Very interesting, especially since SDNY had no idea about this and wasn't involved in coordinating this agreement
The longer Ross is in there, the more friends in high places he will have, as so many people become familiar with online marketplaces, bitcoin lore, education about the technology, the corruption of the investigators, trial judge, unsatisfactory testimony by “expert witness”, circular logic to undermine bill of rights protections for defendant, withheld evidence (that is not deemed exculpatory by the appeals court, but could have swayed a jury regardless) and seeing that this problem with Ross is still ongoing
So many cases have been dropped for waaaaay fewer procedural problems
To see this level of unorthordox coordination ongoing with the Federal Government and Ross, I am pretty confident other individuals will be able to use their employment and status in the public sector to alter Ross’ conditions in his favor
I thought it was weird nobody considered donating to a Trump campaign or PAC in exchange for a desired outcome, in 2020 convicts and senators did that to mitigate consequences
Free Ross raises enough money and have enough friends to get the conversations going, as seen by this article, so not doing that path seemed to have lacked inspiration
Its easy to have tunnel vision, that path was still obvious. It is important that he also doesn't have to pay restitution, but I feel like the state sanctioned Presidential pay for play available in the US would have absolved that too
>> I thought it was weird nobody considered donating to a Trump campaign or PAC in exchange for a desired outcome, in 2020 convicts and senators did that to mitigate consequences
This pardon could not have been without some back-story:
Sure you could impute some nefarious/corrupt intent (almost every pardon seems to have some "lobbyist" or personal attached, regardless of the President or even state governors), but the justification quoted in that article seems reasonable enough on its own:
> “Mr. Levandowski pled guilty to a single criminal count arising from civil litigation. Notably, his sentencing judge called him a ‘brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs.’ Mr. Levandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good.”
From what I know of Trump he is very anti-drug and is a classic moralist (imposing his anti-drug morals by force on others) (despite himself engaging in behavior such as adultery that many people consider immoral). After all he did put that Mississippi guy who thinks the War on Drugs needs to be magnified significantly in as his attorney general. And he (allegedly) is good friends with Eric Ericson who (as a result of his son dying from overdose) has a personal jihad against opioids and wants to throw doctors in jail for prescribing them in good faith, and doesn't care one wit that innocent law abiding people in pain are suffering from his advocacy. I would think Trump is the last person on earth who would be sympathetic to Ulbricht.
What you expect good people like the Sackler family to compete with some upstart on the internet? The medical industrial complex doesn't make a dime when you buy your opioids out of band, we can't have that. Those medical degrees aren't going to pay for themselves.
If you take "just" to mean "justifiable", sure. That meaning doesn't really make sense in the context of this discussion though, so yes I am invoking one of the definitions related to fairness.
Given the same crime, should justice and sentencing be arbitrary or equivalent?
Contextualized to the Nixonian origins of the "war" on "drugs," the US socioeconomic sentencing disparities are the common element linking all drug convictions, from the streets of Baltimore/Camden/Detroit to any one of the Sacklers palatial manors.
Sorry, two wrongs don't make a right, and this guy facilitated selling drugs in large quantities.
Your fatalism only shuts down the discourse of workable solutions. You may as well be a shill for "the man" as you're working for the status quo agenda holding this attitude.
Your moral cry for the small time user is in alignment with me though. I'd decriminalize low amount possession and drug use since locking up drug users almost certainly pushes people who are vulnerable to collapse into definitely collapsed positions.
A civilized people would want the road to success to be the incentivized over pushing people down who are then unable to escape (statistically).
> Sorry, two wrongs don't make a right, and this guy facilitated selling drugs in large quantities.
Selling drugs in large quantities isn't inherently unethical or immoral.
Trying to hire a hit man to have someone else murdered in an incredibly specific and graphic way, on the other hand, is inherently both unethical and immoral.
> Trying to hire a hit man to have someone else murdered in an incredibly specific and graphic way, on the other hand, is inherently both unethical and immoral.
But is it worth a life sentence if the murders never happened? I think there's a reasonable case for "no."
Killing someone and not getting caught is actually not equivalent to not killing anyone. What a bizarre line of argument that people make about this guy.
Are you aware of how rule of law works? There was no conclusive proof that anyone were murdered in this whole case. The justice system does not work on baseless accusations and it's a good thing your bias isn't going to affect it.
The justice system does not consider the murder-for-hire attempts "baseless accusations". From the sentencing document:
> The Court must determine whether these allegations have been demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence and I find that there is ample and unambiguous evidence that Ulbricht commissioned five murders as part of his efforts to protect his criminal enterprise and that he paid for these murders. [...] The Court finds that the evidence is clear and unambiguous and it far exceeds the necessary preponderance findings
This is a criminal trial, not a civil one. Preponderance is not sufficient. No witnesses could say that Ross = DPR in these messages, and the recipient of these messages is... an unreliable narrator at best.
Those charges were dropped[0]. Maybe because there was nothing to them and they were just used to poison the well. Maybe the FBI agents who had access to the DPR account who stole bitcoin planted it in the first place[1].
> his murder-for-hire behavior wasn't part of the trial but only considered in the sentencing.
Not only that (shouldn't consider outside claims that haven't been evaluated by the jury). The DEA withheld evidence that he could have used in his defense and later DEA agents went to jail for corruption (attempting to steal funds and it appeared setting him up).
Further, there wasn't a warrant for his records; they just took them and monitored his traffic. SCOTUS refused to hear the case (doesn't mean it was reasonable or not, they have discretion to skip stuff).
Many people (myself included) believe the government officials in this case were attempting to steal the funds and set him up to take a fall so they can take the funds for themselves.
It's what tends to happen you express ideas that judges find dangerous:
> All the evidence shows that you viewed Silk Road both as above the law and the laws didn't apply, and in this context also very dangerous.
> Your own words I have looked at very carefully and I have reread certainly more than once in this whole process. They reveal a kind of an arrogance and they display an intent that is very important to the Court's determination, [...]
Those charges were all dropped. There was likely intent on his side but no murder were conclusively proven to have taken place. I do believe he will be paroled/commuted eventually under another president, perhaps in another decade or so.
The charges were dropped due to the seriousness of the charges that remained (and the corrupt Fed that would complicate the matter) but the judge found sufficient evidence of intent to order the hits (e.g. messages specifically ordering the hits, sending payment for the hits in the amount of $650k in bitcoin from wallets found on his laptop, writing in his journal "I ordered some people killed" and "they were killed") that those attempted hits were used as a sentencing enhancement for the other charges he was found guilty of - namely the criminal conspiracy and maintaining a criminal enterprise.
And "without parole" is a meaningless thing in Federal prison since there is no parole. If you commit Federal crimes, you get to do Federal sentences.
So the evidence proved their case for the main charges - as demonstrated by the jury’s guilty verdict. The government then provides a sentencing recommendation and Ross’s lawyers can dispute anything the government claims. The bar for the sentencing enhancements is “a preponderance of evidence” which is something akin to 51% vs guilty / not-guilty which requires the jury to be convinced “beyond a reasonable doubt” or closer to 100%.
The judge weighed the evidence, weighed Ulbricht’s lawyers’ responses and found a preponderance of evidence that he did indeed order the hits which enhanced (extended) the sentence he was given.
It’s been awhile since I looked at the transcripts but at the time I couldn’t believe how bad his lawyers were. They offered almost no reply to damning accusation after damning accusation.
To me this seems like a fairly clear-cut constitutional violation.
You are being deprived of life/liberty at sentencing, if the judge can use information/"accusations" that the government failed to prove then you are being punished without conviction.
Just say that you agree with them. You don't have to angrily pretend like you are disagreeing. You agree completely, 100% that those charges got dropped.
Right, the original “goal” was to insist the charges were dropped so nobody should denigrate Ross using the fact that they were brought in the first place. Just pointing out that a Federal judge found a preponderance of evidence that he ordered the hits as based on his journal, the chat logs, and the Bitcoin transfers.
Those charges were not dropped. They were predicates of his conspiracy charge. The murders-for-hire were charged conduct, brought into the trial and rebuttable by the defense, and considered during sentencing.
Of the six murder indictments trumpeted by the U.S. government in the days following Ulbricht’s Oct. 2013 arrest, five have fallen off the table and the sixth sits untouched in a separate indictment (legalese for an unproven allegation) that was purposefully left out of the upcoming trial. https://www.dailydot.com/crime/silk-road-murder-charges-ross...
The conspiracy charges were related to computer hacking and trafficking narcotics, not murder-for-hire which from all the evidences presented was a scheme set up to collect payments from him.
It's right there in the (final, superseding) indictment, and in the PSR (I think? one of the sentencing filings). This isn't a big controversy for us to hash out; you can just go read it.
I'm literally staring at the superseding indictment right now. Page 7. Go look. He was charged, and those charges were not dropped. I don't know what title you're referring to.
That's a narcotics conspiracy charge, due to "intent to prevent the communication by the Employee to a law enforcement officer ofthe United States of information relating to the commission and possible commission of a Federal offense".
Dude didn't end up in jail for murder, because the murder charges were dropped. D.R.O.P.P.E.D. Words have meanings and you are twisting them.
See upthread, where I took the time to pull up a bunch of other drug kingpin indictments to find similar charging structures, and trivially found one (I'm staring at it, too). I'm sorry they didn't charge the murder-for-hire scheme the way you'd have preferred them to, but they certainly did charge it, and the Reason article you're citing is plainly, obviously, factually, irrefutably wrong. The article says "Those charges were no part of what Ulbricht was actually tried and sentenced for." Obviously, they were.
You are going to have a hard time getting me to take an opinion piece that commits a factual error that refutes its premise more seriously than the actual source documents that contradict it.
Yes they did charge them, and then dropped them. That's what happened. Charges and convictions are not the same concept, and it's quite amusing you have the galls to say anyone else is "wrong".
Yeah, you're wrong. I think what's happening here is what Kasey said: you're working exclusively from stuff like this Reason article, which is plainly wrong, and I'm working from the PACER docket of the case, which, uh, isn't. He was convicted of the charge that included the murder-for-hire scheme as its predicate.
I don't know if there was some other more overt "murder" charge that he had that was later dropped (I only see the original and the superseding indictment). But if that happened, the only material implication of it is that they changed the structure of how they charged the murder-for-hire scheme. They did not give up on that charge; in a significant sense, they bet (and won) their case on it --- as the sentencing memoranda point out as well.
This thread is an interesting example of how powerful the Internet folklore about Ulbricht is. Like, it stands up against the primary source documents of a conviction and sentencing! The sentencing documents must be what's wrong, not the Reason article! It's pretty fascinating, just sociologically.
>This thread is an interesting example of how powerful the Internet folklore about Ulbricht is.
I imagine this is just self defense mechanism at work - if you concede to the reality that a libertarian drug utopia took around 3 years to devolve into cliche South American narco violence, you'll end up with that oh-so-uncomfortable step of having to revisit your worldviews.
Wasn't it the FBI/DEA that offered the narco-violence? Kind of throws a wrench into your libertarian utopia claims, when the murder-for-hire is a result of state intervention.
I'm referring to both the offering of murder for-hire by federal undercover/informants, as well as the government creating the concocted problem of the release of names for which they offer a violent solution. I don't think even in the indictment is there any murder-for-hire not offered by federal agents or informants.
That's the irony of it all - when faced with a real world issue of extortion and theft, given the opportunity the libertarian drug utopia solution matches the one of a Central American cartel.
All those libertarian manifestos that Ulbricht dabbled in are just a marketing veneer of the stereotypical criminal organization.
The OP is referring to the reason article they linked to. They are not noting that said article is an opinion piece that is in a long running series advocating on behalf of Ulbricht via libertarian ideals not via the actual law.
Nowhere in that opinion piece does it backup its titles assertion nor link to any of the legal documents. Basically op is arguing based on storytelling not law.
Those charges had some issues. He tried to arrange a hit on someone who he thought had stolen $800k in Bitcoin from him, but it turns out one of the FBI agents stole the money and framed someone else. There's also some accusations that the agents pushed him to order the hit.
The two taken together could be construed as entrapment, but the charges were dropped so there isn't a conclusive answer.
Yeah, but Ulbricht had multiple fake passports, and was assumed to have an unknown but enormous amount of hidden cash, and loyal contacts in lots of countries. Not to mention lots of experience living and traveling under a cover identity. He's a much bigger flight risk than a run-of-the-mill murderer.
Funny how these “tainted” coins are no longer tainted as soon as the US gov gets their hands on them. Anyone else holding the same coins would have their assets seized and get taken in for questioning.
That's not funny or interesting. Sequential bills reported from a bank robbery are interesting when their source is unknown. If the bank gets the money back from police they go back to being exactly the same as they were before the robbery.
It's mentioned in the article. Any money he would earn in prison would go towards paying off his debt, so this allows him to earn whilst in there and make his life marginally more comfortable.
RTA: "But the repayment of his restitution could mean that he's able to earn money in prison to share with family or friends without it being seized or garnished to pay his debts—or even keep any previously unknown caches of bitcoins that he may possess, so long as they aren't tied to the Silk Road or other criminal sources."
It basically means the money he gets while he is in prison he keeps. So if he works, he'll keep his salary. If someone puts money on his books, he gets to keep that. If he didn't keep up with his payments to his debt he would be on a more restricted regime. While it seems like a small thing for us, it's a pretty big deal for his quality of life since he was never going to pay that back so for the rest of his life he would have had less prison money than he earned.
Nobody is spelling the key point out: in prison, you are typically required to pay for basic essentials (everything from soap and shampoo to menstrual products[0]). Phone calls are run through a private company that has a monopoly and charges exorbitant rates. Entertainment (books, etc.) are heavily restricted and cost money - either directly or via secondhand trade.
Prisoners work jobs that are exempt from minimum wage and can pay as little as 25¢/hour.
Having your wages garnished while in prison is a huge deal because it limits your ability to take care of yourself (both literally, but also your ability to trade items with others for protection).
If you don't have access to money in prison, you're screwed. Unless you have some other valuable asset (such as connections on the outside that you can leverage), you are likely to be a target for other inmates, and you're going to be a filthy, starving wreck.
The exact details vary depending on the type of prison, the location, and other factors, but in general: having the debt wiped out would almost certainly be a huge deal for his quality of life in prison, and would literally extend his expected lifespan.
You aren't required to pay for basic supplies, prison commissaries periodically give out hardship packages which include things like sample packages of soap and toothpaste, since withholding basic hygiene products is cruel and unusual punishment.
Garnishing prison wages is fucking brutal and stupid though. Prison laborers typically make less than a quarter per hour, so that isn't going to do shit in terms of repaying any debts, it's just a spite play to make someone's life miserable.
Honestly, if I was Ross I'd refuse to leave my cell and act insane till I got placed in solitary. In most prisons you can still have books in solitary, you just lose out on yard and TV access, which is still a great trade if you're getting regularly beaten and hate raped.
> You aren't required to pay for basic supplies, prison commissaries periodically give out hardship packages which include things like sample packages of soap and toothpaste, since withholding basic hygiene products is cruel and unusual punishment
You're describing the idealized scenario, which isn't exactly wrong, but it doesn't represent the reality that many prisoners actually live in. Yes, it varies - not every prisoner will have the same experience, even within the same prison - but having access to basic necessities is by no means a given in prison, and having wages garnished makes that much harder.
Chelsea Manning is free yet Ross Ulbrecht is in prison. It doesn’t seem right. He can be punished, but give him a chance at life. I don’t believe that he tried to have people killed, but even so, no one died.
Whispers from Inmates say Ross Ulbricht is having a horrible time in prison, unable to adjust to the culture and politics of it. Prison is a dangerous place, and it's said he's very much not doing well.
If this helps provide himself with some prison currency being able to buy from the store, that could go a long way towards helping him have something to trade to help the living hell he is going through.
If my memory serves the government never brought that as a charge at trial. In part, I think, because they wanted to not discuss that the agent Ross tried to buy the hit(s) from wound up stealing money from the Silk Road.
Per Wikipedia - "Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with any murder for hire". Wikipedia does say that there was evidence that was shown at trial about the murder for hire thing and that it did weigh against him in sentencing - which seems odd to me that crimes you haven't been charged with or convicted of could impact your sentence.
Wikipedia also says "Ulbricht was separately indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single murder-for-hire charge, alleging that he contracted to kill one of his employees (a former Silk Road moderator). Prosecutors moved to drop this indictment after his New York conviction and sentence became final"
That's right, he was charged with a "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy", with 4 overt acts, a, b, c, and d, and b and c were the murder-for-hire schemes. The overt acts of a conspiracy charge are the guts of the charge itself, and the prosecution has to prove them at trial.
