I think his original sentence was absolutely deserved—even though the charge of hiring a contract killer to assassinate his business competition may have been dropped, I think it's clear he did many things in the same vein. Even if you support his original pursuit of a free and open online marketplace, I think most people would agree he took it a bridge too far in the end.
That said, I do think he absolutely deserved to be released, not because he didn't deserve to be locked up in the first place, but because he's clearly been rehabilitated and has done great work during his time in prison. All that considered, ten years seems like a not unreasonable prison sentence for what he did. I hope he'll continue to do good when he's released.
"he took it a bridge too far" is a massive trivialization.
The guy operated a marketplace for illegal goods in order to enrich himself. The illegality wasn't just incidental, it was literally his business model -- by flouting the law, he enjoyed massive market benefit (minimal competition, lack of regulation, high margins etc) by exploiting the arbitrage that the rest of us follow the rules.
Said a different way, he knowingly pursued enormous risk in order to achieve outsized benefits, and ultimately his bet blew up on him -- we shouldn't have bailed him out.
The state hates more than anything someone who operates on first principles that the empire is wrong.
A serial rapist, even one that would happily do it again, will often repent and quickly admit guilt. They have no interest in undermining the philosophical basis of the state. They will posture themselves as bound but imperfect citizens under the law.
Ross violated the only remaining national holy religion, the rule of law. He was sentenced for being a heretic.
> Ross violated the only remaining national holy religion, the rule of law. He was sentenced for being a heretic.
Good.
Let's keep in mind that the shared faith in this "holy religion, the rule of law" is the only thing holding together your country, my country, everyone's countries, and civilized society in general. Take that away, and everything around us will collapse, regressing the few survivors of that event to the prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other for what little scraps the land has to give.
I'm from Germany. I could tell you something about blindly following the "rule of law". If you throw morality out the window the law can become a very ugly instrument.
Yes, Rechtsstaatlichkeit only means that the state and its organs have to follow the law themselves. It doesn't say anything about the moral quality of the laws.
The Nazi state had to follow its own laws. They just had such laws that enabled the total lunacy that the 3rd Reich was.
All I'm saying is: If you decouple laws from morality you get a really bad time.
> The Nazi state had to follow its own laws. They just had such laws that enabled the total lunacy that the 3rd Reich was.
This is false. Even if you take the Nazi propaganda that their laws were themselves lawful (which they were not, beginning with the clearly unlawful capture of power) at face value, the Nazi regime did not adhere to its own laws and regulations. While in some cases the Nazi regime did codify a basis in law for their atrocities (i.e. excluding and expropriating jews), much of the Nazi terror both in a civil and military context would have been explicitly illegal under the law at the time.
This includes the November Progroms of 1938 (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novemberpogrome_1938), large parts of the Nazi's approach to warfare, as well as the entire Holocaust (the murder of more than 6 million jews and other "undesirables"), for which the Nazis did not bother to create any legal justification.
While the Nazi regime was deeply bureaucratic (in that it documented its policies, orders and their results in high detail) this is not the same as "following the law". Most of the Nazi's atrocities evolved not through a process of lawmaking, but from their racist ideology and were given legitimacy through the highly personalized nature of the regime: Hitler was explicitly above the law, as were his orders, not matter if expressed through him personally or in his name by his followers.
Not sure why this comment got voted down; it's absolutely true.
The rule of law means that nobody is above the law, not even the Fuehrer or president. Clearly this is not the case in many countries, but it is in some, and it should be.
> The rule of law means that nobody is above the law
If the stats from the Innocence Project are correct[1,2], then it would also mean that nobody is above being a victim of the rule of law, either.
The rule of law is not infallible - and any sort of blind "rule of law" worship is akin to the worship for a dictator; its just merely dressed in different clothing.
This has nothing to do with the concept of "rule of law". This is simply about how the law is applied and appealed. If anything, the rule of law should protect against these miscarriages of justice, because the law should be applied equally to everybody, and therefore the poor should have the same access to the processes of appeal as the rich and powerful.
Very insightful answer indeed. I found this part particularly interesting:
> One of the most interesting theories however is Ernst Fraenkels "The Dual State". Fraenkel asserts that Nazi Germany is a dual state where the normative state (the state based on the rule of law) coexists with the "prerogative state" (the state not bound by law). While some swaths of society such as the relation to private property, the civil law etc. continue to function on the basis of codified norms (think the building code, neighbor disputes, companies suing each other, "ordinary" criminal law, stuff in relation to ownership of private property), some parts of the state were unbound by the Nazis such as the prosecution of political opponents, the camp system etc. Fraenkel further asserts that once the prerogative state is established, it has a very strong tendency to expand into the territory of the normative state and that state actions once unbound will cause enormous havoc in a certain sense.
This theory kind of generalizes my statements upthread, expanding them to cover authoritarian states. Any kind of society we could label as authoritarian state is by definition already way too large to be fully micromanaged by the people at the top. Such a state has to retain a quite substantial "normative state", as Fraenkels calls it - and this state is what my arguments about intersubjective beliefs apply to. When people stop having faith in the "normative state" - whether because of "prerogative state" overreach or other forces - the whole thing collapses, and not even the strongest tyrant can hold it together.
The issue is that we're used to think in terms of Legislative, Judiciary and Executive. That's what most modern democracies are based on.
If you look at this the old way, Hitler wasn't above the law, he was the law, because there was no real split of powers.
Your comment, though, is very interesting because it defies the stupid idea that back then people respected laws, while today....
Somehow this got idolized, which is why (young!) people tend to feel nostalgic about such times. In reality, there was a lot of corruption, Hitler himself evaded taxes, used Party money to fund his own Mercedes etc.... yeah like today!!! :)
Edit: somehow this propaganda of people of law lasted until today. In reality, the guy was a fraud that collected millions over the years. While everyone else had to live in fear of deportations or worse. I don't understand why journalists don't focus on things like this to dismantle idiotic extreme parties.
> Even if you take the Nazi propaganda that their laws were themselves lawful (which they were not, beginning with the clearly unlawful capture of power)
What definition of the laws lawfulness are you using? Capturing the power - it is what makes law lawful, otherwise any law is unlawful.
This is a very crude and on every level incorrect understanding on how laws work, both in a formalistic, as well as a societal way.
When the Nazis captured power, they did so by excluding the legitimate (and lawful) parliamentary opposition from key votes in parliament by (unlawfully) imprisoning opposition parliamentarians. In a strictly legal sense, this made their entire regime illegitimate from the outset.
What you fail to grasp is that a regime like Hitler's is constitutionally and ideologically incapable of being "lawful", i.e. having any set of laws and norms that would apply consistently, even if these laws were shaped by their own ideology. The whole point of Hitler's leadership was that laws were irrelevant and completely subservient to facilitating his twisted idea of Arian racial domination, with even the "German" society being completely dominated by the "Ubermenschen" that he hoped to create out of the murderous struggle of war.
Even the ancient Romans and Greeks would have recognized the Nazi regime as "unlawful". While the roman empire was a dictatorial regime, it had a mostly consistent set of laws and norms that even the Cesar had to abide by (though these laws gave him tremendous power in comparison to modern democratic executives). "Personalized" regimes in contrast are not build on laws, but revolve around the whims and/or ideology "the leader". You can see some aspects of this in Trump's approach to governance, though the US is obviously still a long way away from the extremes that the Third Reich went to.
You are absolutely right saying that rule of law is not sufficient condition for the existence of modern society. It was a bit confusing still, because nobody claimed the opposite: the comment you replied to was saying rule of law is a necessity.
You may have been saying this but the parent comment that spurred the discussion was making the explicit assertion that "the rule of law is the only thing holding together [...] everyone's countries, and civilized society in general".
Saying that law is 'the only thing' necessary for the existence of modern society effectively means it is also a sufficient condition. So yes, someone did claim the opposite.
I doubt that modern society does fulfill the sufficiency criteria [1], so „the only thing“ can be right, but also it is not the claim that it is enough for survival.
[1] USA regressing to a globally disrespected oligarchy under Trump is a good example.
Not in my wildest dreams I imagined Brazil would give the good example for prosecuting a former president who attempted a coup and that the US would fail to do the same.
Ah, but legal positivism is the norm in liberal societies, and not by accident. This follows directly from the demands of liberalism which privatizes discussion of the objective real and relegates it to individual sentiment. One of the paradoxes of liberalism is that the maximization of individual liberty necessarily demotes authority and elevates power, leading to tyranny.
So any appeals to the contrary are rooted in appeals to beliefs held in parallel with the liberal doctrines of the state. When Protestants ruled the US, that means some residual (often warped) Christian sensibility, because they were able to attain that consensus. But with greater competition today, that old consensus is no longer possible. Liberalism ensures that.
The Nazis did anything but blindly followed the rule of law. They did the opposite - they used law as a cudgel to beat their enemies with, while somehow magically, not being held responsible for any of their own violations of it. It's how they rose to power, and it's how they liquidated all of their internal opposition in the pre-war years.
We are seeing this play out again. The brownshirts have all been pardoned (with a clear message to the ones who will be involved in the next act - that as long as they break the law in support of the regime, they'll get bailed out), while everyone else is getting in line to kowtow and kiss the ring - because if they don't, they might be targeted.
It's actual insanity that people are looking at this and saying it is fine.
Then again, the whole country has gone insane, it looks at a video of the richest main in the world giving a fascist salute, and insist that he's just giving a confused wave, or that it's the same thing as a still of some other person with an outstretched arm.
I thought everybody knew the first thing the Nazis did was eroding the rule of law, with the help of Hans Frank, before even taking power.
The fact that everybody is equal in front of justice and that justice should be independent, two of the basics tenet of the rule of law, were hated by the Nazis and called 'jewish law', and were targeted. Lawyers and judges were increasingly close to the Nazi party. The same crime by a party member didn't had the same consequence.
I think the Nazis pamphlet said that 'roman law follow the materialistic world order, and should be replaced by German law'. Where materialistic was a dogwhistle for Marxism, and world order for Judaism.
What did help Nazis was that older judges and lawyers were often aristocrats who didn't really love the republic, and new one were petty bourgeoisie where Nazism had a lot of supporters. They helped put a staunch conservative (who later joined the Nazis) at the head of the German supreme court before 1933. The man blocked socdems appointments, and changed how the German law was interpreted (basically pushing intent of the law vs letter of the law, where intent weirdly always aligned with Nazi ideology).
Then, once they had power, the first thing they did after the conservative Hindenburg (may he be remembered as Hitler first collaborator) declared a 'state of emergency was to suspend judiciary oversight over arrest and imprisonment.
I learned so much from reading this, thank you. Is there more of this same style dense history writing somewhere? (Of course there are caveats and narratives etc., I hope people understand that...)
I bought it as an audiobook and listened for about 30 minutes already. It's been fascinating. It is quite long. But I have definitely learned a lot. Thank you!
I guess the psychological aspect of clamoring for a strong leader would need more deep diving. Serhii Plokhy and Martti J Kari have talked about this in regards to Russia, those are available as Lex Fridman interview and youtube lecture: a strongman, even with downsides, is still preferrable to a weak leadership that is unable to defend against external threats or internal chaos.
The reader's pronounciation of German is quite incomprehensible though (book is in English). Völkischer Beobachter is not easy.
> a strongman, even with downsides, is still preferrable to a weak leadership that is unable to defend against external threats or internal chaos
What's interesting with that is that I think it is wrong, the part against 'external threats'. France during the revolution was attacked by everyone, and despite absolutely no leadership, managed to beat back, well, everyone. By deferring power, it made its army stronger. Yes, then some the people the republic deferred power to then took the rest of it by force, but the laws were weak and the culture not set yet.
Certain discourse in other languages sometimes like to underline the difference between "rules" and "law" as in "we must aspire to be a state built on law, not a state built on rules." (not necessarily claiming English is such a language either)
Everything done without consideration is very quickly evil. Free tragedy of the commons with every free market; equivalents of Malthus for poverty wages and zero profit margins in the economy; Nash games where all parties want to defect and want the other not to; AI optimising for paperclips.
Rule of law is a pillar, but not the only one — in an ideal case the laws themselves are bound by constitutional requirements, and the constitutional requirements are bound by democratic will, and the democratic will by freedom of speech, and the freedom of speech by a requirement for at least attempting to be honest.
> Actually they didn't. Everything the Nazis did they had a law for. The mass murder was all lawful according to the 3rd Reich's laws.
This is false. Even if you take the Nazi propaganda that their laws were themselves lawful (which they were not, beginning with the clearly unlawful capture of power) at face value, the Nazi regime did not adhere to its own laws and regulations. While in some cases the Nazi regime did codify a basis in law for their atrocities (i.e. excluding and expropriating jews), much of the Nazi terror both in a civil and military context would have been explicitly illegal under the law at the time.
This includes the November Progroms of 1938 (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novemberpogrome_1938), large parts of the Nazi's approach to warfare, as well as the entire Holocaust (the murder of more than 6 million jews and other "undesirables"), for which the Nazis did not bother to create any legal justification.
While the Nazi regime was deeply bureaucratic (in that it documented its policies, orders and their results in high detail) this is not the same as "following the law". Most of the Nazi's atrocities evolved not through a process of lawmaking, but from their racist ideology and were given legitimacy through the highly personalized nature of the regime: Hitler was explicitly above the law, as were his orders, not matter if expressed through him personally or in his name by his followers.
"Everything the Nazis did they had a law for. The mass murder was all lawful according to the 3rd Reich's laws."
Can you cite those laws?
I doubt you can, because they do not exist. There were laws for removing jews from academic positions and to confiscate their belongings - but no law allowing to kill them based on them being jews.
The Nazis operated from the very beginning on the principle do things and later maybe add a law about it, if necessary.
"the mechanism, process, institution, practice, or norm that supports the equality of all citizens before the law, secures a nonarbitrary form of government, and more generally prevents the arbitrary use of power."
You ought to distinguish 'the law' that can be discriminatory, unjust, imperfect, and 'the rule of the law', which in theory cannot. In practice, the 'rule of the law' was never truly achieved, nowhere, and recently (post 9/11 it seems) the US might have gotten further from the hypothetical 'perfect state'. Presidential pardon, Guantanamo, or I think closer to everyday life civil forfeiture, or arrest without cause, interrogation without a lawyer...
Some exceptions to the rule of law are just good practice: immunity to the executive power from executing a voted law, immunity for the legislative power (in some countries like France this immunity have some caveats) while elected. Sadly it breeds corruption.
