Several posts on this thread (as well as TFA) have suggested the hitman for hire was slander to paint Ulbricht in a bad light. This is not true.
> At the sentencing hearing, the district court resolved several disputed issues of fact. For example, because Ulbricht contested his responsibility for the five commissioned murders for hire, the district court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Ulbricht did in fact commission the murders, believing that they would be carried out. The district court characterized the evidence of the murders for hire, which included Ulbricht's journal, chats with other Silk Road users, and the evidence showing that Ulbricht actually paid a total of $650,000 in Bitcoins for the killings, as “ample and unambiguous.” App'x 1465.
Agreed - from a purely personal morality argument, I’m convinced this guy did indeed pay for contracted killings for 5 people. Yeah, some of the cops setting up the sting were corrupt, I can certainly see why it was sketchy in court and prosecutors decided to drop this angle (they had him on massive drug dealing anyways), but from my personal moral POV, dude paid for murders. I’m not shedding any tears about Ross being in jail.
He was never charged or convicted of murder, and 2 of the agents on his case were corrupt and dishonest. This is enough to at the very least sow reasonable doubt.
I'm all for him being imprisoned if guilty of attempted murder, but he absolutely should not still be in prison for the charges that he was found guilty of.
He was not charged with murder because the attempt was intercepted by the police and did not occur.
The messages he wrote soliciting the contract murder were submitted as evidence as facts in the case against him and weighed heavily in his sentencing.
I don't understand why people want this guy free besides early-crypto-nostalgia.
I get the "Free Ross" campaigners are trying to persuade us, and I think his parents are largely behind it which I sympathize with, but the manner in which they gloss over FIVE ATTEMPTED MURDERS goes beyond mere bias.
I don't get this. The prosecutors decided not to press the hitman charges, so would the defense have even tried to gather evidence that it was false? Wouldn't that automatically make the preponderance of the evidence suggest his guilt, as only the evidence suggesting his guilt would have been presented?
"Preponderance of evidence" here refers to a legal standard (i.e. was it more likely than not) rather than the criminal standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" and not "most of the evidence."
The prosecutors didn't charge him with hiring hitmen because they were uncertain that they could prove it beyond a resonable doubt, but the evidence they were able to present suggests he probably did it.
If only one side is presenting evidence, isn't it likely that the preponderance of evidence will support their claim? I only browsed the linked judgment, but I didn't see the defense address the hitman claims.
Courts determine guilt, and the courts did not find Ross guilty of attempted murder beyond reasonable doubt. So, objectively, Ross is innocent of attempted murder.
If the prosecutors thought they had a good case, why wouldn't they pursue this?
You can't have it both ways, is court the authority on guilt or not? If not, how can you trust his guilty verdict for the other crimes?
Regardless of if it is or is not excessive, I think it is fascinating that the things a man did entirely online while he assumed he was anonymous are enough that society deems two life sentences in prison. He did that much damage to society with a keyboard and mouse.
I don't think sentencing should be using information that wasn’t part of the charges or the conviction. I’ve seen prosecutors chose to be extremely strict about that, judges chose to be extremely about that, jurors say “we couldn't convict because we had to follow the prosecutor’s instructions”, and yet here the jury was swayed by actions unrelated to the charges in order to convict, and the judge applied sentencing standards based on those same actions, and the government completely dropped the other case that would have been based on those actions
If they want to add time, they could totally charge him while he was already in prison! Nobody is worried about “taxpayer resources” the government got way more money out of the seizures than nearly any of their criminal cases, in which they do redundant tacked on convictions all the time!
What do you mean by 'validating'? It's just the reality of the situation. Is his sentence overreaching and excessive given the circumstances? Yes. Definitively yes. Did Ross commit a crapton of crimes? Also yes. Look I fully agree that his sentence should be reduced and he be given a second chance but again the man is in no way innocent either.