Try this: Google [federal narcotics conspiracy "murder for hire"] (it's not a rare combination of factors!), pull up some DOJ press releases (I found several on the first search results page), and then look them up in PACER. I'm looking at Roger Key (a.k.a. "Luchie")'s 2015 indictment right now, and it's similar. This isn't some weird finagling the prosecutors did with Ulbricht; it's just how you get charged for this kind of conduct.
This notion that prosecutors somehow gave up on the murder-for-hire charge is Internet folklore. It's just not real. What complicated the charge isn't some bungling spy story about the agents involved, but the fact that the murder was a set-up and he didn't actually have anyone killed. But the prosecution established that Ulbricht tried to, and that's also the simplest and most reasonable conclusion to reach given the facts. I've never read an exculpatory explanation of Ulbricht's payment to arrange murders that made any sense at all.
I'm having a hard time squaring your comment with the wikipedia article that you seem to agree with. Ulbricht wasn't convicted on murder for hire charges and the time he was charged on a murder for hire thing that charge was dropped.
You seem to be saying that the reason he wasn't charged/convicted is because nobody was actually murdered. That seems hard for me to believe because the state would have known nobody was actually murdered when they were writing the indictment (which alleges the murder for hire plot) or when they were bringing the original charges.
It's also true that agents involved in the plot, the agent Ulbricht thought he was buying the hit from specifically, were arrested and convicted for stealing from the silk road. I think it's way more plausible that the government decided not to go in to the extent of the corruption of their officers at trial, because it would provide a good reason to think about what other government dishonesty their might be, rather than the government deciding that they can't charge attempted murder for hire because nobody died.
51% of Wikipedians can believe whatever they'd like to, but the primary source documents are right there for you to read. Nobody was actually murdered because the murder-for-hire scheme was an FBI sting.
But the primary source documents all agree that Ulbricht wasn't charged or convicted with murder-for-hire and that the agent Ulbricht contracted with was arrested and convicted for corruption-related crimes. It's also obviously not true that somebody has to be dead for the state to charge murder-for-hire related crimes. If that were the case, the state wouldn't have agents pretending to be hitmen to catch people trying to hire hitmen.
I really don't know how to state this any more plainly: he was charged, in the same manner as other drug kingpins have been charged, with a narcotics conspiracy whose overt acts --- in the indictment, as charged behavior, which the jury had to find true beyond a reasonable doubt --- were comprised of two different murder-for-hire schemes. He was convicted of that charge. He appealed, and his appeal didn't contest that charge or any of the findings of fact (or, for that matter, testimony leading up to that finding of fact) for that charge.
The second bit, about nobody needing to be dead for him to be charged, we agree on.
One reason I think people are confused about this is that there was a second prosecution, by a different team of prosecutors in a different case (out of Baltimore?) that charged the murder-for-hire scheme more directly. That may be, but he was still charged for it in the SDNY case, which earned him a life sentence.
SDNY was not evasive about this! They not only indicted for the murder-for-hire scheme, won a conviction on it, and had him sentenced based in large part on it, but also crowed about it in their press release. I'm sort of baffled by the extremely common belief that the DOJ "dropped the charges" about the murder-for-hire scheme. They did more or less the opposite thing.
"Ulbricht, 31, of San Francisco, California, was convicted of the following seven offenses after a four-week jury trial: distributing narcotics, distributing narcotics by means of the Internet, conspiring to distribute narcotics, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiring to commit computer hacking, conspiring to traffic in false identity documents, and conspiring to commit money laundering."
Noticeably not on that list is anything related to murder, attempted murder, solicitation of murder, or murder-for-hire.
If I understand you correctly you are saying that the attempted murder is an element of his continuing criminal enterprise - or something like that. I don't believe this though and I haven't seen any evidence of this from you. Googling for people who are convicted for hiring fake hitmen I see that they are charged with things like "Solicitation of murder" and not "Continuing criminal enterprise."
Ulbricht was not charged with murder for hire in New York and he wasn't convicted of it ever. Ulbricht was charged with murder for hire in Maryland and those charges were dropped.
This press release does not claim that Ross Ulbricht was convicted of murder or anything related to it. It says "found guilty yesterday on all seven counts in connection" and, later
"ULBRICHT, 30, of San Francisco, California, was found guilty of: one count of distributing narcotics, one count of distributing narcotics by means of the Internet, and one count of conspiring to distribute narcotics, each of which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years; one count of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison; one of count of conspiring to commit computer hacking, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison; one count of conspiring to traffic in false identity documents, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years; and one count of conspiring to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The maximum sentences are prescribed by Congress and are provided for informational purposes only, as the sentence will be determined by the judge. ULBRICHT is scheduled to be sentenced on May 15, 2015."
So, we have...
1. distributing narcotics
2. distributing narcotics via the internet
3. count of conspiring to distribute narcotics
4. engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise
5. conspiring to commit computer hacking
6. conspiring to traffic in false identity documents
7. conspiring to traffic in false identity documents
That's all seven and none of them are murder, conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, or solicitation of murder.
I think I can clear it up: The accusation of murder-for-hire would not hold up. The FBI would not be able to prove the required elements for the deed, because in order to prove it, the FBI would need to actually drive or mail something with the intent of murder [1].
In the released indictment [2] (Apparently there seems to be a superseding indictment), DPR was charged on four counts. Count one is "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy", none of the counts are "Murder-For-Hire". But, there are three overt (motivating) acts for the "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy":
a) Provide a platform for selling drugs
b) Solicit a murder-for-hire
c) Logging in as admin on Silk Road
So, while the charge "Murder-For-Hire" probably seems hard to prove (as stated above), using the intent of it to justify the count "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy" worked here. In a sense, I believe, DPR can not be labeled officially with "murder-for-hire", but in order to protect his "Continuing Criminal Enterprise" and as such commit "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy" it appears that he would have committed a "murder-for-hire" crime.
Not so much: the distinction you're talking about, of how much the FBI would actually have had to do to charge their sting, is I believe what attempt liability (and, really, inchoate liability in general) is all about (this comes up a lot in child sex stings).
What seems more likely is that the murder-for-hire thing is messier than the broader, abstract things he was charged with, and they had him dead to rights on that stuff anyways. Without meaningfully contesting and refuting the murder-for-hire stuff, it's relevant conduct for the sentencing; it did the work the DOJ needed it to do.
The big issue in these discussions is the idea that the murder-for-hire stuff was prejudicial --- that it wasn't a part of the case, but was allowed to hang over the case to taint the jury. But that's clearly not true; he was indicted for it, twice, in the SDNY case.
Certainly. And no wonder that the other charges from the Maryland District were dismissed.
> he was indicted for it, twice, in the SDNY case.
You mean, he was charged and found guilty of "Murder-For-Hire"? This I don't follow. I thought overt acts serve the purpose of evidence for the charges/counts rather than being charges itself.
In any case, DPR clearly concluded, that paying someone to kill someone else in order to preserve his anonymity/enterprise was OK. He even committed it.
> I've never read an exculpatory explanation of Ulbricht's payment to arrange murders that made any sense at all.
This. The mental gymnastics involved in people pivoting from "the justice system is awful, especially the way they've treated poor little Ulbricht" to "the only possible standard for judging Ulbricht's character and intentions is the decisions the justice system made or didn't make" is Olympian.
I'm just saying, they got black-and-white evidence that Ulbricht arranged to pay for a murder, and the Internet has weird stories about how the payment and later murder "confirmation" were some kind of communicative act between Ulbricht and other associates that didn't have anything to do with arranging an actual murder, and it all makes just literally no sense at all. I'm not making a normative claim about the fairness of the US justice system, I'm just saying that if you're trying to pay off a witness, the absolute last way you'd ever structure that payment is as a phony murder for hire scheme.
I agree. My beef's entirely with the people simultaneously claiming we can't agree with the justice system's verdict, but also that we absolutely can't form our own negative judgements of Ulbricht's actions because apparently the only relevant standard for whether orders like “can you change the order to execute rather than torture” made Ulbricht a terribly unsympathetic character is a claim it wasn't the basis of the judicial verdict...
It's not about sympathy but justice. I disagree with tptacek's characterization of it as not being legal finagling. Burying murder-for-hire attempts under "narcotics trafficking conspiracy" is obtuse and opaque. He should be explicitly charged. And yes, perhaps this means the fault isn't with the prosecutors or judge but with the scope of the narcotics trafficking conspiracy laws themselves; it's still sketchy.
I'm not sympathetic to him in the slightest. I believe he's almost certainly guilty of attempting to have those people murdered. I think his sentence should be overturned and I think he should be explicitly charged with attempted murder, and hopefully he will be convicted of those crimes and re-sentenced to life in prison. (Whether or not that's legally viable, I have no idea; I just think it's what ought to happen.)
I would appreciate being reminded as to the facts of that. I’ve always felt skeptical of that claim, but I haven’t spent the time to research it.
It just felt like that would be the exact thing an organization would pin on him if they wanted to destroy his life.
It’s entirely possible he did, but I remind you that in an era where Epstein probably didn’t kill himself, it’s really hard to just take things at face value.
The chat logs they captured from his servers[1] are straight forward and damning, and corroborated by the diary they retrieved from his laptop.
There is no serious doubt that he solicited multiple hits, both from an undercover FBI agent and from other people, possibly scammers. It is up to you what moral weights you want to assign to US drug policies, that the FBI agent was corrupt [2], or that apparently no one actually got killed, but it's silly that people are still disputing the plain fact that Ross Ulbricht tried to have people murdered.
> Dread Pirate Roberts 3/29/2013 22:55: Hi again R&W,
I hate to come to you with a problem when we are just starting to get to know one another, but Blake (FriendlyChemist) is causing me problems. Are you still looking for him or now that you've found Xin have you given up? I would like to put a bounty on his head if it's not too much trouble for you. What would be an adequate amount to motivate you to find him?
Necessities like this do happen from time to time for a person in my position. I have others I can turn to, but it is always good to have options and you are close to the case right now. Hopefully this is something you are open to and can be another aspect of our business relationship.
Regards,
DPR
> Dread Pirate Roberts 3/31/2013 8:59: Don't want to be a pain here, but the price seems high. Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80k. Are the prices you quoted the best you can do?
I would like this done asap as he is talking about releasing the info on Monday
The thing is, prison has a lot of variances. A life sentence in prison has him in the darkest prison world.
Martin Shkreli was in the easiest parts of prison for example. Ross is in the lifer prison with the hardest criminals.
It's said he's struggling a lot because you have to join the racist white groups in lifer prison, and his morals don't allow that. But you have to, or you have no protection, and may get killed.
The US prison system is a far scarier place than anyone thinks about. You essentially have to stay blind to what happens inside, or you couldn't with good conscious send anyone there.
I can understand why he was sentenced to prison but I've never really understood why Ulbrict was put in a high security prison. He's basically harmless without a keyboard.
To inflict cruel and/or unusual punishment and as a deterrent to others. The judge only acknowledged the latter half of my first sentence and the former is the quiet part judges can’t say out loud lest the damned have a toehold for an appeal.
Because if one person that can destroy the state monopoly on trade then that person is a severe threat to the state and needs to be fought with everything the state has at it's disposal. I'm honsetly surprised they stopped short of death penalty.
On one hand, that makes sense if we think of him as just the person who built the computer platform, but on the other this is the logic the courts used to justify his sentence:
"Using the online moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts,” or “DPR,” ULBRICHT controlled and oversaw every aspect of Silk Road, and managed a staff of paid, online administrators and computer programmers who assisted with the day-to-day operation of the site. Through his ownership and operation of Silk Road, ULBRICHT reaped commissions worth more than $13 million generated from the illicit sales conducted through the site. ULBRICHT also demonstrated a willingness to use violence to protect his criminal enterprise and the anonymity of its users, soliciting six murders-for-hire in connection with operating the site, although there is no evidence that these murders were actually carried out."
Should a drug kingpin who built a global network that facilitated the transfer of illegal substances who was willing to kill people to protect that enterprise only get 10 years?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for drugs to be decriminalized in the US, but where the line is crossed for me is that this person was willing to KILL others in service of making money.
The US criminal justice system is supposed to presume someone is innocent until proven guilty. He was never convicted of the murder-for-hire but yet it was taken into account for his sentencing. That is not right and short-circuits due process.
Sentencing has always had unprovable stuff considered. Your friends and family will come in to tell what a wonderful person you are, none of it verifiable and often entirely bullshit.
Being wonderful or not wonderful isn't a crime though. His sentencing included presumption of an unproven crime. The US justice system is explicitly based on not considering someone guilty of a crime until proven guilty. You have no right to not be considered a wonderful or horrible person, but you do have a right to not be considered guilty of the crime until convicted.
> The US justice system is explicitly based on not considering someone guilty of a crime until proven guilty.
For a criminal conviction, the standard is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt".
For sentencing, judges can consider evidence under a different standard, "preponderance of the evidence". As prosecutors introduced evidence of the murder-for-hire allegations in trial, the judge was permitted to consider it.
FWIW, that probably shouldn't be taken into consideration either? I'd argue they should "clean room" the sentence by having a second judge read an assessment of the evidence by the first judge and have them conduct the sentencing, lest sentences be more about how people look than what they did (and allowing laws to continue to be overly harsh but with enough last minute exceptions that no one "important" has reason to complain).
Your behavior before, during, and after the crime are incredibly relevant to your sentencing. The court is trying to determine the best course of action to prevent repeating the behavior and minimize future potential harms, these things must be considered. This is not a "one size fits all" or "strictly by the numbers" question, and we are not benefited as a society by treating it that way.
Based on this argument, shouldn’t Ross’ murder-for-hires be included in sentencing then?
Clearly he didn’t just build a drug website, he was fine ending lives for it. A slap on the wrist (even if his family thinks he is a good guy) wouldn’t deter him much, it would seem.
They didn't charge him with them, but if you read the sentencing transcript [1] you can see it was definitely considered those facts and the specific facts of each murder for hire plot when arriving at a judgement.
And the first judge very much agreed with your assessment.
That's because she weighs facts without prejudice, not that she ignores them entirely; which, is likely why she also has the scales. Or are you suggesting the message is truly "justice is completely blind?"
If a defendant has been convicted and then goes on to hold the court publicly in contempt gets a harsher sentence than someone who is truly reticent and has taken actions to attempt to restore their victims even before sentencing.. I don't see how justice has been unequally applied. The two defendants _are_ unequal. That's the point.
But the offense against the people is the same. Don’t impose social engineering at the sentencing level. It’s not up to the judge. The judge is an idiot, just like us.
Now I understand your position and even agree with it to a point, the idea that justice is blind means judgment is without consideration of undue influence.
Like many things, balance is the best approach. Minimum sentences came about when the prior sentences were perceived to be unreasonable.
Don’t get me started on prison reform, though. Blind or not, US prisons are inherently unconstitutional.
For what it's worth, although it has some judgement call inputs, sentencing at the federal level usually adheres to a guideline formula. I believe that also happened in this case.
> Sentencing has always had unprovable stuff considered. Your friends and family will come in to tell what a wonderful person you are, none of it verifiable and often entirely bullshit.
True, but I see a bigger problem with sentencing being based on conduct that the defendant was acquitted of. The concept is supposed to be that if you were acquitted, you didn't commit the crime.
That's just as much a refutation of your comment as it is of mine. Remember saying this?
>>> Sentencing has always had unprovable stuff considered.
But still, looking outside this trial, sentences being handed out based on acquitted conduct is very much a thing that happens, and it shouldn't be allowed.
The issue at play there is the different standards for conviction vs sentencing.
The standard for conviction is "beyond a reasonable doubt". The standard for something to be considered in sentencing is "perponderance of the evidence".
As such, it's possible for a judge to take a look at a case where a conviction couldn't be obtained, but consider the evidence to be compelling enough to use in sentencing for something else.
Sorry, but "we don't have enough evidence to claim that you did this, but we do have enough evidence to put you in jail for five years" is not a coherent perspective.
And it's not relevant anyway. Once you're acquitted, you didn't commit the crime. Hazy evidence that you did commit the crime might be something the sentencing judge can legitimately consider, but it's necessarily overruled by the fact that you didn't commit the crime, which is something the sentencing judge must consider.
Case in point: OJ Simpson. It’s widely believed he did murder his wife, but the recent death of Rodney King and the whole glove affair in court allowed him to be found “not guilty”.
No, it really is a matter of settled law in America that if acquitted of a charge that you are innocent as you start with the presumption of innocence.