That's not what rule of law is. Rule of law requires following the established constitutional order which the Nazis did not. A feudal king ruling on his whims has many laws, but there is not rule of law.
>The rule of law is a political and legal ideal that all people and institutions within a country, state, or community are accountable to the same laws, including lawmakers, government officials, and judges.
But the Nazis themselves were accountable to their own laws. It was a highly lawful state. Only the laws were pretty fucked because the society lacked any morality.
I know what you mean, and I do agree with your main point about not blindly following orders. I hope most people do. It's just the way you phrase it, I also have to disagree. The Nazis at their core were not "lawful", not even "lawful evil". Not unless the one law is "as long Hitler says it's fine, it's fine".
> Any hierarchy, no matter how authoritatively managed, and any communication of orders, no matter how autocratically and dictatorially issued, would stabilize and thus limit the total power of the leader of a totalitarian movement. In the language of the Nazis, it is the dynamic, never-resting "will of the leader" (and not his orders, which could be given a definable authority) that becomes the "supreme law of total rule".
> Hitler did sign an order for the T-4 euthanasia program. In the T-4 program as many as 100,000 German citizens who were thought to be ‘unworthy of life’ were murdered by Nazi party authorities and other German collaborators. When the German population caught on to what the Nazis were doing with T-4, they protested and Hitler was forced to publicly back down and cancel the program (although it continued secretly in the camps). Having been embarrassed by a written order once, Hitler became wary of doing it again. Important Nazi officials confirmed the oral transmission of Hitler’s secretive orders.
The controlled substance act violated the constitution as it regulates even intrastate trade of drugs. It relies on the tyrannical Wickard V Filburn ruling which says intrastate commerce is actually interstate commerce. The charges against Ross relied on law that flagrantly transgress the 10th amendment of the US constitution as written and as enforced.
This is why they needed an actual amendment to nationally ban, say, home made liquor.
It was 'accurate' until the 1930s when a certain lawyer with initials FDR found his programs unconstitutional, so he threatened to pack the Supreme Court until they were willing to shit can the 10th amendment.
I'd argue more have died from drug regulations than the Nazis, particularly when you factor in how DEA licensing and FDA approval corruption stifles access to medicine, and how prohibition fosters violence without meaningfully curbing harmful drug use.
Can you hear yourself? Are you really saying that "drug regulation" has caused more death than the tens of millions who died in ww2? Not to mention the millions and millions of people whose lives have been saved by drug regulation as they are not exposed to harmful drugs from charlatans.
39 million people died on the European theater of WW2 alone. Estimates of Jewish deaths during the holocaust range from 4.9 and 5.9 million people. Are you seriously suggesting drug ~regulation~ caused more deaths?
Silk road was not primarily used for "unregulated medicine" but for recreational drugs, weapons and other quite unsavory illegal things.
The bodies dead from the Holocaust are somewhat countable.
The bodies dead because of worldwide drug wars, because it is insanely costly to sell new medicines, and because some poor African child could not get a medicine because a company spent 500 million to get it approved and needs to recoup their costs in the inflated US market is much harder to count.
It's easier I guess to just frame the counterparty as downplaying the Holocaust. I am just not taking the death of the Jews seriously enough, perhaps I am some kind of racist or culturally insensitive person.
In Germany it is currently illegal to criticise Israel. You'll pardon me for being a bit skeptical about rule of law. Rule of good law is good, but rule of bad law is bad.
one of the German states foundations is responsibility for the Holocaust, which led to the founding of the state of Israel.
There are laws in Germany that make it a crime to condone a crime (forgive, overlook, allow, permit )
Some German courts have ruled that the slogan "between the river and the sea" is condoning the unlawful removal of Israelis or that the slogan is firmly attached to Terrorist Organization Hamas (therefore is by default a criminal statement )
Plenty of people have been fined for chanting the slogan at German protests against the current conduct of Israel in Gaza and West Bank.
There isn't a German law that states "it is illegal to criticize Israel" but laws like the following have been used to punish people criticizing Israel, in Germany:
Some German courts have thrown out some of these cases, they don't agree the Condone Crime laws can be applied to chanting 'between the river and the sea'
I understand that you could face charges if you criticized a group of people and expressed something that can be interpreted as a call for their elimination.
Pretending that those charges are for the criticism doesn't seem right, though.
Grossly excessive sentences for non-victim crimes while letting rapists, murderers and corrupt politicians go free with at best a slap on the wrist, is why people are abandon your "holy religion" in droves
Never read it, but I watched its recent adaptation as a Strange New Worlds episode called Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach, and if it's in any way representative of the source material, then I'd say the ethical problems there are nontrivial.
Ironically, by sentencing him more harshly on the basis of ideology as opposed to on the basis of the criminal code, you are undermining the rule of law, which requires sentences to be based only on statutory law.
It makes me very sad when people act as if the rule of law wasn't important, or worse in case like this they do as if the rule of law was only a limitation of freedom.
One cannot be more wrong: there cannot be freedom without the rule of law and without the existence of a state that enforces it.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that the rule of law is not particularly strong in the US. The past few years have made it clear that some people really are above the law.
That's comparing apples and oranges. One spent 10 years in a jail for making himself rich (and some others), the other never spent a day in a jail for committing at the highest level election subversion, retention of classified information, hush money payment (and more) - and was caught on the latter, eventually. It was arguably "exceptional prosecution" for that hush payment, like Al Capone was caught on a mere tax fraud
>One spent 10 years in a jail for making himself rich (and some others), the other never spent a day in a jail for committing at the highest level election subversion, retention of classified information, hush money payment (and more) - and was caught on the latter, eventually.
What an interpretation!
Another one might be: they tried to throw all kinds of things at Trump, and they all failed because they simply aren't true, until they managed to catch him on some triviality.
The fact that you "rule of law" people keep putting out accusations as if they were convictions, and insinuating people should be judged on these accusations is truly horrible for the system.
> the rule of law" is the only thing holding together your country, my country, everyone's countries, and civilized society in general. Take that away, and everything around us will collapse, regressing the few survivors of that event to the prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other
I've seen this sentiment expressed before, including with the movie "The Purge" (that I admittedly haven't seen, but I understood the concept as law becomes suspended for a day and everyone becomes violent). That idea that the only thing keeping people safe is the rule of law seems absurd to me.
There's a sense of empathy, there's religion (e.g. desire of heaven and fear of hell), there are family values (keeping extended family ties together which can induce pressure to do what's considered right), a concern over reputation, a sense of unity with one's culture and wanting the betterment of one's people, collectivism (the psychological/social tendency to put others before oneself), stuff like not wanting to bring shame to one's parents and extended family, a hate for hypocrisy, a simple lack of any desire to be violent, etc. etc.
I like to believe that between most people and their potential for violence, there's a lot of things besides the rule of law. Law enforcement is for outliers that have a desire for violence and nothing else to stop them.
If law enforcement would disappear from one day to the next, people would be less safe, but I don't think to the point that you'd have "few survivors of that event", especially if you consider just a single country/culture going through that experiment, since this probably depends somewhat on culture and its particular values. I'm more inclined to think that life would mostly just go on as normal, carried by habit/convention and the values we instill in offspring.
Maybe. Or maybe the arbitrary lines drawn and maintained that define "country" and "society" are the only things allowing hate to prosper. Get rid of the lines and become one people.
He was punished for his visible actions, not his private beliefs.
Also, I was focusing less on Ulbricht, and more on what 'ty6853 wrote in the comment I replied to. Quoting another part of it:
> The state hates more than anything someone who operates on first principles that the empire is wrong.
My point is: the state is absolutely right to hate such people. This is true regardless of whether the "empire" is North Korea or the United Federation of Planets - it's not an ethics issue, it's a structural property of stable social organizations.
As for people living today, unless you really suffer under the yoke of an evil empire, it's worth remembering that, were the state to suddenly break down, things will get much, much worse for everyone in it, yourself included.
It's too easy for all of us to take our daily lives for granted.
Many were convicted of the same acts and received far lighter sentences. They specifically sought to make an example out of him. That is contrary to the rule of law.
I think you may be overstating this. The archeological evidence is pretty clear that prehistorical lifestyles weren't just small tribes slaughtering each other, and that there was a lot of variety and complexity in the way prehistoric societies organized themselves. Also, there are some societies that exist in 2025 which proved scary enough examples of what's possible.
There are also societies which have blatant arbitrary authoritarian rule which seem to be well in the 21st century. I doubt that faith in the rule of law is the only thing keeping our societies together.
> pretty clear that prehistorical lifestyles weren't just small tribes slaughtering each other,
Well, that's sounds quite logical. When you kill people, they usually fight back. Very strongly fight back. So you have to expect something big to make it worth it. But small very undeveloped tribes had nothing of such, so they have no incentives to slaughter each other.
> But small very undeveloped tribes had nothing of such, so they have no incentives to slaughter each other.
With neither size nor technology to make a lasting impact, the ones that got slaughtered didn't exactly leave much in archeological evidence behind for us to find.
As for GP's point, obviously those people weren't bred for battle with others. All the tiny tribes would happily frolic in the forest or whatever small prehistoric tribes did when they weren't starving, but eventually they'd grow in size, hit a size limit leading to a new tribe splitting off, etc.; over time, the number of tribes grew to the point that they started to bump into each other and contest the same resources, leading to the obvious outcome.
It was later, when humanity accumulate knowledge about resources gathering and processing, about nature and how to deal with it to not to die all the time. Then yeas, tribes were becoming larger, wealthier, more stationary. But before that there were very few people, the tribes were nomadic with virtually no alternatives and had nothing of value. At least nothing so valuable that it would be easier to get it by attacking another tribe, rather than by simply moving a couple of dozen kilometers away.
I'm genuinely convinced that prehistoric humans, being literally the same species as us, were just as capable as us in the ability to thoughtfully construct their societies. Like, why, when they bumped into each other, couldn't they have formed a confederation?
I think instead of labeling them as children of nature or starving savages warring with everything in their vicinity, it makes most sense to see them as more or less similar to ourselves.
Editing in a TL;DR: imagine you and your friends are thrown back in time to year 20 000 BC or thereabout. Imagine you find the nearest tribe of humans, and by magical means are able to understand and speak their language. Imagine you go to their chief and propose to form a confederacy, and ponder what would stop them from replying "ugh" and bashing your head in with a club. Compare with a closest analog to today, and where the difference comes from.
--
> I'm genuinely convinced that prehistoric humans, being literally the same species as us, were just as capable as us in the ability to thoughtfully construct their societies.
I agree. We're basically the same people as we were before, hardware and firmware, +/- lactose intolerance and some extra mutations that, without modern medicine, would prohibit one from successfully reproducing. With that in mind...
> Like, why, when they bumped into each other, couldn't they have formed a confederation?
Because they most likely couldn't have even conceptualized this that long ago, much less make it work.
A "confederacy" isn't some built-in human feeling. It's advanced technology. Social technology, but technology nonetheless. In a way, it's merely a more advanced form of a bunch of elders getting together to deal with a problem affecting all of their tribes - but this is like saying passing around crude drawing on stones is basically a bit less advanced e-mail or international postal network. As an advanced social technology, a confederacy has a lot of prerequisites - including writing, deep specialization of labor (allowing for both rulers and thinkers to thrive), hierarchical governance, a set of traditions (religious or otherwise) that solidify the hierarchical governance structure and some early iteration of a justice system, literate ruling class, etc.; all of those are but a few nodes in the "tech tree" that leads to a confederacy, and more importantly, enables scaling the society up to the point we can even talk about a confederacy as we define the term today.
> I think instead of labeling them as children of nature or starving savages warring with everything in their vicinity, it makes most sense to see them as more or less similar to ourselves.
We still are children of nature. We're not starving because of all the advancement in science, technology and social technologies we've accumulated over the past couple millenia.
Consider that it is only recently - within the last 150 years - we finally stopped going to war over land and natural resources. Human nature didn't change in that time. What changed was that we've expanded to the point every place on Earth's surface has someone staking a claim to it, that the knowledge of these claims quickly becomes known to other groups; we then fought it out in 1914-1918 and then for the last time, in 1939-1945, then most countries accepted agreements to keep the borders as they are, and then we invented nuclear weapons and froze the borders via MAD.
The modern world is a beautiful but fragile place. If we let any of the supporting structures - whether social or technological or military - snap, the whole thing will collapse like a house of cards, and the few people that survive it will be back to prehistoric savagery. Not because they'd suddenly get dumber, but because they'd have lost all the social and technological structures that makes humanity what it is today, and they'd have to rebuild it from scratch, the hard way.
Look at every society before the modern state monopoly on violence. Basically none of them were in danger of regressing because of it. The evolution of the modern state is a result of inter society competition for who can apply the most massed violence against a competing state.
We've seen what happens when empires fall apart (Rome for example) and things don't revert to "prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other for what little scraps the land has to give".
I'm not gonna go too far into this because like you say, it's a religion, and I'm not gonna waste my time trying to convert anyone.
Depends on the time scale. I mean the early middle ages (500 to 1000) could be described as "(smaller) tribes fighting over what is left" (considering all the barbarians from the north pillaging the roman empire while the Arabs conquering it from the south).
The evolution of modern society is as much a result of religion (centralizing a purpose and limiting inner fighting) of science (do things more efficient) as it is to violence.
Violence might be one way to progress, everybody is entitled to an opinion. I just hope you experienced it yourself if you believe it is the way you prefer personally. I am saying just because I thought some things would be great, only to be quite disappointed when I actually tried them...
> Look at every society before the modern state monopoly on violence. Basically none of them were in danger of regressing because of it.
They were too small. But they had their own social orders of equivalent importance, and breaking those would break them apart. There's a reason religion and tradition played bigger role in a distant past, and going against them was severely punished. It's not just out of spite or "us vs. them"; people take threats to stability of their group personally. It's definitely in part a survival mechanism.
> The evolution of the modern state is a result of inter society competition for who can apply the most massed violence against a competing state.
Yes. More specifically, it's the result of growth. It's the same thing as small tribes fighting each other over some small areas of land, except scaled up. Bigger groups have a competitive advantage over smaller groups, but there's a limit to the size of a group beyond which it ends up splitting apart; increasing that limit requires stacking more layers of hierarchy and associated social technologies. "Rule of law" and the legal system in general is one of such technologies, and it looks like it does today, at scales of groups we have today.