Seriously if everyone concerned really wants to help this man then everyone needs to drop this misleading mythology built up around him and deal directly with the reality of what happened. For example, this statement from the site:
Ross Ulbricht is condemned to die in prison for creating an anonymous e-commerce website called Silk Road. An entrepreneur passionate about free markets and privacy, he was 26 when he made the site.
I'm sorry that is a gross misrepresentation of what he did and is in no way helping him. If people really want to help him get his sentenced reduced then they need to start by fully acknowledging the crimes Ross actually committed. Then a clear argument can be made that excessiveness of his sentence far outweighs those criminal acts. It's not a case of innocence vs. guilt and shouldn't be framed as such. It's a case of Ross being unduly punished for the crimes that he legitimately committed. Anything else is just muddying the waters and again is in no way helping him.
I don't quote the website, and I was very clear about him being convicted of the things he went to trial for. Furthermore, my whole post was about adding time.
> I don't think sentencing should be using information that wasn’t part of the charges or the conviction. I’ve seen prosecutors chose to be extremely strict about that, judges chose to be extremely about that
The judge addressed this:
> The record was more than sufficient to support the district court's reliance on those attempted murders in sentencing Ulbricht to life in prison. The attempted murders for hire separate this case from that of an ordinary drug dealer, regardless of the quantity of drugs involved in the offense, and lend further support to the district court's finding that Ulbricht's conduct and character were exceptionally destructive. That he was able to distance himself from the actual violence he paid for by using a computer to order the killings is not mitigating. Indeed, the cruelty that he displayed in his casual and confident negotiations for the hits is unnerving. We thus cannot say that a life sentence was outside the “range of permissible decisions” under the circumstances. Cavera, 550 F.3d at 189.
Thats the point? The ruling is resilient in that it survived appeals, we disagree on whether it should have gone down this path at all. Railroaded is the term.
All discord in his empire was fabricated by corrupt government agents who both served time for this, information that was kept from Ross and his defense and the jury during trial
The corrupt agents staged hits in a makeshift studio, just to extort money from Ross, use the money for personal gain such as landing a movie deal with Fox
Cases have been completely dropped for less
The prosecutor and judge found a strategy that is resilient, that doesn't make it correct
This is a good lesson about not forgetting that much of life is not binary. Here we have someone who was convicted of doing illegal things. There is also strong evidence that he hired and paid someone to kill five people.
So the question isn't free or don't free him. The question is "how long should he be in jail for?". There's a middle ground here.
Many people, including the OP website just say "free" him. I don't know. That is a binary option which implies total innocence. And I don't think total innocence is the case here.
So the question really needs to be: for how many years should this guy be in prison for. And the answer to me, primarily because he was planning on killing five people is quite a long time. Certainly longer than the ten years or so he's been in there.
[edited for some increased readability and formatting]
> And the answer to me, primarily because he was planning on killing five people is quite a long time.
Would you agree that he shouldn't be in prison for the crimes he was convicted of at least? Because he wasn't tried or convicted of murder-for-hire (yet?)
Silk Road did like $50-100 million in volume if you measure by bitcoin prices at the time. Tenderloin and a few neighborhoods in San Francisco alone probably have more annual volume than that.
It was totally a political trial with many exaggerations and the government trying to "set an example".
- First-time offender
- All non-violent charges
- Two life sentences plus 40 years without parole
>Ross Ulbricht is condemned to die in prison for creating an anonymous e-commerce website called Silk Road. An entrepreneur passionate about free markets and privacy, he was 26 when he made the site. He was never prosecuted for causing harm or bodily injury and no victim was named at trial.
>Users of Silk Road chose to exchange a variety of goods, both legal and illegal, including drugs (most commonly small amounts of cannabis). Prohibited was anything involuntary that could harm a third party.
>Ross was not convicted of selling drugs or illegal items himself, but was held responsible for what others sold on the site.
According to Wikipedia, Ulbricht allegedly tried to hire a hitman to murder at least five people, but this wasn't actually something he was formally charged with at trial.