> Sorry, but "we don't have enough evidence to claim that you did this, but we do have enough evidence to put you in jail for five years" is not a coherent perspective.
That's true, but that's not relevant, because that's not the scenario. The standard for criminal conviction is not the standard for “to claim that you did this”, it is the standard to determine the maximum legal criminal punishment.
The standard for a judge to assign punishment within the range specified by the statute under which a person was convicted is lower, because by definition the facts which allow the maximum sentence in that range have been established beyond a reasonable doubt.
> Once you're acquitted, you didn't commit the crime
Legally “didn’t commit the crime” (and thus not allowing separate punishment for the crime) is not the same as “did not do something substantially similar to the crime“ (which therefore might be eligible for sanctions other than separate criminal punishment, such as enhancements within the statutorily authorized range of punishments for another crime, civil liability, or all kinds of different things.)
Heck, it doesn't even mean “did not commit a crime with substantially identical elements within the jurisdiction of a separate sovereign with concurrent jurisdiction”, though that's not directly relevant to this case.
> Heck, it doesn't even mean “did not commit a crime with substantially identical elements within the jurisdiction of a separate sovereign with concurrent jurisdiction”, though that's not directly relevant to this case.
I don't think you'll find many people arguing that this is a state of affairs that makes any sense. My position in this thread takes the form "the justice system is doing something that is self-evidently insane". And that's also what I would say here. Being insane in one way doesn't stop you from being insane in another way.
> The standard for criminal conviction is not the standard for “to claim that you did this”
And this just isn't true. The standard for making the claim is the standard for conviction. As far as the law is concerned, the conviction is how you make the claim. As a person, if you make the claim in the absence of a conviction you'll run into serious legal problems. Unless, apparently, you're handing down a sentence for some other crime, in which case anything goes.
> The standard for making the claim is the standard for conviction.
Again, this isn't true. The standard for evaluating a claim is different for conviction versus sentencing.
> As a person, if you make the claim in the absence of a conviction you'll run into serious legal problems.
No, you won't, at least not necessarily. Libel would be a civil action, and as with sentencing, the standard is lower in a civil trial. This is, for example, why OJ Simpson got acquitted in criminal court but was deemed culpable for the murders in civil court.
> As a person, if you make the claim in the absence of a conviction you'll run into serious legal problems.
No, you won't. Heck, as a person, you can make the same claim in court and win a sizable payout based on it with evidence insufficient for a criminal conviction, even if the elements required for civil liability are identical to those for the crime, because the standard of evidence in a civil case is preponderance of the evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt like a criminal conviction.
The high burden of proof required for criminal conviction specifically exists as a narrow purpose failsafe that doesn't apply in other contexts even within the criminal justice system.
He also never actually had anyone killed, the feds created the personas attempting to 'extort' or 'steal' from DPR. The feds detailed their transgressions to DPR and introduced the idea of murder + offered to commit the murders for a fee. Afterwards they fabricated evidence of the hit(s) to steal money from him. --These were the "above board" official and sanctioned things that the feds did during this investigation.
Shaun Bridges of the US secret service and Carl Force of the US DEA were siphoning bitcoin off to their personal accounts throughout the investigation. Bridges even tried to flee the country while on bail.
Think what you want about Ulbrict, but the cops that took him down were every bit as dirty as he was, if not more.
> Think what you want about Ulbrict, but the cops that took him down were every bit as dirty as he was, if not more.
Obviously the agents who stole the funds were dirty, but the contents of your first paragraph is called a criminal investigation. Nothing untoward there (as described, at least).
That's certainly how the courts have interpreted things. As always the distinction between "Legal" and "Justice" is left as an exercise to the reader.
For my 2 cents it seems entirely reasonable that an armed gang backed by the state would consider themselves to be individually above the law, since they are constantly told that the ends always justify the means, no matter how odious those means may be.
It’s called entrapment, and it’s not a normal part of a criminal investigation. It’s why they knew they wouldn’t be able to land the murder-for-hire charges. It could have invalidated the whole case.
From your "Bridges tried to flee while on bail", it seems like both agents were caught and prosecuted. And, AFAIK, the claim was never made that they fabricated evidence. Heck, I don't know who disputes his guilt, just the appropriate sentence.
In any other situation, testimony or evidence from such an easily impeachable witness would get laughed out of court. Why do we allow it from cops?
If a journalist or academic gets found to have knowingly fabricated even the smallest detail it immediately calls into question their entire body of work, and even colleagues they may have worked with.
These are federal agents and the best standard we can hold them to is "oh, we don't have direct evidence of other crimes so we'll just assume the first time we caught you was the first time you did it"
They sold him details of the case for bitcoin into their personal wallets. It wasn't part of a sting or intel operation. The same cops that built the case against him were themselves indicted for money laundering payments they received from Ross. Multiple independent agencies and field offices with rogue agents undermining the cases they were building in real time for personal gain that was contemporaneously worth less than a million dollars.
You alternate between the general "why do we allow it from cops"/"journalists don't do this" and the specifics of what these two did.
We don't allow it from cops (they're going to jail). In the case of these two cops, it's not clear what you want. From what I can tell, they weren't allowed to testify, and they gathered none of the evidence used to convict him. Instead, that evidence was to be used in another trial on different charges and the government dropped those charges because the cops were unreliable.
Again, this is false. The murder-for-hire scheme was a predicate to a conviction charge, and the prosecution was obligated to prove it. He was found guilty of the associated charge.
Again, this is false. None of the things Ross was convicted of are "predicated" of a murder related act for a conviction. Murder, conspiracy for murder, solicitation for murder would be. General drug-related conspiracies in no way are predicated of something homicide or murder related for a conviction.
The murder-for-hire scheme was in fact charged conduct, was introduced at trial, was rebuttable by the defense, and he was found guilty of the associated charge.
It's going to take you more than one snarky sentence to explain what's deceitful about Ulbricht being charged with a conspiracy for which half of the predicate overt acts were murder-for-hire schemes. They're spelled out in detail in the indictment.
Did anyone die as a direct result of Ross giving an order / paying for a murder?
Did the police investigating Ross misrepresent these murders to him while they were occurring?
Did the police investigating Ross attempt to enrich themselves by stealing illicit funds from his drug enterprise or by selling him details of the pending investigation?
I'll give you that the courts have repeatedly held the police can legally do most of these things, and that even having lying/stealing cops running the investigation doesn't invalidate the fruits of that investigation. Perhaps you could also concede that a lot of observers are going to have difficulty seeing the difference in these two shades of grey?
(2) Presumably not, because they held up in court.
(3) I have no idea, and don't see the relevance to Ulbricht. By all means, prosecute any corrupt FBI agents that were involved.
I'm not making a grand normative claim about the justice of the Ulbricht sentence (I think he's a monster, but also that sentences in general are too high). I'm simply establishing that the extraordinarily common Internet narrative of "Ulbricht was never charged with a murder-for-hire scheme, and rumors about it were prejudicial to the case" is irrefutably false. That's as far as I go with this stuff.
We know the agents presenting evidence against him were crooks. How can any of the evidence against him not be fatally tainted? How can anything said by a judge who admitted such "evidence" be credited?
The whole investigation and trial, all told, were a shitshow. I cannot trust any of the process, so cannot conclude anything about Ulbricht from it. The most we can say is that chances are he was guilty of something just from how deep he was in the middle of it all. But I would give the agents longer sentences.
Page 5 of the indictment includes the murder-for-hire activity as part of the first count ("Narcotics trafficking conspiracy"). Ulbricht was convicted on this count of the indictment.
Ulbricht doesn't even bother arguing that the court was wrong in considering the murder-for-hire during sentencing, only that they shouldn't merit a life sentence because they probably didn't actually take place.
The indictment can shot-gun whatever sort of overt acts the grand jury buys into that they like. A conviction usually only needs one qualifying overt act, so a conviction is not at all evidence the accepted overt act was any of the murder-for-hire accusations.
What you're doing here is presenting the indictment with the murder-for-hire as overt acts and relying on the sleight of hand that the reader will assume the conviction asserts the overt acts, when in fact the conviction only generally relies on at least one overt act (and need not be any murder-for-hire related one).
That's definitely not what the sentencing memoranda and final sentencing order say. I'm going to tend to believe that the judge knows more about which facts were and weren't found at trial over the opinions of message boards, which, as you can see, are repeatedly and blatantly wrong about core details of the case.
A given (alleged) act or fact can support multiple possible charges.
For example suppose I were convicted for reckless driving for driving 300% over the speed limit in a school zone while school was in session. That same evidence could have been used for a speeding charge instead of a reckless driving charge.
It would not be violating innocent until proven guilty or due process if my sentencing for reckless driving took into account my extremely high speed, even though I was not charged or convicted of speeding. My driving 300% over the speed limit was proven as part of convicting me for reckless driving and the court can treat my driving that fast as a fact.
In the Ulbricht case the murder-for-hire stuff was part of the basis for one of the conspiracy charges, evidence was heard for it in regards to that, and he was convicted on that charge. So the court can take it as a fact because of that and use it when considering the sentencing for that conviction.
>Should a drug kingpin who built a global network that facilitated the transfer of illegal substances who was willing to kill people to protect that enterprise only get 10 years?
The murder for hire claims lack necessary evidence to convict. Outside that it becomes a question of whether platform owners are responsible for the content on their platform.
I am personally in favor of content owners being responsible. I think Mark Zuckerberg should be in prison. However, Mark Zuckerberg is not in prison, and continues to wreak havoc on humanity. Why is Ulbricht responsible for what happened on his platform, but Zuckerberg is not?
In my view, Ulbricht should be free so long as Zuckerberg is free.
Facebook has and continues to police its platform for illegal activity and cooperates with law enforcement. That's not to say they don't facilitate horrible crimes, but they make some effort not to. Facebook also wasn't created for the express purpose of operating drug trafficking.
Ulbricht created a website to sell drugs and made efforts not to police the platform.
It's pretty clear what the difference is between someone who makes a platform that can be used by bad actors but makes efforts to stop them, versus someone who makes a platform for bad actors and tries to protect them.
To me, it feels more like Facebook selectively facilitates the crimes of some and polices the crimes of others.
There's names of people in the public Congressional record that you cannot put in any post in any context.
The 2020 riots were coordinated on FB.
According to the White House press secretary, the WH sends lists of people to Facebook to censor who did not commit crimes.
If you are successfully opposed to the regime, for example popular voices against US criminal actions regarding Ukraine, you get nerfed.
Azov Batallion was previously banned from FB because they are literally Nazis, but ever since the government started giving weapons to these Nazis you can praise them without concern you will get banned.
> The Azov Battalion has been described as a far-right militia,[60][16] with connections to neo-Nazism[214] and members wearing neo-Nazi and SS symbols and regalia, and expressing neo-Nazi views.[58][215]
> The group's insignia features the Wolfsangel (or a mirrored variation of it),[216][217][218][219] a German heraldic charge inspired by historic wolf traps adopted by the Nazi Party and by WW2 German military units. Its insignia also used to feature the Black Sun,[220][221][222][211][209] both of which remain two popular neo-Nazi symbols.[210][194][220][215] Azov soldiers have worn fascist or Nazi-associated symbols on their uniforms,[223] including swastikas and SS symbols.[23] In 2014, the German ZDF television network showed images of Azov fighters wearing helmets with swastika symbols and "the SS runes of Hitler's infamous black-uniformed elite corps".[224] In 2015, Marcin Ogdowski, a Polish war correspondent, gained access to one of Azov's bases located in the former holiday resort Majak; Azov fighters showed him Nazi tattoos as well as Nazi emblems on their uniforms.[225][16]
> Facebook has and continues to police its platform for illegal activity and cooperates with law enforcement.
This is jurisdiction-dependent. Facebook (a US entity) does things in other countries that would be illegal in the US, such as in Vietnam where it turns over identity information of protesters to police without due process, for beatings/torture purposes.
> Ulbricht created a website to sell drugs and made efforts not to police the platform.
There is another separate moral question about whether or not this should be illegal at all. Even if you think it should, most people agree that the penalties imposed for same in the USA are insanely disproportionate.
Jimmy Carter once said:
"Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed."
There's also the small issue of the hundreds of billions of dollars of whoring and drug retailing that happens via WhatsApp and Facebook and Instagram DMs. WhatsApp is literally the biggest drug marketplace on planet Earth. Nobody seems to bat an eye at the fact that Meta/Facebook could but does not police these.
The other commenter is right: If Zuckerberg is free, then so should DPR be.
This is preposterous. Did you ever go on the Silk Road? It was very clearly a large marketplace of nearly only illegal items (drugs, guns, etc).
Your belief in the law doesn’t change its status. What he did was very illegal, with all use cases to support illegal activity. This wasn’t about possession for an individual, it was a mechanism for large scale distribution of illegal products.
Indeed. Consider the inverse situation: Imagine if Catholics who tithe were investigated, prosecuted, and convicted by the same standards. You’d have to imagine it because while many of us know about the child sexual assault scandals in the Catholic Church, those that tithe certainly should and usually do know. They’re generally understood to be paying money for the good parts of the Church and not the obviously illegal criminal conspiracies protected and promulgated by the Church. So while it’s probably illegal, it’s probably not directly wrong and certainly isn’t being treated as a serious criminal conspiracy normally would be.
Meanwhile for making a website for an illicit market that explicitly sought to reduce violence between people who would otherwise buy or sell their drugs in a situation classically prone to violence — big U received not one but two life sentences.
America has some extremely strange investigation, prosecution, sentencing, and incarceration priorities. One can reasonably call them absurd and unjust, but many Americans will simply tell you that he deserves what he gets. They don’t remark if the rest of us deserve it as well. We are all poorer for this kind of a railroading.
As someone who's generally pretty morally relative, and abstractly, I tend to agree. But you miss the point. Call actions what you want but they will land you in jail if you are a citizen of a society which considers them wrong and you are caught performing them. What's interesting in the US is that we acknowledge this limitation of the law and have an ethical escape hatch. The law does not convict you, a jury of your peers does. And they can decide what you did is not wrong even though the law says it's not allowed. Unfortunately (for sympathizers and for your argument in this context) in this case the jury very much decided that the evidence presented in court proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the actions, which the law says are not allowed, were confirmed as wrong (the law applied correctly) and subsequently worthy of punishment. So arguing from a stance of moral relativism is a logical non sequitur and simply not relevant. If you don't think DPR actions were wrong go change the law or somehow move him to your society where he's a hero. Don't pine over how terrible this man's life now is because "he was just a drug lord on the digital streets and didn't technically kill anybody and people use facebook to sell drugs too see this guy is no worse than zuck and and who says breaking laws is even wrong anyway???".
I actually wrote up a detailed response to your original comment but you appear to not be arguing in good faith after the addition of your last 3 paragraphs. Clearly you have no idea what I'm talking about or if you do you're not interested in a real rebuttal and have opted instead for the word soup let's feed it to GPT at best call it a fallacy but in reality just some lame snide attempt at internet points.
All I'll say is this: I originally replied to sneak who rhetorically questioned whether illegal actions are always wrong. That's called moral relativism and I explained that when you live in a society your ethics are governed to some extent by your peers. So, while you can believe and in large part do whatever you want, illegal actions don't somehow become ethical because you found a few people who happen to be interested in challenging the moral framework behind the laws in question. I find it quite useless and unproductive to bring such a juvenile response to a serious discussion because it takes things to a place where you can just say whatever you want and be right, as evidenced by your inclusion of GPT-2.
I understand that. My argument is that, practically, we're talking about the past actions of a certain individual within a certain legal context on a social scale where societal justice has already been served so you necessarily have to tie the two together otherwise society falls apart. What DPR did is not allowed by the laws of the land in which he did it. Therefore it is logical to assert that his actions are unwanted in that society. It's a bad idea to do illegal things and get caught. The semantics of it doesn't change the principle.
> What DPR did is not allowed by the laws of the land in which he did it. Therefore it is logical to assert that his actions are unwanted in that society.
It does because he committed a crime and is rotting in jail. That’s literally what that means. You can disagree forever about whether you specifically would accept his actions in some ideal society in your head, but that doesn't change reality. Simply, nobody is discussing the your imagination.
> It does because he committed a crime and is rotting in jail. That’s literally what that means.
The fact that he is in jail, or that it is a crime, does not confirm nor disconfirm that society considers his alleged actions unwanted; as the law is not a perfect or even approximate representation of society's preferences.
All it tells you is that it's illegal. It doesn't tell you whether or not society considers it unwanted. They are not congruent. There are literally thousands upon thousands of US federal felonies that society has no opinion whatsoever on.