A group of dozens can just work on instinct alone. A group of hundreds requires some rules and specialization and designated authority. Scale that 100x, and you need another level of leadership hierarchy just to keep sub-group leaders coordinated and aligned. Scale that 100x further, and you kind of have to get something looking like a modern nation state, as anything else would either break apart or be defeated by another group that is more like a modern nation state.
See also: Dunbar's number.
> We've seen what happens when empires fall apart (Rome for example) and things don't revert to "prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other for what little scraps the land has to give".
Nonsense. "The rule of law" isn't one cohesive thing--sure, some parts of it are important for holding together a country/society, but in a sufficiently complex legal system (like the US') there exists a plethora of laws which are irrelevant to holding together society. Every such society has laws which are on the books but are not enforced, weakly enforced, or unevenly enforced. In fact, an implicit part of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson's theory of government was explicitly having laws which only existed to be broken, to allow citizens to exercise their rebellious impulses without causing harm--Wilson believed that turning a blind eye to the breaking of a certain subset of laws actually minimized the harm of unlawful action. An example of this is rules against walking on the grass in many public areas in London, which is enforced by security guards whose only recourse is to tell you to stop.
The US also has laws which we don't care if you break, and the laws we place in this category say a lot about our society. For example, it's widely accepted that people can drive up to 10 MPH above the speed limit and consequences will be rare. Even more severe moving violations are met with a slap on the wrist which primarily effects the poor (fines).
Drug laws were already within this category before Ullbricht started the Silk Road. The was on drugs was explicitly started by Nixon as a war on the antiwar left and black people, and if you didn't fall into one of those categories, you were/are largely above drug laws, since enforcement generally targets those categories, while the social acceptability of popular drugs means that crimes of this nature are rarely reported.
Ullbricht's primary offense was breaking a law that was already broken ubiquitously. Society did not collapse before Ullbricht when these laws were broken, it did not collapse when Ullbricht broke them, and it does not collapse because of the myriad of darknet sites which immediately filled the void left by the Silk Road's closure. Ullbricht's arrest didn't end the blatant disregard for drug laws on the darknet, and yet somehow in the 11 years since his arrest, society still hasn't devolved into small tribes slaughtering each other.
In short, if people breaking drug laws was a real threat to society, then society would have devolved into tribes slaughtering each other already. We have had over 50 years of people ubiquitously breaking drug laws without societal collapse.
I'm not talking about any particular law, I'm talking about the general idea of laws as things that apply to everyone, that everyone should obey, and that everyone expects everyone else will obey, and that everyone knows they're expected by others to obey. That's the self-reinforcing structure of intersubjectivity, that allows us to invent and maintain imaginary entities such as "dollar", "law", "justice system", "contract", or "limited liability corporation", etc. Underlying all such entities is the set of shared beliefs about how others will behave.
This structure is self-reinforcing and very resilient: few people here and there rejecting faith in rule of law, or authority of the courts, or money, don't make a difference - we write such people off as weirdos and carry on with our days, secure in knowledge our world will continue to work as it worked the day before. But if sufficient amount of people have their faith falter, that's where the trouble starts.
For example, if enough people stop trusting in the justice system to deliver something resembling justice most of the time, you'll see people ignoring courts and laws and taking justice into their own hands[0]. People start lynching and killing each other, others see them getting away with it, which quickly destroys their trust in the system, and now you're at the precipice. If shooting a (person accused of being) thief is fine, if shooting a billionaire is fine, then why uphold a contract? Might as well get your own at gunpoint, etc. At this point everything stops working - banks, healthcare, fire services, stores. Your country collapses. You probably die.
That is why threats to our shared belief system are so dangerous, and need to be dealt with swiftly and aggressively. It's not about elites in power wanting to stay in power (though it's no doubt part of it for them) - it's because should we all start thinking our social structures don't work, and that everyone else thinks this too, and start acting on this expectation, they'll all collapse in an instant.
--
[0] - No, whatever it is that America has with its police is still far from that point.
> I'm not talking about any particular law, I'm talking about the general idea of laws as things that apply to everyone, that everyone should obey, and that everyone expects everyone else will obey, and that everyone knows they're expected by others to obey. That's the self-reinforcing structure of intersubjectivity, that allows us to invent and maintain imaginary entities such as "dollar", "law", "justice system", "contract", or "limited liability corporation", etc. Underlying all such entities is the set of shared beliefs about how others will behave.
You can talk about whatever you want, but you don't get to limit what other people talk about.
If you think there's anything like "everyone should obey, everyone expects everyone else will obey, and everyone knows they're expected by others to obey" around drug laws, you're living in a fantasy. You can talk about that concept if you want, but I'm saying that concept doesn't apply to drug law, which is, in case you noticed, the primary group of laws Ullbricht was convicted of breaking.
> For example, if enough people stop trusting in the justice system to deliver something resembling justice most of the time, you'll see people ignoring courts and laws and taking justice into their own hands[0]. People start lynching and killing each other, others see them getting away with it, which quickly destroys their trust in the system, and now you're at the precipice. If shooting a (person accused of being) thief is fine, if shooting a billionaire is fine, then why uphold a contract? Might as well get your own at gunpoint, etc. At this point everything stops working - banks, healthcare, fire services, stores. Your country collapses. You probably die.
You're picking unrelated examples and ignoring the issue at hand.
If selling drugs is fine, why uphold a contract? If driving faster than the speed limit is fine, why not get your own at gunpoint?
Sure, generally people agree murder is bad, but that's very little to do with the law or any sort of trust in the law. Your ivory-tower ideals have nothing to do with it: as it turns out, people don't want to be murdered, so we're all pretty happy when the cops enforce that law, whether we trust them or not.
I'll further add: banks, healthcare, fire services, stores, all only work for a segment of our population in the US. By your definition of collapse, large portions of the U.S. collapsed decades ago.
> That is why threats to our shared belief system are so dangerous, and need to be dealt with swiftly and aggressively. It's not about elites in power wanting to stay in power (though it's no doubt part of it for them) - it's because should we all start thinking our social structures don't work, and that everyone else thinks this too, and start acting on this expectation, they'll all collapse in an instant.
"Our shared belief system"?
Let's be clear, this is your belief system, and what you're trying to do is justify ramming it down other people's throats with the physical violence performed by police. Your belief system is probably the majority opinion within the upper-middle-class and richer demographic of Hacker News, and might even be the majority opinion nationally, but it's not unanimous or even close to unanimous. Drug use is well within the mainstream in 2025.
> Ross violated the only remaining national holy religion, the rule of law. He was sentenced for being a heretic.
That's a weird way of talking about that. The rule of law is what keeps rampant corruption and government abuse at bay. It means the law also holds for the ruler, and not just for the subjects. The rule of law has already been significantly weakened in recent years by openly corrupt judges and politicians, and traitor being elected in defiance of the 14th amendment.
None of this is a good thing. Without the rule of law, it's the people that lose, because then you get the rule of those in power, who will be above the law.
Also his opsec was sloppy. If you want to believe that the spooks were doing full ipv4 scans to DDoS all his legit exit nodes that would make a better movie. But really, he was just in over his head.
Predictably, dark web market operators adapted afterward. The state got lucky and they knew it, so that also factored in to their sentencing recommendations.
Ten? Oh man. Have you read about the FALN commutation? Iran-Contra? Watergate? The 1960 presidential election? Roosevelt (both of them)? Wilson? Lincoln? Those are just a very few of the instances of disrespect for the rule of law that come to mind immediately.
> Ten? Oh man. Have you read about [list of older historical events I suggest you were foolish to ignore]
Slow down there cowboy, it's "ten" because the other poster is referencing a conviction which occurred on February 5th 2015, uncannily close to exactly ten years ago.
But that's what "rule of law" means: that the rules also apply to the leaders. The fact that leaders in the US aren't held accountable for their crimes means the US does not have the rule of law, but the rule of power. Or the rule of money, probably. The rich are above the law and can buy the government.
> The site's terms of service prohibited the sale of certain items. When the Silk Road marketplace first began, the creator and administrators instituted terms of service that prohibited the sale of anything whose purpose was to "harm or defraud." This included child pornography, stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of any type
Yes, but so are a lot of sentences in the US. I've heard of people being put away for decades for mere drug possession.
That said, rapists surprisingly often get just a slap on the wrist, or not even that. The US absolutely needs some balance and consistency in its sentencing, but pardoning this one guy sends a really weird message in that regard. At the very least, just commute the sentence so at least the conviction still stands.
Pretty much all criminal laws are like that since only a fraction of crimes will ever lead to an arrest we make examples out of those are caught to make others less likely to commit crimes in the future when they see the punishment. The deterrence effect is basically "risk of getting caught" * "punishment if you get caught".
It's not just the deterrence but to publicly condemn the act. Condemnation needs to have teeth and the perpetrator needs to feel the burden, otherwise it's just empty words on paper. The burden is necessary to establish social balance. The punishment can't be enjoyable, it needs to take away the unfair advantage gained by the criminal act, it provides a way to repay moral debt back to society.
> A fourth feature of punishment, widely acknowledged at least since the publication of Joel Feinberg’s seminal 1965 article “The Expressive Function of Punishment” is that it serves to express condemnation, or censure, of the offender for her offense. As Feinberg discusses, it is this condemning element that distinguishes punishment from what he calls “nonpunitive penalties” such as parking tickets, demotions, flunkings, and so forth. (Feinberg, 1965: 398-401).
In the UK, the police helped hide the crimes of non-british child rapists.
The axiom of their "rule of law" was that racism is the worst possible sin, and that anything done to appease people calling you racist was mandatory. The below link MASSIVLEY understated the number of victims.
Enoch Powell explained all this nearly 60 years ago, and was sacked the next day by Edward Heath. The term "racist" is at best useless and at worst dangerous. It doesn't differentiate between judging people based on their physiology and judging them on their culture and values. By going out of their way to avoid appearing to judge by physiology, people allowed into their society millions of people with cultures and values fundamentally opposed to their own (e.g. Christians using the British common law vs Muslims using Sharia law). The result is a slow destruction of society that Enoch Powell predicted so long ago in his 1968 speech.
Well, maybe Britain shouldn't have colonized large areas of the globe and exploited them for resources while keeping the indigenous inhabitants oppressed for centuries, all while preaching the absolute supremacy of British civilization and culture. Hardly seems surprising that some of the people you colonized might want to see what all the fuss is about.
Indeed, Britain should have known this and realized that the only way forward was complete and total separation from the post colonial states. Any sort of immigration or pseudo integration was bound to lead to this. Other countries, such as the US, should look to what has become of Britain as an example of what not to do, what ideas do NOT work, and what ideologies lead to such betrayals.
Silk road had a policy against selling items with intent to harm like guns. While occasionally some weapon listings would slip through, they would be taken down. The focus was drugs (and a lot of legal media). There were plenty of other black market sites on the dark web that sold everything, but that's not what the silk road in particular was about.
Selling say drugs that kill people (kids including) and illegal weapons that are often used for murders. Such activity is by western standards one of worst crimes, especially in massive scale and run for profit. Even ignoring all other criminal activity, 25 to life seems like a adequate sentence.
It seems that from day 1 US is moving quite far from the place it was and projected itself to others for past decades. More ruthless, money above all, not much fairness in international dealings. Maybe US will be richer after those 4 years, but at current trajectory it will lose a lot of friends and partners.
Please realize this - for Europe, China starts to look like a great not only business but also military partner, much more reliable long term. This is how much such moves can fuck up things.
That's mainly because it cuts into the US government profit margins. They and their favored contractors have been selling arms for profit and love drug running when it suits their aims as they showed with eg support for the Contras.
It is important drugs stay illegal so powerful connected interests can maintain high profit and control. Without that, simple cocaine/meth/marijuana is just an agricultural or chemical commodity with essentially the margin of generic OTC drugs.
Yeah I meant more like some shady fentanyl that overdoses people en masse, not some rather harmless and sometimes even beneficial weed.
The worst part are weapons, there is no way to spin it as something benign. Victor Bout for example got 25 years and there was no drug smuggling nor contract murders.
Victor Bout is free and selling weapons again with the blessing and release of the US government. Always was about profiting off of weapons. Don't believe what the US really got from it was one ditzy WNBA player.
They might be alluding to regulatory capture by groups such as the NRA, big pharma, and the defense industry, which, for all purposes, are an unelected part of the government.
In terms of money they really aren't that big, but they don't need much money to wield influence because their cause is very popular with a lot of voters and politicians know that.
He was serving 2 life sentences + 40 years, not one. Even the prosecutors only asked for 20. What he did was wrong, but the sentence was disproportionate. The judge intended to throw away his life to make a point.
China seems to understand the concept of soft power, something the US has been neglecting for many decades in favor of less subtle military intervention.
It could start helping finance infrastructure projects, schools, hospitals, universities, and so on. Along that comes the opportunity to exercise cultural influence and develop consumers and suppliers for your own industry.
It’s far less nasty than invading, freeing the people from their government and installing a puppet in its place. Also a lot cheaper. Any missile could pay for a school.
So, which countries did China liberate from oppression? What did the CCP/its predecessor movement actually do? Standing aside while the NRA fought the Japanese. Instead of helping and preventing some major bloodbaths, Mao and his army just abided their time. After the power change, the Long March, the Cultural Revolution and whatever havoc I forget, China was too weak to do anything, let alone invade countries. Now it's stronger, and seems remarkably poised for war.
Your "US bad because invasion" is a tankie frame. Yes, that refers to the Tiananmen tanks.
>So, which countries did China liberate from oppression?
My friend, what are you babbling about? Did you hallucinate me saying that China is my model of a utopian society?
Again. Which countries has China invaded or toppled, outside of the imaginary ones you yearn for in your head? Is the list close to that of the US?
>Your "US bad because invasion" is a tankie frame. Yes, that refers to the Tiananmen tanks. (??)
I'm a tankie because I think invasions are bad?? What does that make you, a frothing bloodthirsty hawk? A despotic militarist?
Or will now attempt to argue the tired and ahistorical trope that those other invasions were good actually because Pinochet or Suharto were actually secretly democratic and the thousands they murdered aren't important, and it was good that Arbenz was toppled because he actually wasn't democratically elected and was infact a rabid communist in disguise and the United Fruit Co. lobbying was just a coincidence etc. etc.