> Federal prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people,[27] allegedly because they threatened to reveal Ulbricht's Silk Road enterprise.[36] Prosecutors believe no contracted killing actually occurred.[27] Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with any murder for hire,[27][37] but evidence was introduced at trial supporting the allegations.[27][38] The evidence that Ulbricht had commissioned murders was considered by the judge in sentencing Ulbricht to life, and was a factor in the Second Circuit's decision to affirm the life sentence.[38]
Isn't it illegal to hire people to kill people even if they aren't actually killed? Like when the police go undercover they don't wait for someone to be killed, they wait for definitive evidence that the hiring person seriously plans to follow through with it I thought.
No killing actually occured because Ulbricht was incompetent at procuring contract killing. Ulbricht was scammed, paying $730K for nothing. But he did have the intention of having the victims killed.
It should be noted that the killing was conspiraed by FBI Agents where some of them also stealed a bunch of bitcoin for their own interest.
It's nowhere mentioned cause it would put the Feds in a bad light
Are you suggesting that FBI actually forced him to contract a hitman? My understanding is that FBI set up the bait and this guy eat it hook and all. It is not illegal or even immoral to bait somebody, there was no pressure, FBI presented the opportunity and this guy wanted to have somebody killed.
It's certainly viewed as immoral at the very least in the UK.
"In R v Looseley; Attorney General's Reference (No 3 of 2000) [2002] 1 Cr. App. R. 29, the House of Lords held that although entrapment is not a substantive defence in English law, where an accused can show entrapment, the court may stay the proceedings as an abuse of the court's process or it may exclude evidence pursuant to Section 78 PACE 1984 ...
"Police conduct which brings about state-created crime is unacceptable and improper, and to prosecute in such circumstances would be an affront to the public conscience."
He would not have committed the crime if the FBI hadn't set up the fake persona that was allegedly going to get caught and get Ulbright arrested and charged with a life sentence.
Lies of the police doesn't constitute entrapment - only forcibly coercion does. Nobody forced Ulbright to hire an assassin - they only lied to him, but his decision stands none the less.
Iirc there was some coercion component to it too. The set up was the hells angels were gonna kill the dude anyways and told him if they didnt most of silkroad probably get caught/deanonymised /arrested. Considering the other claims of potential corruption, id say that classifies as an existential threat scenerio entirely created by law enforcement to coarce him into hiring the assassins as a "now or never, life or death" of ross and his customers situation.
Not anything damning either way, bit definitely food for thought.
I can easily see the fbi agents convincing him that his life was threatened by the 5 guys, offering to kill them, providing a contact for the hitman which is also an undercover fbi agent, then share the $750000
If you can get five to ten years for selling a few thousand pills of fentanyl, it stands to reason that you may get fifty or thereabouts for running a marketplace where hundreds of such sales took place.
I'd also say that there's a significant moral difference between a first time offender, and a 'first time caught offender'. Al Capone and Bernie Madoff were also 'first time offenders' when they went to prison.
You don't whoops one-time-bad-lapse-of-judgement stumble into running a gang, a decade-long fraud... Or the biggest drug marketplace in the world.
Napster was knowingly criminal. Source: I was there.
During discovery they found emails from Parker saying, "Of course it's illegal. We know it, they know it, we're going to be the biggest thing in the world anyways".
If you look at how Napster changed the movie and music industry it just makes more sense for the government to make an example of the Napster of drugs.
While there are certainly problematic aspects of dark web markets, society do get some benefits. No physical contact between sellers and buyers, which reduces violence. Reviews of sellers and products makes it significantly easier to purchase safer drugs (for some drugs, adulterants and/or unpredictable potency are a bigger risk than the drug itself). This translates to fewer visits to the ER or morgue.
Edit: My personal opinion is that we should rid ourselves of the demand for dark web markets by regulating drugs. The regulations should focus on harm reduction, both for the users and society as a whole.
>This translates to fewer visits to the ER or morgue.