Oftentimes laws are passed with the involvement of only a handful of members of society. They are largely disconnected from the wants and views of the wider world.
I think they were just doing a very good job of trolling, and they caught you. I was pretty unsure at first, too, because the exaggeration of sincere (but misguided) rhetoric was pretty subtle.
In this case I don't think our interlocutor is trolling; they're just throwing out words and phrases they think are applause lights without much regard to what they actually mean, with the intent of sincerely signaling their emotions—political sloganeering as a prophylactic against rational thought. It can look like trolling because, as in trolling, the person is saying things that are false and even self-contradictory, and isn't concerned about this; but the motivation is different.
Unfortunately my comment upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32064946 seems to have gotten flagged by the sort of people who prefer political sloganeering to careful rational deconstruction of political sloganeering; perhaps if you think it's a useful contribution to the discussion you could "vouch" it?
There is no plausible reason to believe I wasn't arguing in good faith, although I guess "you appear to not be arguing in good faith" is the sort of thing that people post on here, so you posted it anyway.
As for whether I have any idea what you're talking about, I don't think that there is in fact a thing that you are talking about, so it would make no sense for me to know what it was. I think you're contradicting yourself in the same unselfconscious way as the neural network output (which, by the way, probably is not from GPT-2 any more).
The standard definition of "moral relativism" is the belief that there is no absolute standard of morality, not the belief that the law is not an absolute standard of morality. There are merely descriptive, meta-ethical, and normative variants, but nobody has advanced any of them in this thread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
However, your idiosyncratic definition of "moral relativism" as "questioning whether illegal actions are always wrong" is, I suppose, satisfied!
The belief in an absolute standard of morality usually entails that the law can come into conflict with it; the only way to avoid that is for the law to be the unique and only standard of morality. This entails, for example, that the act of making or repealing laws has no moral weight, except if you violate the proper parliamentary procedure in the process; even if the law you enact, for example, licenses you to confiscate the possessions of your political enemies and give them to your supporters. It also entails that, for example, if the law orders you to torture your mother to death when you reach 25 years old, it is moral for you to do it and immoral for you to refuse. I have never encountered anyone arguing seriously for such a standard.
However, it would be possible for a sufficiently extreme moral relativist (in the standard sense, not your idiosyncratic definition) to argue that such a morality was valid or acceptable even if they did not themselves happen to hold it.
In short, the only way to not be a "moral relativist" by your idiosyncratic definition is to be the most extremist sort of moral relativist by the standard definition.
Any other person who engages in the smallest amount of moral reasoning will immediately see that in the world there are many sorts of laws: good laws, bad laws, laws that sink to the vilest depths of depravity; and, even if they believe that there is a moral obligation to obey the law, even a bad law, they will easily see that in many cases disobedience to the law is the least wrong thing a person can do.
Many other people believe that there is a moral obligation to obey some laws, but not others. For example, I believe that there is a law with heavy penalties that prohibits you from insulting the King of Thailand, whether or not you are in Thailand, and there are several similar laws in different countries that prohibit insulting one or another nobleman or religious leader, alive or dead. Very few people believe that there is a moral obligation to obey all of these laws, but wars have been fought over them; the Peace of Westphalia established an uneasy Schelling point that has held to some extent for some centuries.
As another example, currently both the ROC and PRC claim sovereignty over Taiwan, and their laws impose conflicting obligations in many cases; for example, the ROC's laws require 4 months of military service in the ROC military of all men at the age of 18, while serving in the armed forces of the ROC is illegal under the PRC's laws. Very few people believe that there is a moral obligation for Taiwanese men to obey both of these conflicting laws, which is impossible.
Other people believe that there is no fundamental moral obligation to obey any law, because governments are not the sort o...
2. You're pedantically missing the forest for the trees.
I understand and agree with what you're saying up to your last 2 sentences. The reason I said you're missing my point is because you are. My point is not that laws are the end-all-be-all of morality and don't question just follow. My point is that, while you can believe whatever the hell you want ethically (and, because I'm pretty morally relative almost to the extreme, I'd probably support you abstractly, even if you're not morally relative and rather hold some things absolutely,) I still believe that our western society plays an important superseding role in determining what behaviors should be allowed and the punishments if you misbehave. I accept that we govern each other, that we've figured out a system that isn't "don't insult the king" and that works for the majority of people.
So, abstractly: argue about whatever you want. Express yourself freely. Challenge the status quo. Bad laws are bad, let's change them. Civil disobedience! Etc.
But, in this case: it's not abstract, there are facts, a justice process, and outcome to consider so it's silly to apply abstract reasoning to it. <-- That is my sole point. We can descend from our ivory tower and discuss the dirty details of because they exist. And that's what this topic is about. OP is not an abstract piece on whether it's ethical or desirable or not to not police content on your platform. I'm pretty sure we'd fall on the same side in that debate.
I, basically, don't understand why people are ignoring the facts to push some whacko narrative about how DPR is a libertarian saint who was "just running a platform" and got unfairly boned by the legal system, corrupt cops, a maleficent judge, and unwitting gullible jurors. It's crazy to the point where I'll call it illogical because I don't see any rhetorical way to just ignore the facts in pursuit of a content neutral platform agenda (which I happen to agree with, btw). Defending DPR in face of the facts and outcome hurts that agenda.
His prison conditions seem to extremely bad and your response is to argue he had a fair trial by a jury of his peers. I wonder if you can see that one does not relate to the other? He should be punished by being incarcerated, not by other prisoners during incarceration, no?
I would dispute that the mere fact that he did not have a jury trial where he lived was unfair and an indication that he did not actually have a jury of his peers. He was arrested in San Francisco and tried in New York City. Those are different worlds on technology and drug issues.
A system where an unaccountable pseudonymous warlord tries to hire nonexistent hitmen to kill people who steal from him isn't a very good system, but it's better than the system we have, where the US imprisons 2 million people, where heroin addicts die of fentanyl overdoses, and where at unpredictable times those addicts are forced into agonizing withdrawal when their dealers are arrested.
The undisputed fact that DSR existed to help people do all kinds of illegal things doesn't make those things wrong, and it doesn't make it bad for DSR to have helped them do those things. Fortunately, I wasn't a user, but as I understand it, DSR dramatically reduced the violence and risk of contamination involved in illegal drug use—the next best thing to actual full legalization of those drugs.
The US's drug laws are morally utterly indefensible, and the fact that DSR was violating them on a massive scale is something to be proud of, not ashamed of.
Your comment is my favorite in the entire discussion because you don’t trip over the supposed moral flaws in his character. I appreciate that you focus on why the state tried to entrap (or frame him if you want to assume the claims are totally baseless) him with murder for hire charges in the first place. I am sorry I have only one upvote to give Kragen.
DPR didn't hire, or attempt to hire, anyone to kill anyone. This was a fabrication by those prosecuting him to turn a set of exclusively nonviolent offenses into (supposedly) violent ones.
While that's a plausible possibility, you seem to be stating it as a definite fact, which doesn't seem justifiable on the basis of the public evidence. What do you know that isn't public?
>The murder for hire claims lack necessary evidence to convict.
Yep, the available "evidence" comes from those corrupt federal agents who robbed MtGox, and who fabricated the evidence which prevented Ulbricht's bail. The murder for hire wasn't proven, yet it was used to significantly enhance the sentence, basically a loophole allowing to punish for alleged acts without "proven beyond reasonable doubt" for those acts.
So, in short the trial is tainted beyond any salvage. Note - i have no idea whether Ulbricht did it or not.
Yes, the agents probably deserve longer sentences than Ulbricht, if only because they misused State power, which is inherently worse than any private activity.
But we should get the authors and participants in the torture regime first.
what can be worse abuse of state power than that, or what other purpose for abusing state power other than money? It seems that everything else what they did kind of flows from the theft.
>Bridges’ plea agreement also established that he obstructed the Baltimore federal grand jury’s investigations of Silk Road and Ulbricht in a number of ways, including by impeding the ability of the investigation to fully utilize a cooperator’s access to Silk Road.
That grand jury indictment in Baltimore based on false info from those agents was the reason for denying bail to Ulbricht, and basically prejudiced the judge in the main case.
>According to his plea agreement, Bridges admitted that in January 2013 he used an administrator account on the Silk Road website
There seems to be enough indications to support for a variety of speculations like for example that the agents may have scapegoated Ulbricht, say may be he was an admin or a dev there and was made into the "kingpin", or something like this. Again it is impossible to say anything for sure as the trial wasn't just a fruit of poison tree, it were total poisoned deadlands.
No? Zuckerberg wasn’t in it to sell illicit drugs, though that apparently happens often, and it seems clear that data and targeting of specific people based on that data was a conscious strategy. That might not be illicit in America but it sure is in Europe.
One rule for the rich in America, another rule for the rest of us.
Indeed, he deserves to be in jail not for building the Silk Road, or running it, or potentially even for engaging in drug trafficking-- he deserves to be there for attempted murder. There's no ambiguity there, he tried to have people killed to protect his business.
> soliciting six murders-for-hire in connection with operating the site
This was not proven in court, and at least two federal agents involved in the investigation were found guilty for misconduct related to the investigation, which should at least put doubt on the more salacious elements of the investigation.
The judge took the prosecution's accusation that Ross Ulbricht was responsible for murders-for-hire as truth, and used it to justify a sentence that is cruel and onerous given what he was actually convicted for. In my opinion, that should be considered an unconstitutional violation of due process, since the defense did not get to respond to those accusations as they would in a normal trial. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court refused to hear Ulbricht's appeal, IIRC.
Yes, Ulbricht's lawyer did a truly awful job and anyone else would have likely gotten him off on procedural grounds.
However the evidence that should have been thrown out was pretty clear he tried to order the murder of numerous people. He should 100% be convicted of that and spend many years in prison because you know, we as a society decided somewhere along the way that paying someone to kill people is bad. Fortunately he just got scammed by the hitman haha. Had he actually been competent enough to hire a real hitman there would be a pile of bodies to his name.
He's not a good guy lol. He's a bad guy, who should be out on a technicality for the charges he got convicted on - but really would likely spend the rest of his days in prison for the other things he definitely did do. The government simply chose not to pursue those charges because they'd already lined up a slam dunk. Not because they couldn't charge it, just that they had better things to do than smacking a dead horse around.
- I think his sentencing was unfair and he should have to be convicted of the murder-for-hire charges in order for them to factor into his sentence. His sentence should be overturned immediately.
- I think he's almost certainly guilty of the murder-for-hire attempts and I hope he's re-tried, convicted of those charges, and re-sentenced to life in prison.
So you want his new trial to also be a preordained show trial?
What if he actually isn’t guilty of those accusations?
What should happen to the agents of the state who either entrapped (if true) or fabricated (if false) those claims?
And really, whole-real-actual-life for a first time offender for a made up crime that didn’t happen and was seemingly initiated by corrupt officers who were convicted of their corruption?
I am asking myself: What are the both sides for this person?!
> ULBRICHT also demonstrated a willingness to use violence to protect his criminal enterprise and the anonymity of its users
Those are allegations that were dropped and likely raised in very sketchy circumstances to begin with. Anyone, including you, could have allegations made against them and then dropped later, FWIW.
If there's one thing the government will protect more jealously than pretty much anything else, it's their monopoly on violence, and preventing the government dipping its beak comes a close second.
If he'd "just" run a marketplace for illegal everythings, you might be able to make an argument.
When it crosses into "casually ordering multiple murders he believed happened," then, no, I'm sorry, you're not just running a marketplace. You deserve to be behind bars for a long, long time. The only reason that nobody actually died from that was because he was surrounded by scammers and informants, and didn't realize this. But incompetence is no defense against ordering multiple murders.
Yes, but he's not unique. In fact, he's much less sympathetic that most of the people in there with him.
I find it quite sad that people on this site will say things like "it was unjust for allegations not proved at trial to be used against him at sentencing" and yet always believe that this same logic shouldn't apply to the "average bad person". The logical extension of the arguments below you is at a minimum support for someone like Chesa Boudin. Probably it's far further than what Boudin's (at least publicly) expressed.
(Quotes not direct. Combinations of things I've heard many different people say differently)
> If this helps provide himself with some prison currency being able to buy from the store, that could go a long way towards helping him have something to trade to help the living hell he is going through.
Or it will make him even more a target because he has access to resources.
It's more likely they'd target him because he's unwilling/unable to defend himself. I've read a lot about the US prison system and culture, giving stuff away doesn't get you respect or friendship.
Also to note most commissary stores have monthly purchase limits. Doesn't matter how much money your account has, you still have the same access to commissary as everyone else.
Having been to prison, folks like Ross (easy target, or, a “sweet lick” as the streets would say…) can and will be targeted for protection and extortion. As far as how folks get things out of him, might well be in the form of commissary or via his family to another inmate account or via his family to an external third party.
There is a deep, twisted hustle economy the likes of which a little casual reading will not educate you on. Consider a great example: fake prostitution listings online, operated by contraband cell phone. Demand payment by hard-to-reverse means, demand upfront payment. Then let them fume as they can’t call the police for an “I got ripped off soliciting sex.”
liquid market: think of it as $3B worth of demand-for-BTC that's *not* buying bitcoin on the spot market and propping up the buy-side of the exchanges...
That is not how it works, the price will move via market liquidity - the people buying / selling bitcoin at a given time, the coins sitting in wallets (over 90%) have no effect. This source says it took $91M to move the price of bitcoin by 1% (about a year ago), bigger shifts could have a cascading effect. https://cointelegraph.com/news/bank-of-america-claims-it-cos...
He was bragging “they’ll never catch me” (Forbes interview). He made the US govt and DEA look like fools.
So they made an example out of him.
If he was smart he should kept a lower profile and his first interaction with police (the multiple fake IDs) he should have shut it all down or pass the site to someone else.
So because you pissed off someone in the government you get life in jail? That's not justice. That could be what happened but idk I hate the idea he's not getting released and IIRC he killed noone and robbed noone
The legal system is worth only as much as the population it governs believes in it's authority.
Undermining the authority in a public manner is a sure fire way to ensure that the legal system will use you to reassert it's own authority as an act of long term preservation of the system's status quo.
To call that a legal system and not a systemic political persecution is probably not uniquely American, though it is uniquely on display in this case.
Lately with SCOTUS, I think we are seeing widespread dissent about the worth of the entire legal system. For many, the system was already unbelievably unjust simply for the logic of what you observe. That’s just how it is, but is that how it should be?
> The idea is that justice should take restitution and admission of guilt into account.
Doesn't that imply that not admitting guilt is a crime for which you get an extra penalty? Let's assume that is correct and ethical. The question then is how big should such an extra penalty be, for the crime of not agreeing you are guilty? Life in prison? Or perhaps capital punishment?
> idk I hate the idea he's not getting released and IIRC he killed noone and robbed noone
Then its good that we as a society have institutions that have a better judgement than you, random internet netizen.
There’s a reason people wear suits to court and we have all sorts of processes designed to venerate authority. Before modern times, power flowed from the Monarch. Now, we choose our representatives but the instruments by which power is administered still exists.
In a civilized country such as many developed countries in Europe a life sentence is roughly fifteen to twenty years. That is a remarkably long time. It is an extreme punishment.
There are exceptions for psycho killers like Anders Breivik. Ulbrich would be unlikely to fall into the Breivik category. His prison conditions would not be so brutal either, see again Breivik for an example. If you believe he deserves life, do you believe he deserves brutality in prison?
He is by many international legal definitions a political prisoner found guilty of what appear as obviously relative political crimes and likely even absolute political crimes. His politics were core to his supposed criminal activities in the war on some drugs. His investigation and prosecution was tainted. Several of the involved officers committed blatant crimes for personal gain for which they were later arrested, charged, and convicted. Those same state agents appear to have alleged the murder for hire, which is somehow not entrapment and yet considered credible.
In 1769, William Blackstone said “the law holds that it is better that 10 guilty persons escape, than that 1 innocent suffer (innocent person be convicted).”
Morally and in principle, especially in a tainted investigation with misbehaving Government agents, the guilty should be let go. Perhaps you don’t agree - either way, there is an appearance of a two tier legal system.
The system that jails Ross but lets very wealthy pharmacy company owners off with thousands of confirmed deaths, people who produced, marketed, and sold similar and sometimes identical drugs exclusively for profit are punished with a fine.
Indeed, it was the realization of his political ideals, no matter how wacky they may seem.
He created a market place which was available as a tor hidden service. It was primarily a website and a communications hub, this makes it a kind of meta-criminal enterprise where he enabled other criminals to sell often illegal drugs, though there was apparently much more.