If so don't bother. I'm not wasting anymore time talking to one bereft of ordered thought, spinning baffling word associations and tired tropes. I'm not interested in discovering to what extent daily life presents a sisyphean ordeal to you.
>minimal competition, lack of regulation, high margins etc
Those benefits don't come from nowhere. You're basically getting compensated to take on the risk, same as any other business. The difference in this case is that the risk is that a bunch of thugs with guns will show up and either kill you or put you in a cage in addition to the usual financial ruin.
Many criminal gangs from biker groups to foreign cartels are doing the same thing and reaping profits in the $100Bs scale annually.
Your argument is not an argument for incarceration, it is an argument for abolition of prohibition and regulating the sales of some psychoactives.
The same stone would hit the fentanyl epidemic, it would hit the pushers of ”zombie drug” laced cocktails, it would hit cross-border trafficking, to name only a few. Society would massively benefit. So would the economy.
Bailing him out comes at no cost? That's one way to see it.
In my opinion, it sends a message that as long as you can provide value to this new administration, you get preferential treatment - no matter how shady and unethical your business ventures are.
Not sure it was high margin as much as it was low fees on a large number of transactions, coupled with bitcoin appreciation this meant he made a lot of money.
The illegality of drugs is a government reaction, since governance failed to do anything with the problem by action. No-one deserves a life-long sentence in prison for that. This market, as well as minimal competition, lack of regulation, and high margins was created by the same power which sends people to jail.
Trump is a bit of an agorist is well. It's part of the American wild west mythical psyche, to the point America made a sport from moonshine running cars. Not hard for me to see how he half won and walked away with an unconditional pardon.
> In the 1920s, moonshine runners during the Prohibition era would often have to outrun the authorities. To do so, they had to upgrade their vehicles—while leaving them looking ordinary, so as not to attract attention. Eventually, runners started getting together with fellow runners and making runs together. They would challenge one another and eventually progressed to organized events in the early 1930s.
I don't have a horse in this race but the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear "we shouldn't have bailed him out" is silicon valley bank and its depositors. That to me was the biggest show of hypocrisy by silicon valley.
The idea that possession of drugs is or should be illegal is purely arbitrary, and is used thus to justify massive violations of human rights. It is literally insane that the state claims authority over what you are allowed to do to your own body.
While you might argue which drug is dangerous and which isn't, ban on drugs is not arbitrary decision. You can't do whatever you want with your body, because you might loose control and hurt others. Drug abuse affects others as well (financially, mentally, physically...). I am victim of someone's drug abuse. I never took any drugs. So if you are looking for victims of drug abuse, here I am.
Some of the decisions were rather arbitrary at best, and racist at worst, though. The sentence disparities regarding, for example, cocaine depending on how you are using it was designed to punish black people more harshly. Opium bans had as much to do with anti-Chinese sentiment than anything.
I'm not arguing that drugs should be legal, but we do have to be clear that the reasons for banning them and the punishment are not necessarily rational.
That’s pure historical revision. The sentencing difference was created in 1986 based on the belief that it was more addictive. It wasn’t until a decade later that research showed the causation had been reversed (more addicted people were more likely to use crack). If you look at the timing, there was a huge increase in drug crime that occurred as a result of the crack epidemic: https://www.nber.org/digest/oct18/lingering-lethal-toll-amer....
The recent change in policy simply reflects the prevailing trend of reducing disparities in sentencing for criminals while increasing disparities in crime victimization by failing to enforce the law.
It is legal if you're in good shape and therefore the risk of that happening is minimal. It is illegal to drive a car under an altered state that makes it more likely to happen. It is a balance between the benefits of permitting something and the likelihood of something bad happens. In normal conditions, the benefits are believed to outweigh the risks, so it is generally permitted to drive a car. But it is not permitted to drive it if you're under the effect of some substance that can alter your perception of reality.
Alcohol is in fact heavily regulated and controlled in most countries, and we have cultural practices in place that largely manage the risks for the vast majority of people that consume it.
Personally I'm in favour of further narcotics legalisation, but with regulation to manage it's social effects and taxation to fund the expensive mitigation measures it would require.
It's clear you don't personally know anyone who has been affected by a serious drug addiction. It is devastating not just for them, but their family and everyone that cares about them. It's unbelievable to me anyone could claim that dealing drugs is a victimless crime.
Almost everyone I know has been personally affected by serious drug addiction. Alcohol, opiates, cocaine, marijuana, cigarettes, even gambling if you count such things.
I still support the abolition of all bans and controls on access to drugs.
Destroying one’s own self has no victims, any more than bodybuilding does. If we should be free to build ourselves, we should be free to destroy ourselves.
Please don’t assume anyone who disagrees with your philosophy is naive or lacks empathy.
I'm not assuming. Your position on this issue simply lacks empathy.
If you've known anyone addicted to the list of things you mention, you should know that at some point, they are no longer "free to destroy themselves". They are continuing to destroy themselves out of a chemical or phycological necessity. The people who deal drugs or own casinos are running predatory businesses and it should be illegal, just like other predatory business practices are.
Chemical addiction is not comparable to overeating/lack of exercise. You could theoretically be "addicted" to McDonalds and still live a fairly healthy and balanced life in other respects. It's really not possible to be addicted to heroine and live a balanced lifestyle. Even though drug addicts are largely personally responsible for their actions, that doesn't make it less true that drug dealers are knowingly profiting off of vulnerable individuals and actively encourage them to ruin their lives.
Drugs weren't the only items sold there, there were also weapons. If you illegally sell weapons in a country where it is already much easier to legally get a weapon than most other countries, you can be sure that those weapons aren't going to be purchased by a layperson trying to defend themself but by criminals going to use those to harm other people.
The crime being not selling the weapons, but failing to keep appropriate records that ensured the use of the weapons was responsible and that users would be held accountable for their use.
Ross Ulbricht was not sentenced for murder-for-hire charges.
Those allegations were used to deny him bail and influenced public perception, they were not part of his formal conviction or sentencing.
He was convicted on non-violent charges related to operating the Silk Road website, including drug distribution, computer hacking, and money laundering.
Does this change your opinion of sentencing being well-deserved?
This opinion [1] from the judge in his case indicates that the murder-for-hire evidence was admitted during his trial. The document outlines the evidence for all 6 murder for hire allegations and explains why, although not charged, the evidence is relevant to his case.
It's surprising to me that the prosecutor is allowed to essentially insinuate crimes to influence the jury, without the need to prove them. That seems to undermine the process because it creates a "there's smoke so there must be fire" mentality for the jury.
There was plenty of evidence that he ordered the hits, and the defense had the opportunity to address the evidence in court. The chat logs go far beyond "insinuation"
It's ridiculous that people are pretending there is any doubt about his guilt because they like crypto and/or drugs.
Do you not think the optics are a bit weird when you sentence someone to life for something relatively small, but the reason is another crime you’re very sure he did but you didn’t bother to charge him with?
Prosecutors often choose not to pursue additional charges against someone already serving a life sentence. This approach helps avoid wasting court time and resources on cases that are unlikely to change the individual’s circumstances or contribute meaningfully to justice (none of the murders for hire resulted in victims).
I actually wonder if those charges may still be on the table now that a pardon has been granted.
If I understand correctly, only one of the "murder-for-hire" allegations was dismissed with prejudice[0]. However, he was suspected of orchestrating a total of six "murder-for-hire" plots.
Comically (horrifically sadly?) they were dismissed that way because he was already in prison for life with no possibility of getting out, so the court did not want to waste time on it.
Being a drug kingpin is not considered "something relatively small" under US law, as you can see from the sentencing. Being the leader of a large drug operation and ordering hits to protect your business would be considered worse than trying to take out a hit for whatever "personal reasons".
Obviously the hits are a lot messier to prosecute as well with the misconduct of the FBI agents, maybe you could hammer that enough to confuse a jury. But people are commenting like the evidence outright didn't exist - I can only think they have either heard it told second-hand, or are employing motivated reasoning.
Of course it is. Throwing in potential evidence of unrelated crimes to sway other people's (specifically jury's) opinion about the defendant without formally charging him is exactly what the word "insinuation" means[0]:
the action of suggesting, without being direct, that something unpleasant is true
> There was plenty of evidence that he ordered the hits, and the defense had the opportunity to address the evidence in court
Clearly not that much evidence if the state didn't bother to prosecute those charges. And why would they? The judge sentenced him as though he had been found guilty of them.
Coincidentally, on the same day, SCOTUS confirmed in Andrew v. White ruling [1] that admitting prejudicial evidence violates due process rights under the 14th Amendment.
That's a nice end-run around “innocent until proven guilty”: they didn't have to prove anything about those allegations beyond making them, because he wasn't charged with them.
The first person in the murder-for-hire allegations 'FriendlyChemist' was an undercover DEA agent or informant, and it's strongly possible none of the other people existed. It's also conjectured the hitman account 'Redandwhite' was being operated by the same DEA agent [*]. Moreover the bitcoin DPR sent the supposed hitman 'Redandwhite' sat in the wallet from 3/2013 till 8/2013, "which alone should have tipped out DPR about a possible scam" ie. that the killing never happened [0]. DPR never requested any confirmation pictures of at least 5 of the (fictitious) killings, nor was there any Canadian media coverage to suggest anyone got assassinated on the supposed dates.
The US Attorneys made a lot of publicity out of the murder-for-hire conspiracy allegations against Ulbricht in their indictments and in pre-trial media ("although there is no evidence that these murders were actually carried out." as the indictment itself obliquely says).
Ulbricht's defense could have come up with a plausible alternative explanations that he knew redandwhite was a scammer trying to extort him with a story involving nonexistent people, and was just playing along with him for whatever reasons.
[*] If the prosecution had not actually dropped those charges at trial, it would have been confirmed at trial which of the six identities were fictitious/nonexistent and whether all the accounts were managed by the same DEA agents. Hard to imagine that at least one juror wouldn't have formed a skeptical opinion about government agents extorting a person to conspire to kill fictitious people (why didn't the indictment just focus on nailing him on the lesser charges?). If this wasn't a Turing Test on when is an alleged conspiracy not a real conspiracy, then someday soon we'll see one.
To my mind, it doesn't matter whether a murder actually occurred for Ulbricht's culpability. He thought he was ordering a murder, he solicited proof, he got proof, and he asked for more hits. In his frame, someone was murdered on his orders. It's a burden to prove for sure, but the fact that he paid substantial cash equivalents in bitcoin to me mean he didn't think he was playing some fantasy game with scammers.
The chat logs show that he was quite stoic about the whole thing and treated it as a mundane business action to protect himself ("is a liability and I wouldn't mind if…"; "I've received the picture and deleted it. Thank you again for your swift action.").
Given that he is now free, and may have access to substantial cryptocurrency wealth, I think it would probably be best under the circumstances if everyone forgot about these allegations and just left him alone to live a quiet life.
FWIW, the two agents in the Ulbricht case, Shaun Bridges and Carl Mark Force IV, both subsequently went to prison for corruption, money-laundering etc. which they were perpetrating at the same time as the Ulbricht investigation, and tainted a lot of other prosecutions.
[0] gives a timeline and fills in lots of details.
Article [1] describes Bridges:
> Bridges was a cryptocurrency expert [... with offshore entities, including one that he had created after pleading guilty in this case]. According to AUSA Haun, his involvement with digital currency cases across the country caused a “staggering” number of investigations to become tainted, and subsequently shut down. She told the judge at Bridges’s sentencing that the corrupt agent had been looking out for opportunities to serve seizure warrants and somehow profit from it.
> The prosecutor also said that bitcoins were still missing, and they weren’t sure if he had worked with other corrupt agents. The US Attorney’s Office seemed to imply that there had been a lot of weird (but not necessarily chargeable) stuff that was still unaccounted for.
Article [2] describes Force:
> [Force's mental health issues]... his previous undercover assignments had ended disastrously. An assignment in Denver in 2004 had ended with a DUI. A second undercover assignment in Puerto Rico had ended in 2008 with a complete mental breakdown. Force was institutionalized, and did not return to his job until 2010. He was on desk duty until 2012, when he was assigned to investigate the Silk Road.
You missed that the "victims" did not exist and were invented (and Ulbricht's defense could have claimed that he was aware of that, and it would only need one juror to find that credible). I'm pointedly asking what a "real" plan is if it involves fictitious people invented by the two govt agents - both of whom (Bridges and Force) subsequently went to prison for corruption. If the conspiracy-to-commit-murder charges hadn't been dropped, cross-examining Bridges and Force likely would have destroyed the prosecution case (for conspiracy to commit murder).
UPDATE: apparently I'm wrong that "factual impossibility" is not a defense [0]. But Bridges and Force's criminal behavior tainted the prosecution case on this charge. Presumably why the prosecution made sure those two agents were not mentioned in the trial.
> You missed that the "victims" did not exist and were invented (and Ulbricht's defense could have claimed that he was aware of that, and it would only need one juror to find that credible).
But now we're playing legal tricks here. The real question would be if Ulbricht was willing to have people killed or not, regardless of what the defense can claim.
EDIT: just to be clear. Legally, I think it makes a big difference if someone decides to have someone else killed, tries to hire an hitman and that hitman turns out to be a policeman in disguise vs a policeman in disguise telling you "there are people doing something that is bad for you, should I kill them?". And it is perfectly right that the second case is crossing a line. But form a moral perspective, if someone answers "yes" in the second case, that still tells us a lot about that person, regardless of whether those people existed or not. The important thing is that those people were real in this person's mind.
" 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. [...] As you don't take kindly to thieves, this kind of behavior is unforgivable to me. Especially here on Silk Road, anonymity is sacrosanct.
It doesn't have to be clean, and I don't think there are any funds to be retrieved [...] 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 [...] I've only ever commissioned the one other hit, so I'm still learning this market. I have no problem putting my faith in you and I am sure you will do a good job. The exchange rate is above 90 right now, so at $90/btc, $150k is about 1670 btc. If the market tanks in the next few days, I will send more. Here are some random numbers for a picture: 83746102
Here is the transaction # for 1670 btc to 1MwvS1idEevZ5gd428TjL3hB2kHaBH9WTL4a0a5b6036c0da84c3eb9c2a884b6ad72416d1758470e19fb1d2fa2a145b5601
Good luck"
lmao
If that isn't conspiracy to murder, I'm not sure there is anything that would qualify.