Yea, you seem confused, the funeral I went to was because my friends brother actually had really easy access to really great heroin. For a long time actually. Surprisingly easy to get delivered…
It was only after he was a full-on junkie estranged from his family after they’d basically given up any wealth they had for rehabs and his theft and violence that the “benefits,” as you call them, of the dark web markets might have mattered in the slightest.
No, no, don’t let me rain on anyone’s parade. Whether it’s heroin, or meth, or who knows? Maybe even sex workers of dubious age and consent! The dark web is just connecting willing customers with quality products.
These arguments seem logical, but are they backed up by anything other than gut feeling? If anything, harmful adulterants in drugs have only increased since dark net markets became a thing. There are lots of reasons for that, but it’s hard to argue DNMs have been a net positive given the statistics on drug abuse over the past decade.
I think it's disingenuous to say the Silk Road was used for anything but selling black market goods, predominantly drugs.
It's fine to say that someone shouldn't go to prison for life for running a business centered on selling drugs without violence (hitman non withstanding), and I think you could even argue that the drugs got more dangerous for kids once it went down (there was a decent time period when kids didn't have to worry if what they bought as cocaine, MDMA, or aderall was just meth). But trying to claim the Silk Road wasn't Amazon for drugs is just dishonest.
I was initially unhappy about the situation, but on reviewing the opinion [0] of the judge of the appeal it seems reasonable. It is uncomfortable that the judge effectively sentenced him for something he wasn't charged with, but if that judge saw evidence that he tried to plan the murder of multiple people there aren't really many alternatives.
It does seem like bad form that the prosecutors didn't charge him with murder, it leaves open the question of whether the evidence was actually flimsy and Ulbricht's team didn't challenge it properly because they didn't think it was especially relevant. I assume the details of the opinion would reveal the thinking on that if I read it closely.
I think people who facilitate the sale of community destroying hard drugs deserve punishment, but this trial was a farce. The media ran ceaseless stories making it sound like he was selling guns to terrorists and child abuse material. There's no way he could have been fairly judged by a jury with how prevalent that type of reporting was.
Alcohol is at the top of the list of objective harm to self and others, right up there with heroin. What "most anyone would consider" is irrelevant to the actual pharmacology of the durg.
Warning - potentially bad take incoming: To me this is actually an argument in favour of the legalization of "hard drugs" more than it is an argument against alcohol. In alcohol we have an addictive, harmful substance that is relatively inexpensive, widely available, heavily advertised and yet most people are able to either abstain or use it in moderation.
Does it really matter what "most" think? From the medical point of view, ethanol is a hard drug. It was actually defined as one in an old USSR government standard, but that definition was dropped later (in the 1970s or thereabouts IIRC).
Yourself and others are missing the point. US law here isn’t “what was considered a hard drug in pre-1970s USSR”. And regardless of what the medical point of view might be, alcohol isn’t classed as a hard drug in US law.
Frankly though, even this straw man argument is moot because it is illegal to sell alcohol without a license too. So regardless of what substance was on sale, this market place was facilitating illegal transactions.
As for whether 40 years is a bit harsh, that’s a lot more subjective. But it doesn’t further the conversation to shift definitions of substances when they’re already legally defined.
No, you're missing the point. We are making a normative claim of what SHOULD be illegal or legal.
The definition of a hard drug has nothing to do with whether it is legal or not. Alcohol is a hard drug by the definition of addictiveness and propensity for harm. When it was made illegal, it didn't reduce use and only increased harms. We learned our lesson and made that hard drug legal in order mitigate the harms of organized crime benefiting from selling it.
Similarly all other illegal drugs should be made legal to reduce the harms of them being illegal and facilitating organized crime that increases violence in communities.
In that regard, the silk road was actually a net good. It reduced gang violence by preventing gangs from competing for physical territory. The US postal service delivering the darknet drugs prevented the gangs from being able to enshrine their Monopoly through violence. This was unequivocally good. Similarly reviews by customers increased quality and purity and reduced tainted drugs, reducing harm to the users. Thus, the silk road was a net social good when measured from a social welfare costs and benefits.
