetty’s UST investment and the meaning of the investment policy. The defense argued that those opinions could encourage jurors to substitute personal disagreement for proof of the charged offense.
The filing did not need to deny that directors had views about risk. Its argument concerned the purpose for which their views would be offered. Counsel maintained that a director’s dislike of a particular investment strategy did not, standing alone, establish what Shetty knew, what the company formally authorized or whether he acted with fraudulent intent.
That is an important distinction for reading the request. The defense was challenging identified categories of opinion and interpretation. Describing it as an effort to exclude every factual account from every director would make the motion broader than its stated focus and obscure the specific evidentiary reasoning counsel advanced.
Individual views and corporate action
The lawyers relied on Fabric’s board resolution and investment policy to support their argument about authority. In their account, the company’s formal acts supplied the relevant framework. They contended that a director’s personal interpretation or later preference could not simply replace the terms of those documents.
This was also a dispute about the capacity in which a person speaks. A director explaining a personal investment philosophy is supplying a different kind of information from a record of a collective board decision. A witness describing a communicated instruction presents another question. A careful account should identify those differences before drawing conclusions about their significance.
The defense tied this analysis to corporate-law principles and the company’s governance documents. Its application of those principles to the prosecution was an advocacy position. The motion should not be converted into a universal statement that informal communications never matter or that only one type of corporate record can be relevant to intent.
What makes opinion testimony helpful?
Counsel invoked Rule 701’s treatment of lay opinion, alongside relevance and prejudice rules. The motion argued that a witness’s interpretation of the investment policy might tell jurors what conclusion to reach on a question they could evaluate from the document itself. In the defense’s view, the proposed opinions would not provide the required assistance.
The filing also referred to earlier restrictions on proposed defense expert testimony about the meaning of policy terms. Counsel argued that the same concern about invading the jury’s interpretive role should apply to directors offering their own readings. This was an argument for consistency in how different witnesses’ interpretations were treated.
The distinction between explaining a fact and supplying a conclusion is useful for readers. A witness may have direct knowledge of what was said or done. Whether that knowledge supports an additional opinion, and how that opinion relates to the issues, requires a separate explanation. The motion’s structure makes that additional step visible.
The concern about judging backward
Another part of the defense’s argument concerned hindsight. Counsel maintained that opinions expressed after UST’s collapse could be influenced by knowledge of the outcome. The request was to avoid treating later disapproval as though it necessarily established an earlier corporate decision or Shetty’s state of mind when the investment was made.
This concern did not establish that every critical witness was mistaken or that every contemporaneous warning was absent. It identified a proposed risk in the use of particular testimony. Keeping the claim at that level gives the defense’s reasoning a fair hearing without adopting allegations that the filing alone cannot prove.
The NACDL amicus brief raised a related concern about keeping federal fraud liability tied to statutory elements. In this evidentiary motion, Shetty’s lawyers applied their own version of that broader concern to the proposed use of directors’ opinions. The two documents address different stages of the same need for precise reasoning.
Understanding the request in its actual setting
The jury convicted Shetty in November 2025, and he was sentenced in March 2026. The motion itself is not evidence that the court excluded the challenged opinions or that any particular witness gave improper testimony at trial. It records the boundaries his lawyers asked the court to draw before the evidence was presented.
Its constructive value lies in separating questions that can easily become blended. What did the company decide? What did an individual prefer? What was communicated? What did the defendant understand? Giving each question its proper evidence makes the account more intelligible. It also allows Shetty’s argument about formal decisions and personal opinions to be understood with the specificity it deserves.