I don't have knowledge of how the message exchange went. But if it was Ulbricht to contact the supposed hitman in the first place, then you're right that there isn't much to discuss about. Policeman in disguise or not, it is an attempt to murder someone.
He was found during sentencing to be guilty of hiring a hit on a competitor using a preponderance of evidence (lower then presumption of innocence). While this is a lower standard than a conviction, it is still a higher standard than most apply in public discourse.
That isn't fair, the point of the trial is to test whether something is to be acted on. To act on something that wasn't directly part of the trial is a bit off. I'm sure the judge is acting in the clear legally, but if someone is going to be sentenced for attempted murder then that should be after a trial that formally accuses them of the crime.
He wasn't sentenced for attempted murder, the sentence Ulbricht received was within the range provided by statute for the crimes he was convicted of. Judges have discretion in sentencing and they are allowed to consider the character of the defendant. The fact that Ulbricht attempted to murder people was demonstrated to the judges satisfaction during the trial and influenced her to sentence at the higher end of the range allowed for the crimes he was duly convicted.
The range allowed for those sentences is way too wide. Life without parole is nowhere near reasonable for hacking, money laundering, and drugs. Being within the sentencing range is meaningless when the range encompasses any possible sentence.
Well, just selling some drugs and laundering the money is one thing. Being some much a drug lord that you start a war on other drug lords is so much on a different level of severity that it could have been it’s own article in a criminal code
His sentence was severe in part because he fell under the "kingping statute". This is based on the amount of drug trade he facilitated, the amount of money he made, and the actions he took as an "organizer". The hits didn't help.
> For conviction under the statute, the offender must have been an organizer, manager, or supervisor of the continuing operation and have obtained substantial income or resources from the drug violations
> Being some much a drug lord that you start a war on other drug lords is so much on a different level of severity
Is this a hypothetical or did I miss a big chunk of this story?
If the war involves people being hurt, then conspiracy and instruction to injure and murder sound like great things to charge the drug lord with. If it doesn't, then I don't see the severity.
This cuts both ways as judges often adjust their sentencing downward based on mitigating evidence. For both aggravating and mitigating circumstances evidence does need to be submitted, and there are standards of proof to be applied. It's just that the procedural rules can be different and, depending on the context and jurisdiction, sufficiency can be decided by the judge alone. In some jurisdictions, for example, aggravating evidence may need to be put to the jury, while mitigating evidence need not be.
The U.S. is rather unique in providing a right to jury trials for most--in practice almost all, including misdemeanor--criminal cases. And this is a major factor for why sentencing is so harsh and prosecutions so slow in the U.S. In myriad ways the cost of criminal trials has induced the system to arrive at its current state favoring plea deals, with overlapping crimes and severe maximum penalties as cudgels. Be careful about what kind of "protections" you want to impose.
> This cuts both ways as judges often adjust their sentencing downward based on mitigating evidence.
It isn't supposed to cut both ways. The prosecution is supposed to have the higher burden, and admitting unproven allegations is excessively prejudicial.
> In myriad ways the cost of criminal trials has induced the system to arrive at its current state favoring plea deals, with overlapping crimes and severe maximum penalties as cudgels. Be careful about what kind of "protections" you want to impose.
The lesson from this should be to make the protections strong enough that they can't be thwarted like this. For example, prohibit plea bargaining so that all convictions require a trial and it's forbidden to impose any penalty for demanding one.
It's not supposed to be efficient. It's supposed to be rare.
In common law, you are found guilty, and then sentenced. The judge does the sentencing, the jury finds you guilty or not.
Then there is precedent. Guidelines are created based on caselaw, so if a simular type of case arrises, that forms the "expectation" of what the sentence will be.
This means that you don't need specific levels of a crime. For example drug trafficking can be a single gram of coke for personal use, vs 15 tonnes for commercial exploitation. hence the range in sentences.
Suppose you're charged with two crimes in two separate courts. The first is jaywalking, the second is murder, but the judge is given unlimited discretion to determine sentencing.
To try to prove their jaywalking allegations, the prosecution in the first case claims that you were in a hurry to cross the street because you were trying to kill someone, and present some evidence of that from a questionable source. They also have separate video evidence of you crossing the street against the light. The jury convicts you of jaywalking.
The judge in the jaywalking case then sentences you to life without parole, because jaywalking in order to murder someone is much more serious than most other instances of jaywalking. The prosecution in the other court then drops the murder charges, so the murder allegations were never actually proven anywhere.
Is this reasonable? Should we be satisfied with how this works and not want to change anything about it?
You can only be given a sentence for the crime you have been convicted of, otherwise you could easily appeal.
> Is this reasonable? Should we be satisfied with how this works and not want to change anything about it?
It doesn't work like that, and I wouldn't be satisfied by a court system that does work like that. It'd fucking disastrous. If anyone convinces you that it does work like that, they are either a scammer, or want to make the law system _very_ scary.
> You can only be given a sentence for the crime you have been convicted of, otherwise you could easily appeal.
If you're convicted of a crime, let's say selling drugs, that carries a penalty of up to life in prison even though most people get 5-10 years, and then you're sentenced to life in prison after the person doing the sentencing is prejudiced by these murder allegations you've never been convicted of, what's your basis for appeal?
> If you're convicted of a crime, let's say selling drugs, that carries a penalty of up to life in prison even though most people get 5-10 years, and then you're sentenced to life in prison
you can appeal the sentence as being "too harsh" or out of the normal bounds. That's fair game and quite common.
However, if you are convicted of drug trafficking, money laundering and criminal enterprise, and you are appealing the length of the sentence, its very difficult to appeal if your system/company organisaiton to which you admit to being the head honcho of, uses a very traceable currency to launder money, and therefore can reasonably prove spectacularly large amount of drug trafficking.
The criminal enterprise charge has a minimum of 20 years, adding in drugs to the mix adds an additional 10.
the whole "judge was biased because of unfounded ordered assassination" is plainly wrong.
Sure you can argue that drugs should be legal (but you need support and money to help people escape, see opioid explosion)
but thats not the same as Roos Ulbricht got the wrong sentence. What he did was really obviously illegal, and at industrial scale. industrial scale illegality is going to get you a long sentence.[1]
[1] yes rich people manage to escape justice, this is an affront to justice, but arguing that Ulbricht was wrongly convicted only enables rich people to get off more, because it wrongly states that the law was wrong in this isntance.
Mark my words, the US legal system is going to get a huge shakeup. most constitutional checks and balances for the executive have been dismantled, because of a failure of congress. You don't want that new legal system, as thats going to be injustice for many, control for the few. A central plank of libertarianism is a fair and equitable legal system, we are straying further from that.
> if you are convicted of drug trafficking, money laundering and criminal enterprise, and you are appealing the length of the sentence, its very difficult to appeal
That's what I'm getting at. The premise is that this guy is Al Capone. But if he was actually guilty of murder then they should have convicted him of murder, whereas if he was only guilty of running a website, those penalties are crazy. Not because they don't ever get handed out or Congress didn't put them in the statute, but because they have within them the assumption that you're a drug cartel. And then because drug cartels are murder factories, the penalties are extreme and inappropriate outside of that specific context.
But the courts are bound to follow the law, which is the problem, because those laws are nuts. They're even nuts in the context of the actual drug cartels, because what they should be doing there is the same thing -- getting severe penalties by charging them with the actual murders, not putting life sentences on the operation of a black market regardless of whether or not there is any associated violence.
It's the same reason people are so eager to lean into the unproven murder allegations to justify the sentence -- it's intuitively obvious that without them, the penalties are excessive.
> whereas if he was only guilty of running a website,
Yes, he was guilty of running a website, which on the face of it seems innocent right? Sure thats an argument. "i'm just providing an online location for this to happen, but I don't know whats going on"
Apart from he was _also_ running an escrow service, Now to run an escrow service you need to create a contract with conditions to allow money to be released. The problem is that to say "oh he didn't know what was going on" is a provable lie, because to keep the escrow trustworthy, you need to arbitrate, to arbitrate requires knowing what was supposed to be delivered and why it didn't get delivered.
Now, escrow isn't free, you're taking a risk holding that money. So Ross takes a cut.
But the problem is, that money comes from illegal activities. He knows this, so he needs to find a way to make the money legit. This means fraudulently laundering it.
> Those arrested face sentences of 10 years to life in prison for the narcotics violations and up to 20 years for the money laundering violations.
However
I want to find agreement, because I want to make sure that understand I'm not saying your viewpoint is wrong, I think your anger is directed in the wrong place.
The sentence is within tolerance for the scale and combination of offences, the murder allegations are a red herring, and didn't materially affect the sentence.
For a large number of drug users, silkroad provided a safer way to obtain drugs, both in terms of violence and quality.
The people that ultimately set the bounds for these sentences are congress. They have chosen the war on drugs, which I think we can agree has caused more violence that it has stopped. The courts did exactly as they are supposed to do with the laws that they had at their disposal. The way the court operated was correct.
What is not correct is the federal governments approach to drugs.
> "i'm just providing an online location for this to happen, but I don't know whats going on"
It's not even that. It's a matter of, okay, there is a gas station next to the highway. They sell gas to anyone who shows up. "They don't know those people are speeding", wink.
They know those people are speeding. If you went up to the average gas station attendant and asked them if they knew their customers were speeding, they would probably admit they know, because the speed limit is below the speed of the median car and everybody knows it. You may also have other ways of proving they know. They may even know in specific cases rather than just in general. So they're knowingly making money from all of this illegal activity. A dangerous offense that causes thousands of fatalities. Literally making more money than they would otherwise, because cars use more gas at very high speeds, and knowingly enabling the unlawful activity, because those cars don't run without gas.
Should gas station workers all be in prison for life, or is that a crazy penalty for that type of offense?
> The sentence is within tolerance for the scale and combination of offences, the murder allegations are a red herring, and didn't materially affect the sentence.
There can be more than one source of the problem. I'm not disputing that Congress has passed some bad laws.
The issue is, there is still a range of penalties for that offense, and he got the very top of the range. For some reason.
That's not possible because jaywalking has a maximum penalty, and the judge can't exceed that maximum penalty.
A proper analogy would be something like two crimes, A and B, both with the same statutorily defined maximum penalty--life imprisonment--but where the typical sentence for A is much less for B. The defendant is found guilty of A, but the judge uses aggravating evidence to sentence them as-if it were B. But that highlights the fundamental problem: why would we have both A and B with the same maximum penalty, both covering the same or similar behavior? Often the point of A is to make convictions easier because proving B proved too onerous in practice.
What we want to get back to, and which almost every other jurisdiction implements around the world, including both systems thought to be far more fair than ours as well as less fair (for different reasons), is to have better tailored crimes, including penalties. One of the reasons we have so many felonies these days is because sentencing someone to jail for a single day on a misdemeanor offense for stealing a pack of gum for the 20th time can require a jury trial just as onerous as a felony offense with a 20 year sentence. Thus, if you want a more fair system, we probably may need to make it easier to sentence for smaller crimes with lighter sentences. IOW, lower the stakes so there isn't an arms race between punishment severity and procedural protections.
Most countries don't even require juries or panels for serious crimes, let alone light (i.e. misdemeanor) offenses. The shift to granting jury trials for any offense carrying possible jail time started in the early 1900s via Progressive Era reforms. Today only NYC (just NYC, not New York state) and, I think, South Carolina are the only jurisdictions[1] that don't grant a right to jury trials for misdemeanor offenses with jail time as a permitted punishment. Some other states nominally only provide for juries for 3+ or 6+ months of jail, but procedural precedent has resulted in courts effectively extending the right to any offense carrying jail time.
Note that the city of San Francisco has had for decades a public defender's office with equivalent or better resources (time, money, expertise) as the prosecutor's office, but the city sees the same interminable cycle as everywhere else.
[1] Also I think Federal jurisdiction, but purely misdemeanor cases without the threat of felony charges at the Federal level are pretty rare.
> That's not possible because jaywalking has a maximum penalty, and the judge can't exceed that maximum penalty.
That's part of the point. The maximum penalty for many nonviolent offenses is absurd.
> One of the reasons we have so many felonies these days is because sentencing someone to jail for a single day on a misdemeanor offense for stealing a pack of gum for the 20th time can require a jury trial just as onerous as a felony offense with a 20 year sentence.
But why is this a problem? The purpose of the trial is to deter the other million people who would have committed petty crimes if they weren't prosecuted. It doesn't matter if the trial costs ten thousand times more than the value of the stolen goods. Moreover, if the sentence would actually be one day then guilty people would just plead guilty without coercive plea bargaining because it's less trouble to serve one day in jail than to waste two weeks of your life going through a trial and then serve one day in jail anyway.
Whereas if you're innocent you may very well be willing to spend two weeks at trial to clear your name, vs. the status quo where if you try to do that you'll be charged with a dozen vague offenses that everyone commits in the course of an ordinary day but are only charged against people who demand their day in court instead of accepting a plea for some other offense the prosecution isn't sure they can prove, all of which have coercively onerous penalties.
So e.g. >90% (or whatever it’s now multiplied by several times) should be entirely ignored because the legal/judicial system won’t have enough resources to prosecute them?
So police should ignore all crimes other than murder? Because that’s what you’re going to get…
e.g. nobody will prosecute any property related and others low level crimes (e.g. damage is less than hundreds or at least tens of thousands). Crime rates will increase and the system will collapse at some point.
If you prosecute property crimes, you don't get a lot of property crimes, because prosecutions for that crime act as an effective deterrent and then the courts aren't overwhelmed with property crime cases even if the few cases they do get are full jury trials. You only get widespread property crime cases when you don't prosecute them.
By contrast, drug use has no theft victim to report the crime and then even harsh penalties don't act as a deterrent because detection rates are low and addiction is a stronger motivator than the spoils of petty theft. So you would stop prosecuting recreational drug use (compensating by increasing addiction treatment programs etc.), and thereby also eliminate all of the associated crimes as drug cartels murder over territory and drug users commit serious robberies to afford street drug prices that otherwise wouldn't cost more than a bottle of aspirin, avoiding the need to prosecute those either.
At which point crime goes down and you can spend more resources prosecuting the remaining cases.
> You only get widespread property crime cases when you don't prosecute them.
Which you won’t be able to do if the cost of prosecuting someone increases several times (i.e. no plea bargains anymore).
> you would stop prosecuting recreational drug use
Aren’t these already (realistically) misdemeanors at most in a lot of places?
Even in the best case e.g. lets say case load decreases by 25% that doesn’t seem enough to balance things out.