The stated political goal at the time with using a website was to reduce violence at the time of a transaction. By that alone it was clearly more than a website.
Your claim doesn’t invalidate my claim. It may be that you personally disagree and that’s your political right. Like the man said: you’re entitled to your opinion but not your own facts. Take a look at the definition of relative and absolute political offenses. It’s not what is popularly understood. One need not be Che to be a political prisoner. For example, a person may become one after suffering torture in interrogation by the state or a proxy of the state after a completely normal criminal activity.
Tell that last part to the families of people who have died in the opioid crisis. Drug kingpin is in the eye of the beholder, or prosecution team as we see. For example: Have you watched the CEOs of several major pharmaceutical companies walk with fines? Large fines, paid out of the very profits made from the sales of drugs that killed the customers. Too bad for Ross that he wasn’t smart enough to hire lawyers, and wear a suit, he might be as free as Zuckerberg or the CEO of any of the major Pharma companies making record settlements this year.
Rather than reforming the legal system alone, why not free those harmed by the system we agree is in need of reform? Start by freeing all political prisoners.
Yes, it does. Ross Ulbricht is not a political prisoner, he is a run of the mill criminal prisoner. Sorry if that offends you.
> Too bad for Ross that he wasn’t smart enough
Too bad for Ross that he laughed in the face of the authorities, deliberately built a criminal trafficking organisation and profited from the trade of known illegal substances, while attempting to order hits on people. He's a scumbag.
This equivocation about the pharma industry is utterly laughable, the situation isn't in the slightest bit comparable.
> Start by freeing all political prisoners.
Which would leave Ross Ulbricht still in jail because he's not one of those.
Does the U.S. justice system in your estimation have any political prisoners? If so, could you provide a name of a current prisoner?
In my view the answer is clearly yes. One kind is a prisoner of conscience. Prisoners of conscience are not claiming innocence, for example, rather usually the status is a commentary on the unjustness of laws or of punishment. He probably would never be considered as such by Amnesty International because of the extremely questionable murder for hire charges. Just a hint of a such a thing can sink an Amnesty endorsement of a prisoner.
There are other kinds of political prisoners. One can be a common criminal and be fairly and correctly considered a political prisoner due to political circumstances. The war on drugs is a political circumstance which results in disproportionate sentences. Consider that nearly all terrorism and espionage charges generally fall into the classic categories of relative or absolute political crimes. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_prisoner and note:
“A political prisoner is someone imprisoned for their political activity. The political offense is not always the official reason for the prisoner's detention.”
In his case the majority of his charges are drug or conspiracy charges which are a major political issue for most of the western world at this time and at the time of his incarceration. Furthermore his incredible habit of journaling clearly shows his political views as they extensively detail the war on drugs, and his attempts to allow people to have access to a market for drugs that is safer than the street. American drug laws as seen by most of the rest of the world are insanely harsh in their punishment.
Consider The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe definition c, d, and e from the Wikipedia link. Do you dispute the judge sentenced him harshly to send a message to others? Do you believe his trial wasn’t marred by unbelievable corruption where several involved officers were arrested and jailed for their conduct?
He may very well be a scumbag, my claims aren’t a defense of him personally. Rather please try to read them as a good faith condemnation of the American judicial and American penal system. End the war on drugs, and end the insanely bad conditions for all prisoners. No one should have to suffer what he is suffering in prison, nor a tainted process which led him to prison. No one deserves double life sentences only to be beaten and (almost certainly, if rumors are to be believed) raped in prison for refusing to join a prison gang as a matter of literal personal political beliefs.
But you can tell me he’s not a political prisoner and that he gets what he deserves. That mostly tells me about you, and not about him.
There's nothing unjust about imprisoning drug traffickers, organised crime bosses and those that seek to put out hits on their enemies.
Particularly that last part. Sorry if that offends you.
You can moralise and equivocate all you like, he is not being held for his views or his politics, he is not being held for political activity, but for his clear criminal actions, which include attempts to have people murdered. That's not 'political'.
> There's nothing unjust about imprisoning drug traffickers, organised crime bosses and those that seek to put out hits on their enemies.
There is when the state breaks its own principles and rules, that is the point. It is literally unjust, and the states behavior must be beyond reproach.
> Particularly that last part. Sorry if that offends you.
I am not offended, I asked my questions, which you dodged, in good faith.
I agree with you that murder for hire must be treated seriously. Part of why I find this unjust is that he should have been tried on that charge first and foremost. Yet it looks like it was primarily used to harm his character, and it was not formally brought and successfully won by the state. If the guy did, he should not escape trial for an explicit charge, do you disagree?
> You can moralise and equivocate all you like, he is not being held for his views or his politics, he is not being held for political activity, but for his clear criminal actions, which include attempts to have people murdered. That's not 'political'.
Are you asserting that the drug war, isn’t political?
Are you furthermore asserting that assassinations aren’t inherently political in that context?
Political isn’t a get out of jail free card, and I am not equivocating. I firmly believe he still should stand trial for the murder for hire charges, don’t you?
>The system that jails Ross but lets very wealthy pharmacy company owners off with thousands of confirmed deaths, people who produced, marketed, and sold similar and sometimes identical drugs exclusively for profit are punished with a fine.
Yep, because pharma companies all respect the monopoly of the state. The state can ban any molecule they please and pharma companies will comply. The state could not do anything whatsoever to silkroad so it unleashed its full wrath on a website administrator.
I understand the why - the state felt challenged - ultimately when the state is the supposed victim, the crime is inherently political. It’s nice to see someone in this thread acknowledge the political nature of his situation and thus his status; elsewhere in the discussion there is some pushback.
My primary point is that the Sackler’s company actions have a body count that is sky high, and they will walk with a monetary fine. This is because they accept the primacy of the state, and the victims are not as important and it may be dealt with as a financial compensation issue. That result is as much about the primacy of the state as it is about the standing of the Sackler’s in American high society. In other words it looks like two justice systems: one for the rich, and one for the proles.
In Ulbricht’s case, the hypothetical dead in the murder for hire allegation are known to not exist - the state admits to fabricating all of it. Well not all of it, they claim he was aware, and that he believed their lies. I wouldn’t be surprised if that part was a lie too, since they are admitted liars to achieve their stated goals.
“The people” - of course. So you and me! Everyone we know! Society!
But really: The state who has to expend resources (gotta pay for the officers time), the courts (he is costing them time by asking for a trial!), the prosecution (they probably had to work hard to hide the real sources of intelligence so it could be laundered into a court), the people who bought bad drugs through the market (in theory, I don’t think he was charged with anything specific like this), Ross’s family and friends (isn’t it really their fault for raising him so badly? Nope; but hard to miss an opportunity to victim blame), a lot of Tor relay operators DDoS’es by the Eff-Bee-eye to do intersection and circuit collapsing attacks (yes; they do this and more), almost certainly some NSA XKeyscore specialists were consulted (talk to some of them about it!), the DEA agents who defend our way of life (including the ones that went to prison for corruption in this very case: look it up, it’s amazing!), the secret service (again the ones who went to prison for corruption in this very case!), people who had to sit through the trial and lost faith in their entire country’s justice system (this isn’t most of hacker news which is very “law and order” which means cops can break the rules if the ends justify the means) and of course the children (no specific children, don’t ask so many questions). Never forget. Ahem, I mean, think of the children.
Meanwhile Ross is probably having his ass beaten or sexually assaulted in prison right now for refusing to join a white power group to save himself as a matter of principe. But don’t worry, this is fine because he did it to himself and think of the victims. The poor state, if they hadn’t gotten him, they might have lost the drug war. Good thing they racked up this political win!
There’s a war on drugs my friend, and to paraphrase bill hicks: every time you’re high, you’re winning it!
>company actions have a body count that is sky high
This is not about victims in the population AT ALL. The state could care less about people beeing murdered if it dosen't affect it's power over said people. It was always just about the state's totalitarian power over trading and Ross' complete subjucation of that power.
This. He explicitly wanted to remove opportunity for violence of in-person transactions. This fact wasn’t even a meaningful mitigating factor in sentencing.
I’m confused. He explicitly wanted to remove the opportunity for violence, yet he tried to have multiple people killed? He was against violence yet was so unphased by his crimes that he kept a photo of a victim in a folder in his hard drive?
I think there’s an easier explanation. He may have started the Silk Road with high hopes but things went haywire around the time he started making millions…
Ulbricht should have taken the plea. It was his only chance of breathing free air again. As it stands now, he doesn’t have a hope. It would be very hard for a judge to sentence based on a dream to remove violence when presented with evidence that the accused was actively trying to have people killed. The plea was his last chance and he didn’t take advantage of it.
Yeah, it’s confusing, his stated political goals and the claims of the state with the clear goal to discredit him seem to clash. Perhaps we should doubt the state, presume innocence of the accused, and ensure he is given a separate trial on the murder for hire charges. They are accusations of a terrible crime. They remain accusations even though evidence about them was included in other (political) charges for which he was convicted.
The state tried to bring separate charges and the case was closed without a conviction. It’s probably fair to say that the convicted corrupt cops planted everything and made it up, if we are just accepting base accusations at face value. I am sure you won’t agree, but my response is also for all the other people who see the injustice of the drug war, who have had enough of corrupt cops, and judges only sympathetic to the harshest of laws handing out sentences that are literally not possible to carry out. A double life sentence, if only he had two lives to give for his country, eh?
If the other charges were sufficient to say he did this horrible crime, why wasn’t double jeopardy invoked for the other case? Perhaps someone who followed the case closely can speak to this as from outside it looks extremely suspect. Since it wasn’t, we can assume it isn’t as settled as some would like except in relation to a conspiracy charge for a drug related crime. Those two things seem awfully political to me, and so I remain unconvinced.
Here’s one theory: people such as yourself were already convinced. He was given a double life sentence. Who on the prosecution side cares to allow a person to confront their accusers who were later jailed for corruption directly related to him and these charges? Nearly no one apparently: it’s fine to not convict him as the allegation served to discredit him for his extremely blatant political criticism and actions against the war on some drugs.
There is probably some truth in what you say about the fact that his best chances were with a plea deal. That is probably one of the saddest facts in the American justice system. It’s a concept that doesn’t really exist in many European legal systems, the right to bargain about justice. So his best bet to be free was to skip exercising his right to a trial… nothing problematic here, just another day in an American court.
Another option for him would have been to have never resisted the drug war. To never have attempted to build a market where people have nearly zero chance to physically harm each other in a transaction. Yes they can harm by consuming the substances, but that is again a clear political action in his written philosophy: people should be free to chose to take that risk. He was clearly a fool for believing he could change any of these matters and he should have known his place, right?
Some of us who watch and have watched our friends and family and other people suffer through the drug war where the police regularly kill or cause immense suffering with impunity are less sanguine than you. A market where people cannot be harmed in a transaction was a remarkable thing at the time, and it has now become a norm. As usual the rich get it with things like a coke taxi dispatched by signal, and the poor continue to buy drugs on the street and suffer violence which is all but intended by the state with it’s structures. We should be doing harm reduction and people who try this, however misguided should not be handled as if they are the same as the Zeta cartel.
Those charges were dropped and there was never a trial related to them let alone the evidence to actually convict on it. Anyone can be accused of crimes and later have the charges dropped.
The attempted murder for hire stuff was included as part of the conspiracy to commit narcotics trafficking charge, and the evidence for it was included in the case for proving that charge.
Ross's story is heartbreaking honestly. Yes the guy basically built the Amazon of drugs, yes he should have done prison time for it. But FFS 2X life without possibility of parole.
This guys has maybe one chance left and that's if a sympathetic President gets elected and pardons him.
Pardoning someone that was found guilty of running a massive drug operation doesn't seem like an optic that is popular for a lot of presidential candidates.
Maybe if the Libertarian Party manages to win the presidency?
I think decriminalizing drugs and offering extensive health care as a basic human right sounds like a better choice. I don't see Walmart execs going to jail when people conduct drug exchanges in Walmart parking lots.
It's not unpopular though. Only about 28% of Americans think that prison sentences are too long, whereas 32% think they are too short and 37% think that they're about right.
Also if you're into podcasts the Crypto Critics Corner episode with Nicholas Weaver [2], who was involved in the trial to a small degree, is really good. [1]
Yes, it is reasonable to assume so. The DEA coined the term, right?
It seems like mass surveillance provided by intelligence was likely used to locate relevant computers but that is not what was introduced in court to the best of my knowledge.
That's not a valid answer to the question asked. He did not steal anyone's territory, he did not steal anyone's money. He is out of the game, he did not testify against someone else to get them to prison.
Yeah I can imagine that someone might still be ticked off by him and try to kill him, but you said your original claim with so much conviction ("he has enemies everywhere, with vast resources....he will never know peace") that you clearly know who you're talking about, and your response is "you don't think he made any enemies along the way", which makes no sense.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 336 ms ] threadThe longer Ross is in there, the more friends in high places he will have, as so many people become familiar with online marketplaces, bitcoin lore, education about the technology, the corruption of the investigators, trial judge, unsatisfactory testimony by “expert witness”, circular logic to undermine bill of rights protections for defendant, withheld evidence (that is not deemed exculpatory by the appeals court, but could have swayed a jury regardless) and seeing that this problem with Ross is still ongoing
So many cases have been dropped for waaaaay fewer procedural problems
To see this level of unorthordox coordination ongoing with the Federal Government and Ross, I am pretty confident other individuals will be able to use their employment and status in the public sector to alter Ross’ conditions in his favor
I thought it was weird nobody considered donating to a Trump campaign or PAC in exchange for a desired outcome, in 2020 convicts and senators did that to mitigate consequences
Free Ross raises enough money and have enough friends to get the conversations going, as seen by this article, so not doing that path seemed to have lacked inspiration
Its easy to have tunnel vision, that path was still obvious. It is important that he also doesn't have to pay restitution, but I feel like the state sanctioned Presidential pay for play available in the US would have absolved that too
This pardon could not have been without some back-story:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/20/anthony-levandowski-pardoned...
> “Mr. Levandowski pled guilty to a single criminal count arising from civil litigation. Notably, his sentencing judge called him a ‘brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs.’ Mr. Levandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good.”
yet he's step brother is still free. its a mystery.
The crime isn’t that you did something wrong. It’s that you didn’t make the right person richer by doing so.
Your fatalism only shuts down the discourse of workable solutions. You may as well be a shill for "the man" as you're working for the status quo agenda holding this attitude.
Your moral cry for the small time user is in alignment with me though. I'd decriminalize low amount possession and drug use since locking up drug users almost certainly pushes people who are vulnerable to collapse into definitely collapsed positions.
A civilized people would want the road to success to be the incentivized over pushing people down who are then unable to escape (statistically).
Selling drugs in large quantities isn't inherently unethical or immoral.
Trying to hire a hit man to have someone else murdered in an incredibly specific and graphic way, on the other hand, is inherently both unethical and immoral.
But is it worth a life sentence if the murders never happened? I think there's a reasonable case for "no."
> The Court must determine whether these allegations have been demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence and I find that there is ample and unambiguous evidence that Ulbricht commissioned five murders as part of his efforts to protect his criminal enterprise and that he paid for these murders. [...] The Court finds that the evidence is clear and unambiguous and it far exceeds the necessary preponderance findings
This is a criminal trial, not a civil one. Preponderance is not sufficient. No witnesses could say that Ross = DPR in these messages, and the recipient of these messages is... an unreliable narrator at best.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/silk-roads-alleg...
[0] https://reason.com/2018/07/25/ross-ulbrichts-murder-for-hire...
[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/rogue-silk-road-agent-admits-to-ste...
He should have teamed up with the Sacklers
Not only that (shouldn't consider outside claims that haven't been evaluated by the jury). The DEA withheld evidence that he could have used in his defense and later DEA agents went to jail for corruption (attempting to steal funds and it appeared setting him up).
Further, there wasn't a warrant for his records; they just took them and monitored his traffic. SCOTUS refused to hear the case (doesn't mean it was reasonable or not, they have discretion to skip stuff).
Many people (myself included) believe the government officials in this case were attempting to steal the funds and set him up to take a fall so they can take the funds for themselves.
A lot of this can be actually seen on the wikipedia -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht
It was part of the trial, as part of the case to prove one of the conspiracy charges.
> All the evidence shows that you viewed Silk Road both as above the law and the laws didn't apply, and in this context also very dangerous.
> Your own words I have looked at very carefully and I have reread certainly more than once in this whole process. They reveal a kind of an arrogance and they display an intent that is very important to the Court's determination, [...]
https://www.scribd.com/doc/283722300/Ross-Ulbricht-Sentencin...