> The definition of a hard drug has nothing to do with whether it is legal or not.
I agree. But there is also a legal definition and we are taking about the law. You can bitch and moan about whether the law is just or not but that’s a different topic.
Which is why you’re missing the point and I wasn’t.
You can argue to you’re blue in the face about what the law should be, but that doesn’t make the law so.
Hoping it's not too much of an imposition, I'd like to pose a series of rhetorical questions about criminological policy, which may not be new territory, but I hope will, nonetheless, elevate the discussion
What does 'deserve' mean?
How do you distinguish it from vengeance?
If the idea is that it has deterrent value, how do we measure that?
Also why are we trying to deter? What's the social cost of the behavior his platform helped facilitate?
How much did his being a party to that behavior contribute to its prevalence? Is there any evidence suggesting the behavior wouldn't have been enacted through alternative intermediaries?
Most importantly: Is there any unintended secondary cost to society, as a result of bringing punitive repercussions on intermediaries that are incidentally party to an undesired behavior?
In Policy Analysis one often sees a pattern where punitive policies exacerbate either the undesired behavior or associated antisocial behaviors
It's counter-intuitive but the correlation between criminalization and increased antisocial activity — and indeed net social cost — is quite strong.
In my view the only sensible approach to criminology is "consequentialism" with all punishments being informed by therapeutic approaches to reduce future harm — or "Harm Reduction"
When we allow ourselves to be guided by "scale balancing" rationales, it's just too easy for that to turn into sadism and worse "mob" sadism — where any view of proportionality (vague and aspirational to begin with) is abandoned until some "Lord of the Flies" moment of cruelty provokes social reflection.
Nope it's the institutions that trample on people and violate their civil rights that should be suffering punishment. The government, medical, and mental health community are highly discriminatory and don't respect freedom of religion.
It's created a perfect storm of death in destruction in the USA. The system needs to be reboot and built to protect citizens, not abusive / incompetent doctors, insurance companies.
Drug addicts are people that deserve to be respected, not spit on and turned away. Even if you aren't a drug addict, you can really quickly have your rights stripped away. Drug use, even repeated, isn't always addiction. Drugs are often a critical component of our health.
I've become increasingly aware of the role the medical industry is playing in exacerbating drug abuse and suicide. So many people are driven away from care and into a suicide/jail or other health problems like morbid obesity.
> I think people who facilitate the sale of community destroying hard drugs deserve punishment
I'd argue Instagram has done more damage to human relationships and communities than MDMA, despite the former being around for much longer.
Really, when we look at the forces "destroying our communities", it's not so much the drugs as the the reasons people take them - alienation caused by post-modern industrial capitalism, face-to-face interaction replaced by screen time, a society that values "success" over happiness, health and connection... the drugs are a symptom.
If you take morphine because you have a broken bone, the issue is the broken bone.
If people drink themselves to death because they are lonely, the issue is the loneliness.
to add, how many of the domestic terrorists killing children in schools with guns did buy them legally? vs illegally? and how many homicides were done with legal guns? vs illegal guns? and suicides?
There's a lot of strange and misleading information on the website. For example the sentencing disparity is comparing sentences that were handed out in locations outside of the United States [0].
You could say all the same things for any other victims of America's drug war. IMO the drug war should end and all non-violent drug offenders should be released.
But the American economy depends on prison slavery, and they need the drug war to continue creating slaves.
He probably could’ve got 15-20 years if he worked out a deal but he had very ineffective counsel. With RDAP and the First Step Act and potentially compassionate release for COVID he could be out by now.
>Ross was smeared with false, unprosecuted allegations of planning murder-for-hire that much of the media amplified through inaccurate and sensationalized reporting. The allegations were never charged at trial, never proven, never submitted to, or ruled on by, a jury, and eventually dismissed with prejudice.
The website is called "free Ross Ulbricht," they aren't quiet about their bias.