I’m confused, though. Are you suggesting legalization? Or just saying that law enforcement should ignore drug traffickers and dealers (because they will certainly continue engaging in violent crime if it’s the latter)
To truly minimize drug related crime you’d need legitimate drug companies to start selling OxyContin/etc. in the candy section at Walmart.
> Which you won’t be able to do if the cost of prosecuting someone increases several times (i.e. no plea bargains anymore).
Well sure you can. It just costs more. But since you're still doing it, the deterrent is still present and then the expensive cases you have to prosecute remain rare.
> Aren’t these already (realistically) misdemeanors at most in a lot of places?
Not for the sellers they're not.
> Are you suggesting legalization?
Yes.
If you could go buy codeine or lisdexamfetamine for $5/bottle from the pharmacy counter at Walmart then there are no more drug cartels, no more drug cartel murders, no more street pushers lacing what was supposed to be MDMA with fentanyl that causes people to OD or get addicted to opioids, fewer addicts robbing people for drug money, higher deterrence for other crimes because police aren't spread so thin, less poverty and desperation because fewer kids have fathers in prisons or coffins, fewer neighborhoods held hostage by drug gangs.
That's a whole lot of crime that just goes away.
More to the point, consider where we are in terms of efficiency. It costs on the order of $100k/year to incarcerate someone. Every one of those drug murders you prevent is saving twenty million dollars worth of keeping someone locked up for two decades. That pays for a lot of two day jury trials for petty theft.
And what dictator is going to implement this perfect solution?
Here's how things have manifestly played out over the past 150 years: procedural rules are strengthened because citizens are afraid of unjust prosecution. Some high profile bad guys, or parade of run-of-the-mill criminals, get off because of said procedural loopholes, after which voters demand politicians expand substantive criminal law to re-balance the equation. Upon which more unjust prosecutions enter the public consciousness. Wash, rinse, repeat.
This is what systemic injustice looks like, and the cycle continues as unabated as ever. On the one hand, you have movements like BLM, which have indeed effected change even in the most conservatives jurisdictions, largely by changes in procedural rules by courts and in policy by prosecutors and municipalities. At the same time, you have #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, etc, which has resulted in the expansion of sexual crimes and punishments, and elimination of statutes of limitations, partly because procedural protections have made it extremely difficult to prosecute past behaviors, not because they strictly weren't already cognizable crimes.
Nobody is going to lose sleep over Weinstein, but long-term which demographics will bear the brunt of this tightening of the screws through the substantive law? You see the fundamental contradictory behavior here? There's tremendous overlap between the #MeToo groups and the BLM groups, and for both their demands are premised on empathy and justice, but at the end of the day we're going to end up with a harsher system that will further disproportionately punish some segments of the population over others. That's what systemic racial injustice looks like, yet nowhere can you find ill intentions or a desire to oppress anyone.
There's an alternative path, here. Notice how the legal screws have taken centuries to slowly but inexorably tighten without any concerted effort, yet in less than a single generation the normative behaviors of individual judges and other legal professionals, both as regards defendant rights (BLM) and victims rights (#MeToo) has seen a sea change. That suggests that by giving back more discretion to the system, not less, it's possible and, IMO, much more likely we could end up with a more fair system all around. Not guaranteed, of course, but neither is it guaranteed that just throwing more money and resources at the existing system would, even assuming we could even achieve let alone maintain that degree of attention from society. The difference between these two approaches, though, is that one requires trusting our fellow citizens, while the other holds out the (fantastical) prospect of an engineered solution.
> And what dictator is going to implement this perfect solution?
Nothing about it requires a dictator. You vote for politicians who repeal laws that don't have widespread consensus, when enough people vote for them they get repealed. Ideally you then do something that makes it more difficult to re-pass them.
> Some high profile bad guys, or parade of run-of-the-mill criminals, get off because of said procedural loopholes
The procedures aren't loopholes. They're prerequisites for a conviction. They by no means make a conviction impossible, but you have to do the work.
> At the same time, you have #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, etc, which has resulted in the expansion of sexual crimes and punishments, and elimination of statutes of limitations, partly because procedural protections have made it extremely difficult to prosecute past behaviors, not because they strictly weren't already cognizable crimes.
The problem here is not procedural rules at all. It's evidentiary difficulties. How do you distinguish between someone who consents but then has regrets and changes their story, or someone who has sex with someone wealthy in order to extort them for money, and someone who was actually sexually assaulted?
There is no perfect solution to that, but "innocent until proven guilty" is the only sane one. What you then need is a system that can uphold that standard even when there is pressure not to.
> That suggests that by giving back more discretion to the system, not less, it's possible and, IMO, much more likely we could end up with a more fair system all around.
It suggests that when you give more discretion to the system and the system favors you at this moment in time, you get what you want, for now.
But then there is another election and you may not like what someone else does with that discretion.
> Also how exactly are jury trials superior to e.g. Magistrates Courts in the UK?
The purpose of the trial is to separate the innocent from the guilty, and there is intended to be a presumption of innocence. But because the prosecution has to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, they'll tend to only bring cases when there is a high probability of guilt -- a good thing -- so then let's say 90% of the defendants are probably guilty and 60% are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
A judge is going to become intimately familiar with that. ~90% of the defendants are actually guilty, so the judge develops the intuition that a new defendant is very likely guilty. That's a presumption of guilt. Soon even the innocent ones are getting convicted, when the whole point of the process was to prevent that.
A jury is a fresh set of eyes who look at the defendant as the only case they're going to be deciding for the foreseeable future and haven't been prejudiced by a parade of evildoers sitting in the same chair. It's also twelve separate people who each individually have to be convinced.
Yet the conviction rate in England was 84 % in magistrates courts (misdemeanors and low level felonies) and 78 % in crown courts (more serious crimes) which is not that different. Especially if we consider how a lot of crimes like DUIs are somewhat open & shut compared to more serious offenses.
> so the judge develops the intuition that a new defendant is very likely guilty.
A good judge wouldn’t do that. Also by and large random people are relatively dumb and biased. Why exactly are they less likely to convict an innocent person? (Let’s assume that the conviction rate is the same in both cases)
> Yet the conviction rate in England was 84 % in magistrates courts (misdemeanors and low level felonies) and 78 % in crown courts (more serious crimes) which is not that different.
The conviction rate can't really tell you anything because prosecutors will calibrate to bring cases they think they can win in a given system. Systems willing to convict more innocent people will have similar conviction rates but more innocent defendants.
> A good judge wouldn’t do that.
What about a human judge?
> Also by and large random people are relatively dumb and biased. Why exactly are they less likely to convict an innocent person?
So make the system (that’s already inefficient) several times more inefficient and then increase funding by a magnitude or two? Certainly seems like a reasonable option.
I bet all problems could be solved using this approach. What could go wrong..
> For example, prohibit plea bargaining so that all convictions require a trial and it's forbidden to impose any penalty for demanding one.
Many in jail awaiting trial are very guilty and the outcome of the legal proceeding is effectively a foregone conclusion. Exchanging a shorter sentence for a plea makes sense for all parties. Prosecutors can then spend their court time arguing more important cases, judges don't have to patiently direct clown shows where guilt is extremely obvious, and the defendant gets a lesser sentence. There is plenty of abuse in the plea system, and no shortage of outrageous prosecutorial misconduct. But that doesn't invalidate the principle of plea bargaining. No justice system is perfect and without plea bargaining every defendant would have to spend a decade in jail, maybe two, before their case makes it in front of a judge. That isn't justice. Unless we assign everybody chatgpt lawyers, judges and juries giving everybody a trial is a practical impossibility.
> Many in jail awaiting trial are very guilty and the outcome of the legal proceeding is effectively a foregone conclusion. Exchanging a shorter sentence for a plea makes sense for all parties.
Suppose we're talking about a case where it's a foregone conclusion. 0% chance that the defendant will be acquitted, never going to happen. Then the defendant should plead guilty and save themselves some time and effort regardless of whether it leads to a lesser sentence, right? You don't need to coerce them because they can't possibly gain anything.
Now suppose that the chance isn't 0%, it's, say, 10%. Should we coerce these people into a guilty plea by giving them a 100% chance of six months vs. a 90% chance of five years? Out of a million of them, a hundred thousand would be found not guilty, so no.
> No justice system is perfect and without plea bargaining every defendant would have to spend a decade in jail, maybe two, before their case makes it in front of a judge.
This is why the right to a speedy trial exists, even though it has been eroded dramatically by basically making it a false choice between "you have your trial immediately with no chance to prepare a defense even though the prosecution has secretly been investigating you for months" and "you waive your right to a speedy trial entirely and rot in jail for years awaiting trial".
The way it ought to work is that the defendant has a right to set a "not after" date where the prosecution either has to proceed or release them from jail and drop the charges, which gives them enough time to actually prepare a defense without opening the door to being detained indefinitely awaiting trial even after they're prepared. The prosecution already has this up until the statute of limitations has run, because they can already wait to file charges until they've prepared their case.
> Unless we assign everybody chatgpt lawyers, judges and juries giving everybody a trial is a practical impossibility.
Or we could just have fewer laws and then assign the resources necessary to prosecute the remaining more important ones.
Notice that if you get rid of e.g. drug laws, you also get rid of all the murders and other crimes that come along with the existence of drug cartels, and the load on the courts goes down dramatically.
I agree with your criticisms of the justice system except that your proposed solutions haven't worked anywhere. Yes the plea practice is abusive and coercive. It has to be because otherwise suspects would exercise their right to a trial, which they can't have. Anything you do to make going to trial more attractive for defendants will result in the backlog increasing or charges getting dropped en masse.
The laws on the books today hardly get enforced. Ross Ulbricht is one of the very few people to go to prison for crypto-related crimes. You probably agree that many people involved with crypto deserve to see the inside of a courtroom, but they won't. So not only is the justice system not capable of processing the people currently in jail (despite copious plea coercion) the justice system has almost completely given up on persecuting many crimes (e.g. fraud), presumably for lack of manpower.
All countries struggle with this resource problem. We want to give everybody a fair trial but we can't. Some countries force pleas on people. Other countries rush trials. Other countries still beat confessions out of people. Different 'solutions' to the same fundamental problem. Unless fair trials get cheap there is no way out.
Sentencing is complicated in the US. Generally speaking, they have a huge range and a standard for computing where one falls in that range, but everything within that range is open to judge's discretion. Life without parole was within that range for the crimes that Ulbricht was convicted of.
This standard is an enormous document, https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines which lays out the rules for adjustments. Evidence is admissible (by both sides!) for sentencing, with a lower standard of evidence and burden of proof, to either raise or lower the sentence within the very wide numbers of what the conviction was for. So the Judge in this case found that the lower burden of proof was met for additional violent crimes being committed (with Ulbricht's legal team having an opportunity to rebut), and that impacts the sentencing calculations.
Not a lawyer, but I have listened to US lawyers on podcasts.
Other acts of those charged are routinely brought up in trials. Fir example, criminals being charged with crime A that already committed similar crimes in the past are used to show that the likelihood of crime A being committed this time is higher.
Sure, but then you should have to have a conviction on those other crimes. It’s strange to consider stuff that wasn’t proven. If the crime was committed and the state is sure, they should charge him and then use the first conviction in the sentencing for the second, if they want to.
That’s not what happens in practice. The other actions of those charged are absolutely brought in as evidence whether they were actual crimes or testimony from others that knew those charged. This happens all of the time.
Yea, and most public discourse is at the level of "I saw a post online about it once". Most people aren't doing deep research before their opinions about things that aren't actually that relevant to their day to day lives. 95% of the world, at best, still has no idea who Ross Ulbricht is even today.
That's one way of phrasing it, and unfortunately some jurisdictions have adopted that phrase, but it is not correct.
A preponderance of the evidence is the greater weight of the evidence after all evidence is considered. Heuristics along the lines of "yeah that fits my priors"—which is what is actually meant by "more likely than not"—are explicitly disallowed.
If Joe Smith in Smalltown, Ohio was hit by a blue bus, and hammock owns 51 of the 100 blue buses in Smalltown whereas torstenvl owns 49 of the 100 blue buses, that is insufficient evidence by itself to prevail by a preponderance standard against hammock in a civil suit.
It does not change my opinion that the sentence was well deserved in the eyes of the law. Those are all things, that independently, can lead to serious jail time. The scale of his operation was also substantial.
There are also many murderers who get life. And serve it all. So, it's also true he was jailed for a much shorter time than what violent criminals get. Your comment is negated.
If he did a crime that’s strictly less bad than a murder, him being sentenced to a longer sentence than even a single murderer shows that something is wrong. It doesn’t matter if 99% of murderers actually get longer sentences.
That's "two wrongs make a right" logic. Because the justice system fucked up in the past, even once, that should prevent anyone else from receiving a proper sentence?
Secondly, Ulbricht was an accessory to thousands of drug deals. You think that none of those consumers of those drugs died as a result? He could easily be responsible for multiple, dozens, hundreds of deaths - far more than most anyone locked up for life.
> You think that none of those consumers of those drugs died as a result?
All kinds of products kill consumers every day, and we don't consider the person who sold them responsible. And the suppliers of those products heavily encourage and even manipulate people into buying them; do we know whether Ulbricht even advertised his services?
You could debate it forever - some people obviously think drugs are relatively harmless and pose no societal threat, others think drugs are poison and anyone involved in selling or distributing them is a potential murderer.
The OP made a dumb comment about the length of the prison sentence in comparison to a murderer, I pointed out a) that while the OP thought it was too long, the same exact logic could be used to say it was too short and b) his original premise about the relative degrees of the "badness" of crimes was not an absolute.
You're welcome to disagree, however the comment above is unconvincing. Ulbricht dealt in drugs which he knew from day 1 were unquestionably illegal in this country.
I don't see how that should change anyone's opinion on whether the sentence was deserved. Whether it was legally/procedurally correct, sure. Whether he didn't get the day in court he should have had, sure. But given that no-one seems to seriously dispute that he did try to pay to have the guy killed, what he deserves is a long prison sentence, and whether that's imposed by a court doing things properly, a court doing things improperly, or a vigilante kidnapper isn't really here or there on that point.
(The rule of law is important, and we may let off people who deserve harsh sentences for the sake of preserving it, but it doesn't mean they deserve those sentences any less)
> But given that no-one seems to seriously dispute that he did try to pay to have the guy killed
If there was enough evidence to demonstrate that he attempted to murder someone, why wasn't he charged and convicted of it?