And "without parole" is a meaningless thing in Federal prison since there is no parole. If you commit Federal crimes, you get to do Federal sentences.
See page 20 onwards for the evidence that the judge weighed about the ordered hits: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/17/17A559/20426/20171...
So the gov couldn’t prove its case but it still gets to use that data for sentencing?
The judge weighed the evidence, weighed Ulbricht’s lawyers’ responses and found a preponderance of evidence that he did indeed order the hits which enhanced (extended) the sentence he was given.
It’s been awhile since I looked at the transcripts but at the time I couldn’t believe how bad his lawyers were. They offered almost no reply to damning accusation after damning accusation.
You are being deprived of life/liberty at sentencing, if the judge can use information/"accusations" that the government failed to prove then you are being punished without conviction.
Just say that you agree with them. You don't have to angrily pretend like you are disagreeing. You agree completely, 100% that those charges got dropped.
Ross Ulbricht's Murder-for-Hire Charges Dropped by U.S. Attorney https://reason.com/2018/07/25/ross-ulbrichts-murder-for-hire...
The conspiracy charges were related to computer hacking and trafficking narcotics, not murder-for-hire which from all the evidences presented was a scheme set up to collect payments from him.
Dude didn't end up in jail for murder, because the murder charges were dropped. D.R.O.P.P.E.D. Words have meanings and you are twisting them.
You are going to have a hard time getting me to take an opinion piece that commits a factual error that refutes its premise more seriously than the actual source documents that contradict it.
Yes they did charge them, and then dropped them. That's what happened. Charges and convictions are not the same concept, and it's quite amusing you have the galls to say anyone else is "wrong".
I don't know if there was some other more overt "murder" charge that he had that was later dropped (I only see the original and the superseding indictment). But if that happened, the only material implication of it is that they changed the structure of how they charged the murder-for-hire scheme. They did not give up on that charge; in a significant sense, they bet (and won) their case on it --- as the sentencing memoranda point out as well.
This thread is an interesting example of how powerful the Internet folklore about Ulbricht is. Like, it stands up against the primary source documents of a conviction and sentencing! The sentencing documents must be what's wrong, not the Reason article! It's pretty fascinating, just sociologically.
I imagine this is just self defense mechanism at work - if you concede to the reality that a libertarian drug utopia took around 3 years to devolve into cliche South American narco violence, you'll end up with that oh-so-uncomfortable step of having to revisit your worldviews.
All those libertarian manifestos that Ulbricht dabbled in are just a marketing veneer of the stereotypical criminal organization.
Ulbricht wasn't living in a utopia, nor are many people going to argue his acts perfectly reflect some vague notion of any utopia.
Nowhere in that opinion piece does it backup its titles assertion nor link to any of the legal documents. Basically op is arguing based on storytelling not law.
The two taken together could be construed as entrapment, but the charges were dropped so there isn't a conclusive answer.
Prisoners work jobs that are exempt from minimum wage and can pay as little as 25¢/hour.
Having your wages garnished while in prison is a huge deal because it limits your ability to take care of yourself (both literally, but also your ability to trade items with others for protection).
If you don't have access to money in prison, you're screwed. Unless you have some other valuable asset (such as connections on the outside that you can leverage), you are likely to be a target for other inmates, and you're going to be a filthy, starving wreck.
The exact details vary depending on the type of prison, the location, and other factors, but in general: having the debt wiped out would almost certainly be a huge deal for his quality of life in prison, and would literally extend his expected lifespan.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/25/prison-pe...
Garnishing prison wages is fucking brutal and stupid though. Prison laborers typically make less than a quarter per hour, so that isn't going to do shit in terms of repaying any debts, it's just a spite play to make someone's life miserable.
Honestly, if I was Ross I'd refuse to leave my cell and act insane till I got placed in solitary. In most prisons you can still have books in solitary, you just lose out on yard and TV access, which is still a great trade if you're getting regularly beaten and hate raped.
You're describing the idealized scenario, which isn't exactly wrong, but it doesn't represent the reality that many prisoners actually live in. Yes, it varies - not every prisoner will have the same experience, even within the same prison - but having access to basic necessities is by no means a given in prison, and having wages garnished makes that much harder.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/11/18/indigence/
If this helps provide himself with some prison currency being able to buy from the store, that could go a long way towards helping him have something to trade to help the living hell he is going through.
Wikipedia also says "Ulbricht was separately indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single murder-for-hire charge, alleging that he contracted to kill one of his employees (a former Silk Road moderator). Prosecutors moved to drop this indictment after his New York conviction and sentence became final"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Arrest
Try this: Google [federal narcotics conspiracy "murder for hire"] (it's not a rare combination of factors!), pull up some DOJ press releases (I found several on the first search results page), and then look them up in PACER. I'm looking at Roger Key (a.k.a. "Luchie")'s 2015 indictment right now, and it's similar. This isn't some weird finagling the prosecutors did with Ulbricht; it's just how you get charged for this kind of conduct.
This notion that prosecutors somehow gave up on the murder-for-hire charge is Internet folklore. It's just not real. What complicated the charge isn't some bungling spy story about the agents involved, but the fact that the murder was a set-up and he didn't actually have anyone killed. But the prosecution established that Ulbricht tried to, and that's also the simplest and most reasonable conclusion to reach given the facts. I've never read an exculpatory explanation of Ulbricht's payment to arrange murders that made any sense at all.
You seem to be saying that the reason he wasn't charged/convicted is because nobody was actually murdered. That seems hard for me to believe because the state would have known nobody was actually murdered when they were writing the indictment (which alleges the murder for hire plot) or when they were bringing the original charges.
It's also true that agents involved in the plot, the agent Ulbricht thought he was buying the hit from specifically, were arrested and convicted for stealing from the silk road. I think it's way more plausible that the government decided not to go in to the extent of the corruption of their officers at trial, because it would provide a good reason to think about what other government dishonesty their might be, rather than the government deciding that they can't charge attempted murder for hire because nobody died.
https://www.wired.com/2015/03/dea-agent-charged-acting-paid-...
The second bit, about nobody needing to be dead for him to be charged, we agree on.
One reason I think people are confused about this is that there was a second prosecution, by a different team of prosecutors in a different case (out of Baltimore?) that charged the murder-for-hire scheme more directly. That may be, but he was still charged for it in the SDNY case, which earned him a life sentence.
SDNY was not evasive about this! They not only indicted for the murder-for-hire scheme, won a conviction on it, and had him sentenced based in large part on it, but also crowed about it in their press release. I'm sort of baffled by the extremely common belief that the DOJ "dropped the charges" about the murder-for-hire scheme. They did more or less the opposite thing.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ross-ulbricht-aka-dread-pi...
Noticeably not on that list is anything related to murder, attempted murder, solicitation of murder, or murder-for-hire.
If I understand you correctly you are saying that the attempted murder is an element of his continuing criminal enterprise - or something like that. I don't believe this though and I haven't seen any evidence of this from you. Googling for people who are convicted for hiring fake hitmen I see that they are charged with things like "Solicitation of murder" and not "Continuing criminal enterprise."
Ulbricht was not charged with murder for hire in New York and he wasn't convicted of it ever. Ulbricht was charged with murder for hire in Maryland and those charges were dropped.
In the released indictment [2] (Apparently there seems to be a superseding indictment), DPR was charged on four counts. Count one is "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy", none of the counts are "Murder-For-Hire". But, there are three overt (motivating) acts for the "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy": a) Provide a platform for selling drugs b) Solicit a murder-for-hire c) Logging in as admin on Silk Road
So, while the charge "Murder-For-Hire" probably seems hard to prove (as stated above), using the intent of it to justify the count "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy" worked here. In a sense, I believe, DPR can not be labeled officially with "murder-for-hire", but in order to protect his "Continuing Criminal Enterprise" and as such commit "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy" it appears that he would have committed a "murder-for-hire" crime.
Sources:
[1] https://www.springsteadbartish.com/federal-criminal-defense-...
[2] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao-sdny/legacy...
What seems more likely is that the murder-for-hire thing is messier than the broader, abstract things he was charged with, and they had him dead to rights on that stuff anyways. Without meaningfully contesting and refuting the murder-for-hire stuff, it's relevant conduct for the sentencing; it did the work the DOJ needed it to do.
The big issue in these discussions is the idea that the murder-for-hire stuff was prejudicial --- that it wasn't a part of the case, but was allowed to hang over the case to taint the jury. But that's clearly not true; he was indicted for it, twice, in the SDNY case.
Certainly. And no wonder that the other charges from the Maryland District were dismissed.
> he was indicted for it, twice, in the SDNY case.
You mean, he was charged and found guilty of "Murder-For-Hire"? This I don't follow. I thought overt acts serve the purpose of evidence for the charges/counts rather than being charges itself.
In any case, DPR clearly concluded, that paying someone to kill someone else in order to preserve his anonymity/enterprise was OK. He even committed it.
This. The mental gymnastics involved in people pivoting from "the justice system is awful, especially the way they've treated poor little Ulbricht" to "the only possible standard for judging Ulbricht's character and intentions is the decisions the justice system made or didn't make" is Olympian.
I'm not sympathetic to him in the slightest. I believe he's almost certainly guilty of attempting to have those people murdered. I think his sentence should be overturned and I think he should be explicitly charged with attempted murder, and hopefully he will be convicted of those crimes and re-sentenced to life in prison. (Whether or not that's legally viable, I have no idea; I just think it's what ought to happen.)
I would appreciate being reminded as to the facts of that. I’ve always felt skeptical of that claim, but I haven’t spent the time to research it.
It just felt like that would be the exact thing an organization would pin on him if they wanted to destroy his life.
It’s entirely possible he did, but I remind you that in an era where Epstein probably didn’t kill himself, it’s really hard to just take things at face value.
EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32057717 is a pretty good overview.
There is no serious doubt that he solicited multiple hits, both from an undercover FBI agent and from other people, possibly scammers. It is up to you what moral weights you want to assign to US drug policies, that the FBI agent was corrupt [2], or that apparently no one actually got killed, but it's silly that people are still disputing the plain fact that Ross Ulbricht tried to have people murdered.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/02/read-transcript-silk-roads-bos...
> Dread Pirate Roberts 3/29/2013 22:55: Hi again R&W, I hate to come to you with a problem when we are just starting to get to know one another, but Blake (FriendlyChemist) is causing me problems. Are you still looking for him or now that you've found Xin have you given up? I would like to put a bounty on his head if it's not too much trouble for you. What would be an adequate amount to motivate you to find him? Necessities like this do happen from time to time for a person in my position. I have others I can turn to, but it is always good to have options and you are close to the case right now. Hopefully this is something you are open to and can be another aspect of our business relationship. Regards, DPR
> Dread Pirate Roberts 3/31/2013 8:59: Don't want to be a pain here, but the price seems high. Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80k. Are the prices you quoted the best you can do? I would like this done asap as he is talking about releasing the info on Monday
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/8q845p/dea-agent-who-faked-a...
You might want to give me a really good price.
Martin Shkreli was in the easiest parts of prison for example. Ross is in the lifer prison with the hardest criminals.
It's said he's struggling a lot because you have to join the racist white groups in lifer prison, and his morals don't allow that. But you have to, or you have no protection, and may get killed.
The US prison system is a far scarier place than anyone thinks about. You essentially have to stay blind to what happens inside, or you couldn't with good conscious send anyone there.
What was the nature of your case? Or are you saying you're DPR?
Said by who?
"Using the online moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts,” or “DPR,” ULBRICHT controlled and oversaw every aspect of Silk Road, and managed a staff of paid, online administrators and computer programmers who assisted with the day-to-day operation of the site. Through his ownership and operation of Silk Road, ULBRICHT reaped commissions worth more than $13 million generated from the illicit sales conducted through the site. ULBRICHT also demonstrated a willingness to use violence to protect his criminal enterprise and the anonymity of its users, soliciting six murders-for-hire in connection with operating the site, although there is no evidence that these murders were actually carried out."
Should a drug kingpin who built a global network that facilitated the transfer of illegal substances who was willing to kill people to protect that enterprise only get 10 years?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for drugs to be decriminalized in the US, but where the line is crossed for me is that this person was willing to KILL others in service of making money.
For a criminal conviction, the standard is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt".
For sentencing, judges can consider evidence under a different standard, "preponderance of the evidence". As prosecutors introduced evidence of the murder-for-hire allegations in trial, the judge was permitted to consider it.
Clearly he didn’t just build a drug website, he was fine ending lives for it. A slap on the wrist (even if his family thinks he is a good guy) wouldn’t deter him much, it would seem.
And the first judge very much agreed with your assessment.
[1]: https://freeross.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Sentencing_2...
If a defendant has been convicted and then goes on to hold the court publicly in contempt gets a harsher sentence than someone who is truly reticent and has taken actions to attempt to restore their victims even before sentencing.. I don't see how justice has been unequally applied. The two defendants _are_ unequal. That's the point.
Now I understand your position and even agree with it to a point, the idea that justice is blind means judgment is without consideration of undue influence.
Like many things, balance is the best approach. Minimum sentences came about when the prior sentences were perceived to be unreasonable.
Don’t get me started on prison reform, though. Blind or not, US prisons are inherently unconstitutional.
True, but I see a bigger problem with sentencing being based on conduct that the defendant was acquitted of. The concept is supposed to be that if you were acquitted, you didn't commit the crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Murder-for-hire_...
>>> Sentencing has always had unprovable stuff considered.
But still, looking outside this trial, sentences being handed out based on acquitted conduct is very much a thing that happens, and it shouldn't be allowed.
The standard for conviction is "beyond a reasonable doubt". The standard for something to be considered in sentencing is "perponderance of the evidence".
As such, it's possible for a judge to take a look at a case where a conviction couldn't be obtained, but consider the evidence to be compelling enough to use in sentencing for something else.
And it's not relevant anyway. Once you're acquitted, you didn't commit the crime. Hazy evidence that you did commit the crime might be something the sentencing judge can legitimately consider, but it's necessarily overruled by the fact that you didn't commit the crime, which is something the sentencing judge must consider.
No. "Not guilty" is not the same as "innocent".
Not guilty means they could not prove you committed the crime beyond a reasonable doubt; that it's possible that you're innocent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence is a useful resource for understanding why a person is innocent unless and until they have been proven guilty.
It is surprising that this is even a matter of debate. This is a basic fact taught as part of U.S. compulsory education.
That's true, but that's not relevant, because that's not the scenario. The standard for criminal conviction is not the standard for “to claim that you did this”, it is the standard to determine the maximum legal criminal punishment.
The standard for a judge to assign punishment within the range specified by the statute under which a person was convicted is lower, because by definition the facts which allow the maximum sentence in that range have been established beyond a reasonable doubt.
> Once you're acquitted, you didn't commit the crime
Legally “didn’t commit the crime” (and thus not allowing separate punishment for the crime) is not the same as “did not do something substantially similar to the crime“ (which therefore might be eligible for sanctions other than separate criminal punishment, such as enhancements within the statutorily authorized range of punishments for another crime, civil liability, or all kinds of different things.)
Heck, it doesn't even mean “did not commit a crime with substantially identical elements within the jurisdiction of a separate sovereign with concurrent jurisdiction”, though that's not directly relevant to this case.
I don't think you'll find many people arguing that this is a state of affairs that makes any sense. My position in this thread takes the form "the justice system is doing something that is self-evidently insane". And that's also what I would say here. Being insane in one way doesn't stop you from being insane in another way.
> The standard for criminal conviction is not the standard for “to claim that you did this”
And this just isn't true. The standard for making the claim is the standard for conviction. As far as the law is concerned, the conviction is how you make the claim. As a person, if you make the claim in the absence of a conviction you'll run into serious legal problems. Unless, apparently, you're handing down a sentence for some other crime, in which case anything goes.
Again, this isn't true. The standard for evaluating a claim is different for conviction versus sentencing.
> As a person, if you make the claim in the absence of a conviction you'll run into serious legal problems.
No, you won't, at least not necessarily. Libel would be a civil action, and as with sentencing, the standard is lower in a civil trial. This is, for example, why OJ Simpson got acquitted in criminal court but was deemed culpable for the murders in civil court.
No, you won't. Heck, as a person, you can make the same claim in court and win a sizable payout based on it with evidence insufficient for a criminal conviction, even if the elements required for civil liability are identical to those for the crime, because the standard of evidence in a civil case is preponderance of the evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt like a criminal conviction.
The high burden of proof required for criminal conviction specifically exists as a narrow purpose failsafe that doesn't apply in other contexts even within the criminal justice system.