>none of this is utilizing actual facts,
"The allegations were never charged at trial, never proven, never submitted to, or ruled on by, a jury, and eventually dismissed with prejudice" are the actual facts.
Being proud of your bias doesn’t absolve you of its fact corruption effect, that is just silly. If anything it makes you more likely to stretch the truth.
The fact remains that someone should be considered innocent of a crime until proven guilty. If the prosecution couldn't prove that he hired a hitman (sounds like they didn't even try), then that shouldn't influence his sentencing.
That’s not how it works. The evidentiary standard for a jury is “beyond a reasonable doubt” but for the sentencing judge is “preponderance of the evidence”, with the caveat that the judge can’t use that to hand down a sentence harsher than legally permitted by what the jury convicted on (in this case narcotics distribution - resulting in deaths of overdose victims).
At the very least, the 2 agents involved in his case being found to be corrupt and having forged evidence, should cast additional doubt on the murder for hire.
I'm not saying he didn't do it, but had that been known at the time, I think it would have been less decided that his sentencing should take the alleged murders for hire into account.
He should be tried for that separately at this point
It went to appeal and all those points were addressed. But I agree that it would have been much better to actually prosecute those murder-for-hire charges. Even if acquitted, the judge can still take the accusations into account during sentencing (due to the different evidentiary standards).
It objectively compares his sentence of 2 lifetimes + 40 years to the sentences of the biggest actual drug dealers on silk road, as well as the founders of the bigger silk road 2.0, all of whom got less than 10 years. I would consider that to be satisfactory actual fact utilization.
US judges are free to sentence a convict for allegations of which he was acquitted. Sentencing him for allegations that were dismissed isn't really different.
There's two angles to justice. The legal, and the moral.
What was done to him was legal, and nobody's denying that.
Given the scope of the crimes he was convicted for, I don't think it was immortal to throw the entire book at him, to the maximum possible legal extent.
The article linked here addresses that multiple times. That accusation, largely overinflated by the media, was dismissed with prejudice. He was never even charged with it.
The article conflates the case in Maryland, which was dismissed after Ulbricht was already convicted and his appeals denied by SCOTUS.
The article pretends this exonerated Ross when it reality the government didn't see a reason to go through another trial when he was already serving multiple life sentences.
The article also does the hand-waivey "it was never shown the messages were authored by Ross."
Those messages were presented into evidence, during the trial. Ross lawyers had no explanation for them.
The FBI accepted that multiple people were behind the DreadPirateRoberts account and that the writing style did not match his. He was ultimately not charged with it, but the story was used to slander him and make him seem dangerous and violent.
well then lets all band together and get that murdering gangster kingpin back in our communities where he belongs. I mean he’s a psychopath, obviously.
You can’t give a gigantic middle finger to the social contract and expect to be treated with kid gloves.
I think the sentence was excessive, but then again I didn’t run a website for years for the expressed purpose of facilitating and profiting from the illegal international drug trade.
The idea that he would just be released and not then immediately charged by another nation is naive.
I’m genuinely shocked that this is getting attention from anyone but libertarian ideologues.
Edit: I’m fine with your downvotes. Nobody wants to discuss the level of taboo breaking the Silk Road caused simply because it’s actually not entirely difficult to operate. People get made examples of.
But it's not the same. Who wants to be exploited like an influencer when you can be the star of a creepy old man's sex videographer fantasies, before he kills you and hides your body.
That's the kind o freedom that heroes like Ross are protecting!
> At the sentencing hearing, the district court resolved several disputed issues of fact. For example, because Ulbricht contested his responsibility for the five commissioned murders for hire, the district court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Ulbricht did in fact commission the murders, believing that they would be carried out. The district court characterized the evidence of the murders for hire, which included Ulbricht's journal, chats with other Silk Road users, and the evidence showing that Ulbricht actually paid a total of $650,000 in Bitcoins for the killings, as “ample and unambiguous.” App'x 1465.
From https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-2nd-circuit/1862572.html