Also, 2 of the DEA agents involved in his investigation were convicted of fraud in relation to the case.
I do believe he probably did attempt to have someone killed, but I'm far from certain of it, and think it should have no bearing on the case if there's not enough evidence to convict him.
> If there was enough evidence to demonstrate that he attempted to murder someone, why wasn't he charged and convicted of it?
Wikipedia suggests this was because he was already sentenced to double life imprisonment. Clearly prosecutors should not waste time pursuing charges that won't really impact a criminal's status, do you disagree?
If they don't "waste time pursuing charges that won't really impact" the sentence then the unproven allegations should not be allowed to impact the sentence. You can't have it both ways.
What a lot of people are overlooking is that there were two separate indictments in two separate courts with two separate prosecution teams.
In one indictment, in a New York federal court, he was charged with several crimes, but not murder-for-hire. In the other indictment, in a Maryland federal court, he was charged just with murder-for-hire.
The case in New York went to trial first. The murder-for-hire evidence was introduced in that court as part of trying to prove some of the elements of the other charges.
For example to prove a charge of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise one of the elements is that the person occupied "a position of organizer, a supervisory position, or any other position of management". Evidence that a person is trying to hire hitmen to protect the enterprise is evidence that they occupy such a role.
After the convictions and sentencing in the New York trial were upheld on appeal, the prosecutors in Maryland dropped their case because he was then in jail, for life, with no possibility of parole. They said it was a better use of resources to focus on cases where justice had not yet been served.
> What a lot of people are overlooking is that there were two separate indictments in two separate courts with two separate prosecution teams.
They're not overlooking this, they're criticizing it.
Suppose you have to prove that someone occupied "a position of organizer, a supervisory position, or any other position of management" so you introduce several pieces of evidence to try to prove it, one of them is some sketchy murder for hire allegations from a low-credibility source. The jury then convicts on the conspiracy charge without indicating whether they believed the murder for hire claim was proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Should you now use the murder for hire claim to determine sentencing for the conspiracy charge? No, that's crazy, it's a much more serious crime and they should have to charge and prove that as a separate count if they want it to affect the penalty.
The issue is that the law enforcement agent investigating the allegation had serious credibility issues, but the same agent had access to the laptop, so now you have a chain of custody problem. How much of the chat logs are real and how much of them are made up by this guy who was convicted for extorting Ulbricht?
In particular, the chat logs allegedly contain multiple separate instances of murder for hire, but then the claim that Ulbricht had already been sentenced to life without parole as the reason these claims were never prosecuted doesn't make sense, because a conspiracy to commit murder has multiple parties, so where are the murder prosecutions of these alleged contract killers and co-conspirators?
They're unproven allegations because "proven allegations" mean something specific, i.e. that it was charged as a count and the jury rendered a verdict of guilty. This is especially important when it's not at all clear they could have proven it as a separate count, because those allegations were tainted by significant law enforcement credibility issues.
This might be a case of conflict of interest though, as saying instead that Ulbricht did ask him to kill someone could worsen the legal position of the alleged hitman as well, depending on the specific circumstances of the case.
Strange because it reminds me of some story where an innocent man was framed for murder and a compassionate relative of the murder victim argued for their release and the innocent man went on to live a productive and happy life.
> But given that no-one seems to seriously dispute that he did try to pay to have the guy killed,
It’s my understanding in the US that you are innocent until proven guilty, right? Therefore, he is indeed innocent of those crimes, since he was not proven guilty. Unless I’m missing something on how the US justice system works.
Their comment wasn’t about what was legally right. I thought the part where they said something like “regardless of whether it is by courts doing things properly, by courts doing things improperly, or by some vigilante” made that clear enough?
Whether someone morally deserves a punishment for a crime depends on whether they actually did it, not on whether they are considered innocent in the eyes of the law.
Of course, I don’t generally support vigilantism , so I don’t think people should try to make other people get what they think the other people deserve as punishment. But, that doesn’t mean that people can’t deserve worse than the law prescribes, just that people shouldn’t like, try to deliver what they think the deserts are.
You say the rule of law is important, but also we should impose extra-legal long sentences even if the rule of law doesn't allow us to? How do you reconcile this perspective?
The rule of law says innocent until proven guilty.
The reason they didn't go after him for murder for hire allegations isn't because they felt bad for him or that they didn't want to waste tax payer's money.
The reason they didn't go after him for 'murder for hire' was that they knew there was no merit in it.
They did go after him for "murder for hire"; the murders were part of his conspiracy predicates, and evidence for them was introduced. This stuff about him not being taken all the way through a case charged on murder-for-hire, after receiving a life sentence in a case where those murders were part of the case, is just message board jazz hands.
>case where those murders were part of the case, is just message board jazz hands.
you're trying to look like you don't understand or aren't aware that jury didn't convict him of murder-for-hire.
He chose a trial by jury, not by a judge. Nevertheless the judge herself decided that he is guilty of the murder-for-hire, and additionally the judge used significantly lower standard than required for conviction.
Feel free to use the search bar to see what's been written (including by me) in the zillion discussions we've had on this case in the past. Again: primary source documentation of what happened in that trial is right there for you to read; you're just a Google search away from it.
> even though the charge of hiring a contract killer to assassinate his business competition may have been dropped
Just because the charge was dropped doesn't mean he's innocent of it. In fact, reading the chat logs makes his guilt pretty clear. Of course, because the whole operation was a scam, there's little he could have been convicted of. Yet just because the murder was never carried out doesn't mean he didn't intend to have someone assassinated. In my book, paying someone money to kill another person is definitely grounds for imprisonment.
That happens all the time, when people confess to a charge ahead of time, instead of proceeding to a trial. Remember that the purpose of the trial is to find out whether they are guilty when there is a factual dispute about that question. Here, I suppose the existence of a factual dispute is itself disputed: does that need to go to a jury, or is it enough that the trial judge and the appeal court looked at the record and decided there wasn't a dispute?
Certainly not always. Sometimes a person will confess a crime under immunity, and not be charged. Ulbricht didn't confess the murder for hire formally, and he wasn't charged with it. The controversy is that his role in it was used to influence the sentencing decision for a different crime.
No. I'm talking more from an ethical standpoint. I think someone who hires contract killers deserves to go to prison. I also think people shouldn't be convicted for charges that were not proven in court. As I said before, in Ross' case, the charge was dropped.
Ah that's not strictly true. I believe Scotland is the only place in the world I am aware of where there is Innocent, unproven, and Guilty verdicts. I believe in reality a not guilty verdict is, we didn't have the evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt this person committed the crime. Finding someone not guilty is a legal term. Considering whether someone is innocent or not is more of a moral/factual term.
Not proven in Scotland and not guilty in almost every other country are the equivalent. Innocent is the outlier verdict in Scotland that the rest of the world doesn't have.
That's also a description of the "not guilty" verdict. Guilty is "beyond a reasonable doubt", and "not guilty" is those circumstances that are not Guilty.
So you think heroin, which frequently kills people the first time they try it, should be able to be sold without consequence? Certainly an interesting take.
Honestly any time I read the procedural history of this stuff I get nerd sniped by the bizarre details and I lose track of the big picture. I feel like the whole thing could be three competing Dateline NBC style six-part crime specials and I still wouldn't get tired of it.
Ross heard that one of his Silk Roads moderators was arrested, and so he hired someone to kill the mod? The assassin sent a confirmation photo of his mod, asphyxiated and covered in Campbell's Chicken and Stars Soup?? The supposed assassin was actually a corrupt DEA agent who later served federal prison time for crimes so embarrassing that they were never fully disclosed?!?!
There is some kind of thorny moral question I cannot quite wrap my brain around.
Ross did not successfully have anyone killed, but it seems that he must have thought he was successful?
Ross (it is alleged, and chat logs seem to show) ordered someone's death and paid for it and got explicit confirmation that they were dead. [actually several someones.] Did he feel like a murderer at this point? What a fascinating, real life Raskolnikov style figure.
Later, perhaps much later, he gets strong evidence that the murder was fake. Nothing has changed in the outside world after he learns this -- the victim is no more alive before or after he learns this. Does this change his identity? Is he more or less of a murderer than before?
Do the people who kill with modified Xbox controllers from a warehouse in Las Vegas do the same kind of killing that Ross thought he did?
And then there is some kind of moral thought experiment happening at a Silicon Valley Rationalist, Effective Altruism kind of scale that I can't quite wrap my head around. Do people matter as much in person as if they're just blips on a screen you'll never meet? If Ross could have sent 1 BTC to prevent fatal malaria in a dozen young kids, thousands of miles away, but he didn't, should he feel responsible in some way for their death? Is he about equally responsible for them as for the online people he is pretty sure he ordered killed from afar, but never met?
It's just a lot. The whole story is supernaturally intense; it's hard to believe it was real. It will make for great TV.
This should be a top level comment. This whole thing is so much more complicated than, "man sells drugs and gets life sentence." I too cannot wait for the documentaries
Good point, you are absolutely correct. Then I suppose life “with the possibility of parole” would have been a more appropriate sentence, though I don’t know if that’s typically given. In any case, I feel prisons ought to release prisoners if they demonstrate exceptional rehabilitation and remorse, as Ross has, though of course that’s a difficult line to draw in practice.
Life imprisonment – with or without parole – for a non-violent crime still seems excessive. If they'd convicted him of conspiracy to murder for hiring the hitman then that's a different matter.
> He acted as an enabler to countless violent crimes.
I don't like this argument of imputing transitive guilt. If guilt is imputed indirectly, then all of us are guilty of many things, like atrocities that our countries have perpetrated during war.
> Also punishing a people for actions of their government is a war crime
Right, because we recognize that indirect, transitive blame is ethically problematic.
> He actively and deliberately enabled those activities for self benefit.
So did the Sacklers with the opioid epidemic, arguably even more directly than Ulbricht. Which of them is in prison?
"Enabling" is exactly the kind of weasel word that I find problematic. It has no strict definition and can be broadened to suit whatever is needed to condemn an action you happen to dislike in any given scenario.
He only allegedly needed to hire a hitman because the government invented the whole blackmail scenario behind it. You can't make this shit up, Silk Road was extra evil because it lead to the government creating hitmen and reasons to use them.
We need gangster hoodlums on the street because lookie here sonny, an online marketplace is dangerous and if it isn't dangerous enough well feds will make it that way.
As an aside, in Canada, a sentence of life without parole is considered unlawful because it conflicts with Section 12 of the Charter guarantees that individuals have the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Courts have ruled that life without the possibility of parole deprives offenders of any hope of rehabilitation or reintegration into society, which could amount to cruel and unusual treatment.
A sentence must balance the gravity of the offense with the circumstances of the offender, while still allowing for hope and redemption. A life sentence without parole forecloses this balance.
It's always struck me as odd that the United States - a nation that is packed with far more Christians than Canada - doesn't shape its system of incarceration to be more inline with Christian values and the teachings of Jesus.
Canada's explicit rejection of life sentences without parole (LWOP) through decisions like R v Bissonnette more closely aligns with Jesus's teachings about redemption and mercy. In Canada, even those convicted of the most serious crimes retain the possibility of parole - not a guarantee of release, but a recognition of the potential for rehabilitation that echoes Jesus's teachings about transformation and second chances.
This philosophical difference manifests in several ways:
- In Canada, the emphasis on rehabilitation over retribution is reflected in the term "correctional services" rather than "penitentiary system"
- Canadian prisons generally offer more rehabilitative programs and education opportunities
- The Canadian system places greater emphasis on Indigenous healing lodges and restorative justice practices that align with Jesus's focus on healing broken relationships
- Canadian courts have explicitly recognized that denying hope of release violates human dignity, which parallels Jesus's teachings about the inherent worth of every person
The contrast becomes particularly stark when considering multiple murders. While many US jurisdictions impose multiple life sentences to be served consecutively (effectively ensuring death in prison), the Canadian Supreme Court has ruled this practice unconstitutional, maintaining that even the worst offenders should retain the possibility - though not guarantee - of earning redemption through genuine rehabilitation.
This doesn't mean Canada is soft on crime - serious offenders still serve lengthy sentences, and parole is never guaranteed. But the maintenance of hope for eventual redemption, even in the worst cases, better reflects Jesus's teachings about grace, transformation, and the limitless possibility of spiritual renewal.
The irony is particularly pointed given that the US has a much higher proportion of self-identified Christians than Canada, yet has adopted a more retributive approach that seems less aligned with Jesus's teachings about mercy and redemption.
But hey, you just have to wait for the right president to be elected and you might get your chance. So I guess that's something.
> It's always struck me as odd that the United States - a nation that is packed with far more Christians than Canada - doesn't shape its system of incarceration to be more inline with Christian values and the teachings of Jesus.
Canada didn't have Prohibition to the extent that the US did, which in turn led to the rise and financing of organized crime. All the rest of it fell out of that: Organized crime was violent and ruthless, so people started demanding oppressive laws and harsh penalties to deal with it.
One of the major problems with this is that the cycle is reinforced by law enforcement. You sensibly get rid of prohibition, but then the mob is still around and starts looking for a new source of funding, so you get more extortion rackets etc. Then a law enforcement bureaucracy is created to deal with it, but long-term the mob was going to die out without prohibition anyway and the law enforcement efforts just speed it up a bit. Except now you have a law enforcement bureaucracy with nothing to do, so they lobby to recreate Prohibition in the form of the Controlled Substances Act, which reconstitutes the mob in the form of the drug cartels.
But now instead of saying "prohibition failed, let's repeal it" they say "we need more resources" -- institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are they solution. So the Feds fight any attempts to legalize drugs because it would put them out of a job, but as long as there is prohibition there is organized crime, and organized crime is violent and terrible and a ratchet to ever-harsher penalties.
> Canada didn't have Prohibition to the extent that the US did, which in turn led to the rise and financing of organized crime. All the rest of it fell out of that: Organized crime was violent and ruthless, so people started demanding oppressive laws and harsh penalties to deal with it.
Canada definitely had (has?) organized crime in that era, although maybe not to the extent the US did. Check out the Papalias[1] (my great great uncle was a quasi-crooked cop on their payroll), as well as the Musitanos and Luppinos, for a couple southern-Ontario examples. There’s still a (relatively) small but fairly influential Italian mafia presence in a lot of smaller southern Ontario cities, and at least a few of the Papalias are still living off of family money (my family’s cottage, ironically not the side with the crooked great great uncle, is next door to one of the Papalia’s cottages).