Shaun Bridges of the US secret service and Carl Force of the US DEA were siphoning bitcoin off to their personal accounts throughout the investigation. Bridges even tried to flee the country while on bail.
Think what you want about Ulbrict, but the cops that took him down were every bit as dirty as he was, if not more.
Obviously the agents who stole the funds were dirty, but the contents of your first paragraph is called a criminal investigation. Nothing untoward there (as described, at least).
For my 2 cents it seems entirely reasonable that an armed gang backed by the state would consider themselves to be individually above the law, since they are constantly told that the ends always justify the means, no matter how odious those means may be.
If a journalist or academic gets found to have knowingly fabricated even the smallest detail it immediately calls into question their entire body of work, and even colleagues they may have worked with.
These are federal agents and the best standard we can hold them to is "oh, we don't have direct evidence of other crimes so we'll just assume the first time we caught you was the first time you did it"
They sold him details of the case for bitcoin into their personal wallets. It wasn't part of a sting or intel operation. The same cops that built the case against him were themselves indicted for money laundering payments they received from Ross. Multiple independent agencies and field offices with rogue agents undermining the cases they were building in real time for personal gain that was contemporaneously worth less than a million dollars.
We don't allow it from cops (they're going to jail). In the case of these two cops, it's not clear what you want. From what I can tell, they weren't allowed to testify, and they gathered none of the evidence used to convict him. Instead, that evidence was to be used in another trial on different charges and the government dropped those charges because the cops were unreliable.
Did the police investigating Ross misrepresent these murders to him while they were occurring?
Did the police investigating Ross attempt to enrich themselves by stealing illicit funds from his drug enterprise or by selling him details of the pending investigation?
I'll give you that the courts have repeatedly held the police can legally do most of these things, and that even having lying/stealing cops running the investigation doesn't invalidate the fruits of that investigation. Perhaps you could also concede that a lot of observers are going to have difficulty seeing the difference in these two shades of grey?
(2) Presumably not, because they held up in court.
(3) I have no idea, and don't see the relevance to Ulbricht. By all means, prosecute any corrupt FBI agents that were involved.
I'm not making a grand normative claim about the justice of the Ulbricht sentence (I think he's a monster, but also that sentences in general are too high). I'm simply establishing that the extraordinarily common Internet narrative of "Ulbricht was never charged with a murder-for-hire scheme, and rumors about it were prejudicial to the case" is irrefutably false. That's as far as I go with this stuff.
I'm pretty sure it's highly illegal to take actions that you think will lead to a murder, even if the plot if unsuccessful.
The whole investigation and trial, all told, were a shitshow. I cannot trust any of the process, so cannot conclude anything about Ulbricht from it. The most we can say is that chances are he was guilty of something just from how deep he was in the middle of it all. But I would give the agents longer sentences.
Here's the indictment: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao-sdny/legacy...
Page 5 of the indictment includes the murder-for-hire activity as part of the first count ("Narcotics trafficking conspiracy"). Ulbricht was convicted on this count of the indictment.
Here is Ulbricht's appeal against sentence to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-2nd-circuit/1862572.html
Ulbricht doesn't even bother arguing that the court was wrong in considering the murder-for-hire during sentencing, only that they shouldn't merit a life sentence because they probably didn't actually take place.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-2nd-circuit/1862572.html#foot...
Later
I removed ", and bets more of the case on it.", to dial it back a little.
What you're doing here is presenting the indictment with the murder-for-hire as overt acts and relying on the sleight of hand that the reader will assume the conviction asserts the overt acts, when in fact the conviction only generally relies on at least one overt act (and need not be any murder-for-hire related one).
For example suppose I were convicted for reckless driving for driving 300% over the speed limit in a school zone while school was in session. That same evidence could have been used for a speeding charge instead of a reckless driving charge.
It would not be violating innocent until proven guilty or due process if my sentencing for reckless driving took into account my extremely high speed, even though I was not charged or convicted of speeding. My driving 300% over the speed limit was proven as part of convicting me for reckless driving and the court can treat my driving that fast as a fact.
In the Ulbricht case the murder-for-hire stuff was part of the basis for one of the conspiracy charges, evidence was heard for it in regards to that, and he was convicted on that charge. So the court can take it as a fact because of that and use it when considering the sentencing for that conviction.
The murder for hire claims lack necessary evidence to convict. Outside that it becomes a question of whether platform owners are responsible for the content on their platform.
I am personally in favor of content owners being responsible. I think Mark Zuckerberg should be in prison. However, Mark Zuckerberg is not in prison, and continues to wreak havoc on humanity. Why is Ulbricht responsible for what happened on his platform, but Zuckerberg is not?
In my view, Ulbricht should be free so long as Zuckerberg is free.
Ulbricht created a website to sell drugs and made efforts not to police the platform.
It's pretty clear what the difference is between someone who makes a platform that can be used by bad actors but makes efforts to stop them, versus someone who makes a platform for bad actors and tries to protect them.
There's names of people in the public Congressional record that you cannot put in any post in any context.
The 2020 riots were coordinated on FB.
According to the White House press secretary, the WH sends lists of people to Facebook to censor who did not commit crimes.
If you are successfully opposed to the regime, for example popular voices against US criminal actions regarding Ukraine, you get nerfed.
Azov Batallion was previously banned from FB because they are literally Nazis, but ever since the government started giving weapons to these Nazis you can praise them without concern you will get banned.
Because they wanted to appease russia, which proven to be futile.
> The Azov Battalion has been described as a far-right militia,[60][16] with connections to neo-Nazism[214] and members wearing neo-Nazi and SS symbols and regalia, and expressing neo-Nazi views.[58][215]
> The group's insignia features the Wolfsangel (or a mirrored variation of it),[216][217][218][219] a German heraldic charge inspired by historic wolf traps adopted by the Nazi Party and by WW2 German military units. Its insignia also used to feature the Black Sun,[220][221][222][211][209] both of which remain two popular neo-Nazi symbols.[210][194][220][215] Azov soldiers have worn fascist or Nazi-associated symbols on their uniforms,[223] including swastikas and SS symbols.[23] In 2014, the German ZDF television network showed images of Azov fighters wearing helmets with swastika symbols and "the SS runes of Hitler's infamous black-uniformed elite corps".[224] In 2015, Marcin Ogdowski, a Polish war correspondent, gained access to one of Azov's bases located in the former holiday resort Majak; Azov fighters showed him Nazi tattoos as well as Nazi emblems on their uniforms.[225][16]
This is jurisdiction-dependent. Facebook (a US entity) does things in other countries that would be illegal in the US, such as in Vietnam where it turns over identity information of protesters to police without due process, for beatings/torture purposes.
> Ulbricht created a website to sell drugs and made efforts not to police the platform.
There is another separate moral question about whether or not this should be illegal at all. Even if you think it should, most people agree that the penalties imposed for same in the USA are insanely disproportionate.
Jimmy Carter once said:
"Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed."
There's also the small issue of the hundreds of billions of dollars of whoring and drug retailing that happens via WhatsApp and Facebook and Instagram DMs. WhatsApp is literally the biggest drug marketplace on planet Earth. Nobody seems to bat an eye at the fact that Meta/Facebook could but does not police these.
The other commenter is right: If Zuckerberg is free, then so should DPR be.
Your belief in the law doesn’t change its status. What he did was very illegal, with all use cases to support illegal activity. This wasn’t about possession for an individual, it was a mechanism for large scale distribution of illegal products.
It’s apples and oranges to compare the two.
Meanwhile for making a website for an illicit market that explicitly sought to reduce violence between people who would otherwise buy or sell their drugs in a situation classically prone to violence — big U received not one but two life sentences.
America has some extremely strange investigation, prosecution, sentencing, and incarceration priorities. One can reasonably call them absurd and unjust, but many Americans will simply tell you that he deserves what he gets. They don’t remark if the rest of us deserve it as well. We are all poorer for this kind of a railroading.
All I'll say is this: I originally replied to sneak who rhetorically questioned whether illegal actions are always wrong. That's called moral relativism and I explained that when you live in a society your ethics are governed to some extent by your peers. So, while you can believe and in large part do whatever you want, illegal actions don't somehow become ethical because you found a few people who happen to be interested in challenging the moral framework behind the laws in question. I find it quite useless and unproductive to bring such a juvenile response to a serious discussion because it takes things to a place where you can just say whatever you want and be right, as evidenced by your inclusion of GPT-2.
It could be called "moral relativism". But I do not think it really is.
The moral content of my actions is entirely independent of the legality of my actions.
There is correlation, a lot of bad things and few good things are illegal.
But legality does not imply good and vise versa.
I don't think that logically follows, either.
The fact that he is in jail, or that it is a crime, does not confirm nor disconfirm that society considers his alleged actions unwanted; as the law is not a perfect or even approximate representation of society's preferences.
All it tells you is that it's illegal. It doesn't tell you whether or not society considers it unwanted. They are not congruent. There are literally thousands upon thousands of US federal felonies that society has no opinion whatsoever on.
Oftentimes laws are passed with the involvement of only a handful of members of society. They are largely disconnected from the wants and views of the wider world.
I need to redefine my definition of trolling.
I am too tolerant, and could be accused of it myself if my definition so far off.
A learning experience
In this case I don't think our interlocutor is trolling; they're just throwing out words and phrases they think are applause lights without much regard to what they actually mean, with the intent of sincerely signaling their emotions—political sloganeering as a prophylactic against rational thought. It can look like trolling because, as in trolling, the person is saying things that are false and even self-contradictory, and isn't concerned about this; but the motivation is different.
Unfortunately my comment upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32064946 seems to have gotten flagged by the sort of people who prefer political sloganeering to careful rational deconstruction of political sloganeering; perhaps if you think it's a useful contribution to the discussion you could "vouch" it?
As for whether I have any idea what you're talking about, I don't think that there is in fact a thing that you are talking about, so it would make no sense for me to know what it was. I think you're contradicting yourself in the same unselfconscious way as the neural network output (which, by the way, probably is not from GPT-2 any more).
The standard definition of "moral relativism" is the belief that there is no absolute standard of morality, not the belief that the law is not an absolute standard of morality. There are merely descriptive, meta-ethical, and normative variants, but nobody has advanced any of them in this thread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
However, your idiosyncratic definition of "moral relativism" as "questioning whether illegal actions are always wrong" is, I suppose, satisfied!
The belief in an absolute standard of morality usually entails that the law can come into conflict with it; the only way to avoid that is for the law to be the unique and only standard of morality. This entails, for example, that the act of making or repealing laws has no moral weight, except if you violate the proper parliamentary procedure in the process; even if the law you enact, for example, licenses you to confiscate the possessions of your political enemies and give them to your supporters. It also entails that, for example, if the law orders you to torture your mother to death when you reach 25 years old, it is moral for you to do it and immoral for you to refuse. I have never encountered anyone arguing seriously for such a standard.
However, it would be possible for a sufficiently extreme moral relativist (in the standard sense, not your idiosyncratic definition) to argue that such a morality was valid or acceptable even if they did not themselves happen to hold it.
In short, the only way to not be a "moral relativist" by your idiosyncratic definition is to be the most extremist sort of moral relativist by the standard definition.
Any other person who engages in the smallest amount of moral reasoning will immediately see that in the world there are many sorts of laws: good laws, bad laws, laws that sink to the vilest depths of depravity; and, even if they believe that there is a moral obligation to obey the law, even a bad law, they will easily see that in many cases disobedience to the law is the least wrong thing a person can do.
Many other people believe that there is a moral obligation to obey some laws, but not others. For example, I believe that there is a law with heavy penalties that prohibits you from insulting the King of Thailand, whether or not you are in Thailand, and there are several similar laws in different countries that prohibit insulting one or another nobleman or religious leader, alive or dead. Very few people believe that there is a moral obligation to obey all of these laws, but wars have been fought over them; the Peace of Westphalia established an uneasy Schelling point that has held to some extent for some centuries.
As another example, currently both the ROC and PRC claim sovereignty over Taiwan, and their laws impose conflicting obligations in many cases; for example, the ROC's laws require 4 months of military service in the ROC military of all men at the age of 18, while serving in the armed forces of the ROC is illegal under the PRC's laws. Very few people believe that there is a moral obligation for Taiwanese men to obey both of these conflicting laws, which is impossible.
Other people believe that there is no fundamental moral obligation to obey any law, because governments are not the sort o...
2. You're pedantically missing the forest for the trees.
I understand and agree with what you're saying up to your last 2 sentences. The reason I said you're missing my point is because you are. My point is not that laws are the end-all-be-all of morality and don't question just follow. My point is that, while you can believe whatever the hell you want ethically (and, because I'm pretty morally relative almost to the extreme, I'd probably support you abstractly, even if you're not morally relative and rather hold some things absolutely,) I still believe that our western society plays an important superseding role in determining what behaviors should be allowed and the punishments if you misbehave. I accept that we govern each other, that we've figured out a system that isn't "don't insult the king" and that works for the majority of people.
So, abstractly: argue about whatever you want. Express yourself freely. Challenge the status quo. Bad laws are bad, let's change them. Civil disobedience! Etc.
But, in this case: it's not abstract, there are facts, a justice process, and outcome to consider so it's silly to apply abstract reasoning to it. <-- That is my sole point. We can descend from our ivory tower and discuss the dirty details of because they exist. And that's what this topic is about. OP is not an abstract piece on whether it's ethical or desirable or not to not police content on your platform. I'm pretty sure we'd fall on the same side in that debate.
I, basically, don't understand why people are ignoring the facts to push some whacko narrative about how DPR is a libertarian saint who was "just running a platform" and got unfairly boned by the legal system, corrupt cops, a maleficent judge, and unwitting gullible jurors. It's crazy to the point where I'll call it illogical because I don't see any rhetorical way to just ignore the facts in pursuit of a content neutral platform agenda (which I happen to agree with, btw). Defending DPR in face of the facts and outcome hurts that agenda.
I would dispute that the mere fact that he did not have a jury trial where he lived was unfair and an indication that he did not actually have a jury of his peers. He was arrested in San Francisco and tried in New York City. Those are different worlds on technology and drug issues.
The undisputed fact that DSR existed to help people do all kinds of illegal things doesn't make those things wrong, and it doesn't make it bad for DSR to have helped them do those things. Fortunately, I wasn't a user, but as I understand it, DSR dramatically reduced the violence and risk of contamination involved in illegal drug use—the next best thing to actual full legalization of those drugs.
The US's drug laws are morally utterly indefensible, and the fact that DSR was violating them on a massive scale is something to be proud of, not ashamed of.
Yep, the available "evidence" comes from those corrupt federal agents who robbed MtGox, and who fabricated the evidence which prevented Ulbricht's bail. The murder for hire wasn't proven, yet it was used to significantly enhance the sentence, basically a loophole allowing to punish for alleged acts without "proven beyond reasonable doubt" for those acts.
So, in short the trial is tainted beyond any salvage. Note - i have no idea whether Ulbricht did it or not.
But we should get the authors and participants in the torture regime first.
Asking because I’ve read the story of Silk Road but didn’t hear about this other than the bitcoin theft
what can be worse abuse of state power than that, or what other purpose for abusing state power other than money? It seems that everything else what they did kind of flows from the theft.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-silk-road-task-force-a... :
>Bridges’ plea agreement also established that he obstructed the Baltimore federal grand jury’s investigations of Silk Road and Ulbricht in a number of ways, including by impeding the ability of the investigation to fully utilize a cooperator’s access to Silk Road.
That grand jury indictment in Baltimore based on false info from those agents was the reason for denying bail to Ulbricht, and basically prejudiced the judge in the main case.
>According to his plea agreement, Bridges admitted that in January 2013 he used an administrator account on the Silk Road website
There seems to be enough indications to support for a variety of speculations like for example that the agents may have scapegoated Ulbricht, say may be he was an admin or a dev there and was made into the "kingpin", or something like this. Again it is impossible to say anything for sure as the trial wasn't just a fruit of poison tree, it were total poisoned deadlands.
Except that it would be, you know, actual work.
One rule for the rich in America, another rule for the rest of us.
This was not proven in court, and at least two federal agents involved in the investigation were found guilty for misconduct related to the investigation, which should at least put doubt on the more salacious elements of the investigation.
The judge took the prosecution's accusation that Ross Ulbricht was responsible for murders-for-hire as truth, and used it to justify a sentence that is cruel and onerous given what he was actually convicted for. In my opinion, that should be considered an unconstitutional violation of due process, since the defense did not get to respond to those accusations as they would in a normal trial. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court refused to hear Ulbricht's appeal, IIRC.
However the evidence that should have been thrown out was pretty clear he tried to order the murder of numerous people. He should 100% be convicted of that and spend many years in prison because you know, we as a society decided somewhere along the way that paying someone to kill people is bad. Fortunately he just got scammed by the hitman haha. Had he actually been competent enough to hire a real hitman there would be a pile of bodies to his name.
He's not a good guy lol. He's a bad guy, who should be out on a technicality for the charges he got convicted on - but really would likely spend the rest of his days in prison for the other things he definitely did do. The government simply chose not to pursue those charges because they'd already lined up a slam dunk. Not because they couldn't charge it, just that they had better things to do than smacking a dead horse around.
- I think his sentencing was unfair and he should have to be convicted of the murder-for-hire charges in order for them to factor into his sentence. His sentence should be overturned immediately.
- I think he's almost certainly guilty of the murder-for-hire attempts and I hope he's re-tried, convicted of those charges, and re-sentenced to life in prison.
What if he actually isn’t guilty of those accusations?
What should happen to the agents of the state who either entrapped (if true) or fabricated (if false) those claims?
And really, whole-real-actual-life for a first time offender for a made up crime that didn’t happen and was seemingly initiated by corrupt officers who were convicted of their corruption?
I am asking myself: What are the both sides for this person?!
Ulbricht was never charged with this, never-mind convicted.
Those are allegations that were dropped and likely raised in very sketchy circumstances to begin with. Anyone, including you, could have allegations made against them and then dropped later, FWIW.
When it crosses into "casually ordering multiple murders he believed happened," then, no, I'm sorry, you're not just running a marketplace. You deserve to be behind bars for a long, long time. The only reason that nobody actually died from that was because he was surrounded by scammers and informants, and didn't realize this. But incompetence is no defense against ordering multiple murders.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/inside-silk-road-staged-... has a lot of details on the absurdities surrounding it, but DPR genuinely did believe he'd ordered people killed.
I find it quite sad that people on this site will say things like "it was unjust for allegations not proved at trial to be used against him at sentencing" and yet always believe that this same logic shouldn't apply to the "average bad person". The logical extension of the arguments below you is at a minimum support for someone like Chesa Boudin. Probably it's far further than what Boudin's (at least publicly) expressed.
(Quotes not direct. Combinations of things I've heard many different people say differently)
Or it will make him even more a target because he has access to resources.
Also to note most commissary stores have monthly purchase limits. Doesn't matter how much money your account has, you still have the same access to commissary as everyone else.
Having been to prison, folks like Ross (easy target, or, a “sweet lick” as the streets would say…) can and will be targeted for protection and extortion. As far as how folks get things out of him, might well be in the form of commissary or via his family to another inmate account or via his family to an external third party.
There is a deep, twisted hustle economy the likes of which a little casual reading will not educate you on. Consider a great example: fake prostitution listings online, operated by contraband cell phone. Demand payment by hard-to-reverse means, demand upfront payment. Then let them fume as they can’t call the police for an “I got ripped off soliciting sex.”
If so I wonder how the crypto market will react to that
I am interested in crypto, but I really don’t want to be a retail schmuck buying tainted coins. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30224637S
So they made an example out of him.
If he was smart he should kept a lower profile and his first interaction with police (the multiple fake IDs) he should have shut it all down or pass the site to someone else.
But hey ego and hubris gets the best of us.
Undermining the authority in a public manner is a sure fire way to ensure that the legal system will use you to reassert it's own authority as an act of long term preservation of the system's status quo.
Lately with SCOTUS, I think we are seeing widespread dissent about the worth of the entire legal system. For many, the system was already unbelievably unjust simply for the logic of what you observe. That’s just how it is, but is that how it should be?
If you rob a bank, get caught, say sorry and work at restitution you’ll often be given a lighter sentence.
Rob a bank then brag that the cops will never catch you and you’re glad you got away with it? Yeah, you’ll get a more severe sentence.
The idea is that justice should take restitution and admission of guilt into account.
Doesn't that imply that not admitting guilt is a crime for which you get an extra penalty? Let's assume that is correct and ethical. The question then is how big should such an extra penalty be, for the crime of not agreeing you are guilty? Life in prison? Or perhaps capital punishment?
https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/coercive-plea-...
Then its good that we as a society have institutions that have a better judgement than you, random internet netizen.
There’s a reason people wear suits to court and we have all sorts of processes designed to venerate authority. Before modern times, power flowed from the Monarch. Now, we choose our representatives but the instruments by which power is administered still exists.
He got life in prison because the laws he broke called for it.
There are exceptions for psycho killers like Anders Breivik. Ulbrich would be unlikely to fall into the Breivik category. His prison conditions would not be so brutal either, see again Breivik for an example. If you believe he deserves life, do you believe he deserves brutality in prison?
He is by many international legal definitions a political prisoner found guilty of what appear as obviously relative political crimes and likely even absolute political crimes. His politics were core to his supposed criminal activities in the war on some drugs. His investigation and prosecution was tainted. Several of the involved officers committed blatant crimes for personal gain for which they were later arrested, charged, and convicted. Those same state agents appear to have alleged the murder for hire, which is somehow not entrapment and yet considered credible.
In 1769, William Blackstone said “the law holds that it is better that 10 guilty persons escape, than that 1 innocent suffer (innocent person be convicted).”
Morally and in principle, especially in a tainted investigation with misbehaving Government agents, the guilty should be let go. Perhaps you don’t agree - either way, there is an appearance of a two tier legal system.
The system that jails Ross but lets very wealthy pharmacy company owners off with thousands of confirmed deaths, people who produced, marketed, and sold similar and sometimes identical drugs exclusively for profit are punished with a fine.
No, this is bullshit. He committed several serious crimes and is now paying the price for that.
Yes, reform the legal system sensibly. No, we don't let drug kingpins who have built up a serious crime organisation walk.
He ran a website. I don't call that a kingpin
He created a market place which was available as a tor hidden service. It was primarily a website and a communications hub, this makes it a kind of meta-criminal enterprise where he enabled other criminals to sell often illegal drugs, though there was apparently much more.
The stated political goal at the time with using a website was to reduce violence at the time of a transaction. By that alone it was clearly more than a website.
Tell that last part to the families of people who have died in the opioid crisis. Drug kingpin is in the eye of the beholder, or prosecution team as we see. For example: Have you watched the CEOs of several major pharmaceutical companies walk with fines? Large fines, paid out of the very profits made from the sales of drugs that killed the customers. Too bad for Ross that he wasn’t smart enough to hire lawyers, and wear a suit, he might be as free as Zuckerberg or the CEO of any of the major Pharma companies making record settlements this year.
Rather than reforming the legal system alone, why not free those harmed by the system we agree is in need of reform? Start by freeing all political prisoners.
Yes, it does. Ross Ulbricht is not a political prisoner, he is a run of the mill criminal prisoner. Sorry if that offends you.
> Too bad for Ross that he wasn’t smart enough
Too bad for Ross that he laughed in the face of the authorities, deliberately built a criminal trafficking organisation and profited from the trade of known illegal substances, while attempting to order hits on people. He's a scumbag.
This equivocation about the pharma industry is utterly laughable, the situation isn't in the slightest bit comparable.
> Start by freeing all political prisoners.
Which would leave Ross Ulbricht still in jail because he's not one of those.
In my view the answer is clearly yes. One kind is a prisoner of conscience. Prisoners of conscience are not claiming innocence, for example, rather usually the status is a commentary on the unjustness of laws or of punishment. He probably would never be considered as such by Amnesty International because of the extremely questionable murder for hire charges. Just a hint of a such a thing can sink an Amnesty endorsement of a prisoner.
There are other kinds of political prisoners. One can be a common criminal and be fairly and correctly considered a political prisoner due to political circumstances. The war on drugs is a political circumstance which results in disproportionate sentences. Consider that nearly all terrorism and espionage charges generally fall into the classic categories of relative or absolute political crimes. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_prisoner and note: “A political prisoner is someone imprisoned for their political activity. The political offense is not always the official reason for the prisoner's detention.”
In his case the majority of his charges are drug or conspiracy charges which are a major political issue for most of the western world at this time and at the time of his incarceration. Furthermore his incredible habit of journaling clearly shows his political views as they extensively detail the war on drugs, and his attempts to allow people to have access to a market for drugs that is safer than the street. American drug laws as seen by most of the rest of the world are insanely harsh in their punishment.
Consider The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe definition c, d, and e from the Wikipedia link. Do you dispute the judge sentenced him harshly to send a message to others? Do you believe his trial wasn’t marred by unbelievable corruption where several involved officers were arrested and jailed for their conduct?
He may very well be a scumbag, my claims aren’t a defense of him personally. Rather please try to read them as a good faith condemnation of the American judicial and American penal system. End the war on drugs, and end the insanely bad conditions for all prisoners. No one should have to suffer what he is suffering in prison, nor a tainted process which led him to prison. No one deserves double life sentences only to be beaten and (almost certainly, if rumors are to be believed) raped in prison for refusing to join a prison gang as a matter of literal personal political beliefs.
But you can tell me he’s not a political prisoner and that he gets what he deserves. That mostly tells me about you, and not about him.
Particularly that last part. Sorry if that offends you.
You can moralise and equivocate all you like, he is not being held for his views or his politics, he is not being held for political activity, but for his clear criminal actions, which include attempts to have people murdered. That's not 'political'.
There is when the state breaks its own principles and rules, that is the point. It is literally unjust, and the states behavior must be beyond reproach.
> Particularly that last part. Sorry if that offends you.
I am not offended, I asked my questions, which you dodged, in good faith.
I agree with you that murder for hire must be treated seriously. Part of why I find this unjust is that he should have been tried on that charge first and foremost. Yet it looks like it was primarily used to harm his character, and it was not formally brought and successfully won by the state. If the guy did, he should not escape trial for an explicit charge, do you disagree?
> You can moralise and equivocate all you like, he is not being held for his views or his politics, he is not being held for political activity, but for his clear criminal actions, which include attempts to have people murdered. That's not 'political'.
Are you asserting that the drug war, isn’t political?
Are you furthermore asserting that assassinations aren’t inherently political in that context?
Political isn’t a get out of jail free card, and I am not equivocating. I firmly believe he still should stand trial for the murder for hire charges, don’t you?
Yep, because pharma companies all respect the monopoly of the state. The state can ban any molecule they please and pharma companies will comply. The state could not do anything whatsoever to silkroad so it unleashed its full wrath on a website administrator.
My primary point is that the Sackler’s company actions have a body count that is sky high, and they will walk with a monetary fine. This is because they accept the primacy of the state, and the victims are not as important and it may be dealt with as a financial compensation issue. That result is as much about the primacy of the state as it is about the standing of the Sackler’s in American high society. In other words it looks like two justice systems: one for the rich, and one for the proles.
In Ulbricht’s case, the hypothetical dead in the murder for hire allegation are known to not exist - the state admits to fabricating all of it. Well not all of it, they claim he was aware, and that he believed their lies. I wouldn’t be surprised if that part was a lie too, since they are admitted liars to achieve their stated goals.
But really: The state who has to expend resources (gotta pay for the officers time), the courts (he is costing them time by asking for a trial!), the prosecution (they probably had to work hard to hide the real sources of intelligence so it could be laundered into a court), the people who bought bad drugs through the market (in theory, I don’t think he was charged with anything specific like this), Ross’s family and friends (isn’t it really their fault for raising him so badly? Nope; but hard to miss an opportunity to victim blame), a lot of Tor relay operators DDoS’es by the Eff-Bee-eye to do intersection and circuit collapsing attacks (yes; they do this and more), almost certainly some NSA XKeyscore specialists were consulted (talk to some of them about it!), the DEA agents who defend our way of life (including the ones that went to prison for corruption in this very case: look it up, it’s amazing!), the secret service (again the ones who went to prison for corruption in this very case!), people who had to sit through the trial and lost faith in their entire country’s justice system (this isn’t most of hacker news which is very “law and order” which means cops can break the rules if the ends justify the means) and of course the children (no specific children, don’t ask so many questions). Never forget. Ahem, I mean, think of the children.
Meanwhile Ross is probably having his ass beaten or sexually assaulted in prison right now for refusing to join a white power group to save himself as a matter of principe. But don’t worry, this is fine because he did it to himself and think of the victims. The poor state, if they hadn’t gotten him, they might have lost the drug war. Good thing they racked up this political win!
There’s a war on drugs my friend, and to paraphrase bill hicks: every time you’re high, you’re winning it!
This is not about victims in the population AT ALL. The state could care less about people beeing murdered if it dosen't affect it's power over said people. It was always just about the state's totalitarian power over trading and Ross' complete subjucation of that power.
I think there’s an easier explanation. He may have started the Silk Road with high hopes but things went haywire around the time he started making millions…
Ulbricht should have taken the plea. It was his only chance of breathing free air again. As it stands now, he doesn’t have a hope. It would be very hard for a judge to sentence based on a dream to remove violence when presented with evidence that the accused was actively trying to have people killed. The plea was his last chance and he didn’t take advantage of it.
The state tried to bring separate charges and the case was closed without a conviction. It’s probably fair to say that the convicted corrupt cops planted everything and made it up, if we are just accepting base accusations at face value. I am sure you won’t agree, but my response is also for all the other people who see the injustice of the drug war, who have had enough of corrupt cops, and judges only sympathetic to the harshest of laws handing out sentences that are literally not possible to carry out. A double life sentence, if only he had two lives to give for his country, eh?
If the other charges were sufficient to say he did this horrible crime, why wasn’t double jeopardy invoked for the other case? Perhaps someone who followed the case closely can speak to this as from outside it looks extremely suspect. Since it wasn’t, we can assume it isn’t as settled as some would like except in relation to a conspiracy charge for a drug related crime. Those two things seem awfully political to me, and so I remain unconvinced.
Here’s one theory: people such as yourself were already convinced. He was given a double life sentence. Who on the prosecution side cares to allow a person to confront their accusers who were later jailed for corruption directly related to him and these charges? Nearly no one apparently: it’s fine to not convict him as the allegation served to discredit him for his extremely blatant political criticism and actions against the war on some drugs.
There is probably some truth in what you say about the fact that his best chances were with a plea deal. That is probably one of the saddest facts in the American justice system. It’s a concept that doesn’t really exist in many European legal systems, the right to bargain about justice. So his best bet to be free was to skip exercising his right to a trial… nothing problematic here, just another day in an American court.
Another option for him would have been to have never resisted the drug war. To never have attempted to build a market where people have nearly zero chance to physically harm each other in a transaction. Yes they can harm by consuming the substances, but that is again a clear political action in his written philosophy: people should be free to chose to take that risk. He was clearly a fool for believing he could change any of these matters and he should have known his place, right?
Some of us who watch and have watched our friends and family and other people suffer through the drug war where the police regularly kill or cause immense suffering with impunity are less sanguine than you. A market where people cannot be harmed in a transaction was a remarkable thing at the time, and it has now become a norm. As usual the rich get it with things like a coke taxi dispatched by signal, and the poor continue to buy drugs on the street and suffer violence which is all but intended by the state with it’s structures. We should be doing harm reduction and people who try this, however misguided should not be handled as if they are the same as the Zeta cartel.
Those charges were dropped and there was never a trial related to them let alone the evidence to actually convict on it. Anyone can be accused of crimes and later have the charges dropped.
He should have taken the plea.
This guys has maybe one chance left and that's if a sympathetic President gets elected and pardons him.
Maybe if the Libertarian Party manages to win the presidency?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/12/06/u-s-public-...
If I were running the Amazon of drugs, I'd brush up on which countries don't extradite to the USA.
Ross Julian Martin
Joe biden has the power to pardon these people, we just need to stand as a united front to get our follow programmers the freedom they need.
Makes me sick to see non violent offenders locked up in a violent place.
[1] https://cryptocriticscorner.com/2021/12/30/episode-40-the-si...
[2] https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/nweaver.htm...
It seems like mass surveillance provided by intelligence was likely used to locate relevant computers but that is not what was introduced in court to the best of my knowledge.
The audiobook is great too
As long as he lives on this earth, he will never know freedom or peace. He has enemies everywhere, and with vast resources.
Yeah I can imagine that someone might still be ticked off by him and try to kill him, but you said your original claim with so much conviction ("he has enemies everywhere, with vast resources....he will never know peace") that you clearly know who you're talking about, and your response is "you don't think he made any enemies along the way", which makes no sense.
Still … once you've decided that hiring people to kill other people is a valid path towards your libertarian utopia, my sympathy approaches zero.