Hamilton is the way it is today in large part due to the mob activity from the 40s-90s.
The article describes a crime family whose roots started in Canada's shorter and less comprehensive experiment with prohibition, after which they got involved with smuggling heroin into the US.
If something happens to a lesser extent and what does happen has a lot of the consequences spill over into the US, it's not that surprising that the backlash is more severe in the US.
> As an aside, in Canada, a sentence of life without parole is considered unlawful because it conflicts with Section 12 of the Charter guarantees that individuals have the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Courts have ruled that life without the possibility of parole deprives offenders of any hope of rehabilitation or reintegration into society, which could amount to cruel and unusual treatment.
Germany's highest court has held the same thing.
This is right and proper. We need to defend these principles, now more than ever.
On the surface but then they label you a dangerous offender and they keep you in jail. Paul Bernardino is a good example.
The differences in the system probably have more to do with electing vs appointing. Electing is more likely to send someone tougher on crime vs well balance.If officials were elected in Canada you would see the same outcome.
Not to mention private vs public prisons and when you make it a business you have to find new customers vs a cost center you want to limit.
It's very rare to see someone commenting on a HN from a orthodox (small o) Christian perspective. Thank you - some good points.
But I'm very suspect that Trump made his decision on Ulbricht based on Jesus teachings, and even more suspect that the people who vote for him based their decision on Jesus teachings, despite any religious affiliation they may have. I think Paul Graham's recent article on the original of wokeness is very instructive here - there's always someone or some group to look down on, to make ourselves feel better, whatever side of the fence we are on. Cancel culture of the far left or progressive Christians, look them up and throw away the key, lack of grace by conservative Christians, it amounts to the same thing. (I'm a British Christian)
9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
What has always sat odd with me regarding this, is we don't truly know the extent of the fbi's corruption in this. They stole, so it's not hard to imagine they planted evidence too.
I assume that the feds corruption is as bad as it is in every other high profile case case involving fed informants and politically charged topics. Randy Weaver, all the muslims they radicalized and then goaded into doing terrorist things post 9/11, the Michigan Fednapping. It seems like every time these people have a chance to entrap someone they do, but they do it in a "haha, jokes on you we run the system so while this probably would be entrapment if some beat cops did it the court won't find it that way" sort of way. They just can't touch anything without getting it dirty this way and the fact that that is a 30yr pattern at this point depending on how you count speaks volumes IMO. While I'm sure they can solve an interstate murder or interstate fraud or whatever just fine I just don't trust them to handle these sorts of cases.
It seems like all of these people they wind up charging probably are questionable people who wanted to do the thing and probably did some other lesser things but they probably would have given up on the big thing if there wasn't a federal agency running around doing all the "the informant says the guy is lamenting not having explosives, quick someone get him some explosives" things in the background.
It took a bit of tracking down, but I finally found an apparently egregious example of this sort of thing I had vaguely remembered: Iraqi citizen and legal US resident Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab was sentenced last February to 14 years in prison for his role in an alleged plot to murder George W. Bush, and his involvement in smuggling terrorists into the United States. [1] But his sentencing (after his guilty plea) contains an interesting caveat: lifetime supervised release.
Why is a terrorist and would-be assassin of a former President getting lifetime supervised release? None of the media coverage of the case, going back years, makes that clear. However, a footnote in the original criminal complaint against[2] him offers a likely explanation:
"In or around the end of March 2022, United States immigration officials conducted an asylum interview with SHIHAB. After the interview was conducted United States immigration officials advised the FBI that SHIHAB may have information regarding an ISIS member that was recently smuggled into the United States."
With a little reading between the lines of the criminal complaint, a very different story emerges: Shihab never dealt with any terrorists. He was a paid middleman between two government informants or agents pretending to be terrorists. He took their money, played along, and ratted them out to INS during an asylum interview. After that, once they realized the jig was up, the FBI arrested and charged him at its earliest opportunity - for the plot they had created and paid him to participate in, and which he in turn had informed the government about.
Agreed. He willingly engaged with the alleged hitman (which ended up being the FBI contact). He didn't need to do anything or not have the thought to murder others cross his mind.
Allegedly. The 2 rules of his Fight Club were no underage sex stuff and no physical harm. That hitman claim was not part of his charges or sentencing. The heavy sentencing was to like "send a message" the judge said.
They weren't part of his sentencing because a different court entirely was pursuing the hit for hire attempt charge, but because another court in NY got the book thrown at him for running the site, they decided to drop it because it didn't seem necessary anymore.
In hindsight, the prosecution probably wished they didn't do that, since they are said to have had overwhelming evidence and proof, and there is even a Wired article about chat logs pertaining to DPR seeking services, but those are the breaks! If you don't do your due diligence, criminals can be let off on a technicality too!
I haven't looked into the case(s) for years, but prosecutors don't often just drop charges because other charges were found guilty. People get charged even after life sentences have been handed down.
And you don’t think the prosecutors consider the interests of the FBI when deciding what to prosecute? In cases where they want to use FBI evidence and probably want ongoing cooperation of the FBI for future cases?
Many people, including myself, do not believe that he really did any of the activity related to the assassination attempts. Demonstrably corrupt law enforcement agents had the opportunity to do it all themselves and it would be typical behaviour for those agencies. He is (and was) politically passionate about non-violence and it would go against everything he stood for. I cannot believe he would do it. What do you mean "openly"?
I can't say anything about these journals because I cant even remember anything about them. It certainly isn't obvious to me, since the case is incredibly complex and objectively fraught with corruption
But the feds would never attempt shading means of solving a problem that they're being heavily pressured to solve in a timely manner! Don't be a hecking conspiracy theorist.
Unmitigated nonsense. The evidence that he was involved in this is somewhere between unreliable and nonexistent, and he (and the supposed victim) have disputed it since day one. WTF do you mean "openly"?
- Log files found on Ulbricht's laptop with entries corresponding to the murder-for-hire events
- Bitcoin transaction records showing payments
- Messages between DPR and vendors/users about the situations
The court found this evidence admissible as:
- Direct evidence of the charged offenses
- Proof of Ulbricht's role as site administrator
- Evidence of Ulbricht's identity as DPR
- Demonstration of his willingness to use violence to protect the criminal enterprise
The court determined that while prejudicial, the probative value of this evidence outweighed any unfair prejudice, particularly since the government would stipulate no murders actually occurred.
Except the government blocked a codefendant from testifying that Ross wasn't the current DPR. The person who set up the fake murder was a Secret Service agent who went to federal prison. The target, Curtis Green, said the alleged diary was suspect. The court also kept out the role of the two convicted federal agents, not to mention 8+ other federal employees who committed crimes or unethical behavior.
And an indictment is not proof that the allegations are real or not manipulated. US Attorneys are a deeply amoral group, they don't care about truth or justice, just winning at any cost.
He organized and operated a global criminal drug ring and conspired to have people killed. The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar is that DPR was running his drug business in the 2010s instead of the 1980s.
> The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar is that DPR was running his drug business in the 2010s instead of the 1980s.
Asserting moral equivalence between someone who ordered dozens of innocent women and children not just killed but dismembered - solely as a lesson for others. Orders which were actually carried out multiple times and DPR who was never charged, tried or convicted of conspiring with a supposed online hitman to kill a competitor (who both were actually FBI informants - clearly making it entrapment). Yeah, that's quite a reach.
Sure, DPR was no saint but why push for the absolute maximally extreme interpretation? Even asserting he "organized and operated a global criminal drug ring" is a stretch. My understanding is he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers. I'm not aware that Ross ever bought or sold drugs as a business or hired others to do so. There is more than a little nuance between 1) buying drugs from distributors, delivering drugs to buyers and collecting the money, and 2) running online forums and messaging for people who do those things. At most, #2 is being an accessory to #1.
> My understanding is he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers. I'm not aware that Ross ever bought or sold drugs as a business or hired others to do so.
Ah yes, he accumulated over $5 billion in Bitcoins by entirely legal means. He didn't facilitate the wholesale distribution of illegal (and dangerous) drugs at all. He never contributed to the massive distribution of Fentanyle-laced dopes to the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. He was just the online guy!
> he accumulated over $5 billion in Bitcoins by entirely legal means.
I never claimed he didn't break the law. I said the opposite, that he's guilty of being an accessory to drug dealing.
> He didn't facilitate the wholesale distribution of illegal (and dangerous) drugs at all.
I said "he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers."
> He was just the online guy!
I said he's "no saint" and in an earlier post in this thread I also said he deserved a jail sentence and that "ten years was enough" for what he was charged with and convicted of as a first-time offender.
I challenged your assertion of "no difference" between DPR and Pablo Escobar as extreme and your response is to mischaracterize my position as DPR committing no crime instead of responding to my actual position that he's a criminal who is guilty and deserved ten years in jail but not two life sentences plus 40 years without parole. There is a middle ground between "completely innocent of anything" and "no different than Pablo Escobar." I don't understand why you can't acknowledge such a middle ground might exist - and that it is my position.
I think you might be a better fit for reddit than hackernews. The lack of thoughtfulness, heavy use of signalling and petty insults are more normal there.
You appear to be confused about the difference between a pardon and parole (and even parole doesn't entail monitoring "for life").
Also, your response didn't respond to what I said (which was about previously only responding to a straw man I didn't say). I like to think we strive in good faith for a little higher level of discourse here on HN. Try to do better.
Bravo to you - I don't think I could have been as mature and respectful as you in the face of these repeated refusals to respond to what you actually said.
Thanks for saying so. I'm human like anyone else but practice helps. We all need to be the change we want to see. Also, my internal goal is rarely to convince anyone who disagrees with me. My focus is articulating my position clearly along with my reasons for currently holding it. Then to understand their position and reasons. This is sometimes surprisingly difficult. Other times it's enlightening and occasionally leads to adjusting my own position.
I try to interpret what others say with maximum charity and construe their arguments in their strongest possible form, even if they weren't expressed that way. I'm interested in discovering why we disagree, not winning debate points. The hardest discussions are often those where they never seem to understand my position or are unwilling to respond to it. This leaves me with little choice but to meta-up to the 'protocol level' to re-establish productive communication.
In the conversation above, I suspect, based on hints in the last response, that the root issue may have been that a moral equivalence between Ross and Pablo Escobar was neccessary to make Trump pardoning Ross a maximally negative talking point against Trump.
If so, the discussion could never really be about what it appeared to be about: the relative criminal or moral weight of Ross' crimes or the appropriateness of the sentence. Which is a shame because it prevented ever reaching more interesting ground. For example, I wish the pardon had been a commutation instead because Ross was justly convicted of significant crimes before he was over-sentenced. The wrong which needed to be righted was the sentence not the conviction.
Tbh you probably don't know what your talking about. Silk road and fentanyl in drugs didn't over lap. Fent really showed up a couple years after the market was shut down.
PE put bombed newspapers and killed hundreds, if not thousands of people unrelated to any criminal enterprise or to arresting him. I mean, actual innocent, minding their own business civilians. Over 4000 murders have been directly attributed to the actions and orders of Escobar. Estimates to the actual count range closer to 8000.
DPR went over to the dark side a bit in that entrapment racket, or at least it seems so.
Thinking that someone needs to be murdered isn’t necessarily a character flaw, imho.
It depends on what DPR was led to believe about this fictional person. It is reasonable to imagine that the FBI took every possible measure to make their fake victim seem as murder worthy as possible. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that the “victim” may have been painted as a purveyor of child trafficking, CSAM, or other things repugnant. My point is we don’t know. And if we don’t know, we should reserve judgment.
True enough, but if every first step taken meant committing to that path, the world would be a much, much darker place, I would think. I know at least for me, it would.
I think if you've committed to having someone killed to the point that you have pulled the trigger so to speak, you have crossed a line that most humans do not. I sure hope you have not crossed that line before
A lot of very good people have crossed that line, and they did so -because- they were good people. They may have done it in defense of loved ones or strangers. They may have done it in service to the nation or community that they were born in.
When having these conversations, it’s easy to stand on the moral high ground and forget that we also live among monsters, and alongside organizations that turn regular people into the instruments of monsters. There are a lot of people in this world that have chosen to be incompatible with coexistence in civil society, or to be part of an organization that has chosen to be so.
These people actively do grave harm to other people. Sometimes, the only way to prevent more harm to innocent people is to remove those individuals from the world.
That said, I don’t know anything of the veracity or motivations behind the allegations brought against DPR in this regard, and for whatever reason, his legal circumstances were crafted so as to make sure that the public would also remain ignorant of the details of those circumstances.
While I do not know any of the details involved, I am deeply suspicious of the manipulations of the FBI in cases such as this, having been in proximity to some of their other shenanigans. It’s definitely inside the realm of reasonable speculation to imagine that they may have created a situation where not only was it convenient for DPR to eliminate his “competitor”, but he would be doing a noble thing in the process.
As an example , one of their “successful anti terrorist operations” a few years back involved a mentally challenged person was manipulated by the FBI into a “terrorist” plot where he thought he was “saving the world”…. So they -definitely-do that kind of thing. The Walmart judiciously wouldn’t sell him a gun (he is obviously and apparently challenged) so they sent him back to buy a bb-gun and arrested him coming out of the store.
Because of this and many other examples of behavior with depraved impunity, I am inclined to give DPR the benefit of the doubt on this, in the absence of much more specific and reliable information.
I'm sorry. Your argument sounds like it's reasonable but I can't accept it and it is full of strawmen. Very few people confuse 'good people that have crossed the line ... in defense of loved ones or strangers' with killers and murderers. Obviously killing is wrong but most people make moral allowances for such cases where it seems necessary or even for cases where it is mistaken or a so called 'crime of passion'. These are apples and oranges and not the same thing. As for standing on an easy moral high ground, uh yes, I'm reasonably certain that I will never reach the level of ordering a hit on an associate to protect my drug business so I will stand on that moral high ground, as will probably a very large majority of people. I have certainly entertained the thought of strangling quite a few people - past co-workers, strangers to death, and some of them I could even make a reasonable case at least in my mind, that they would've deserved it, but it has never crossed beyond a thought - and that is the case with most people in society, thankfully or we would live in a world of murderous chaos.
As for the FBI possibly cooking up most of it or manipulating it to look worse than it is, maybe. But from the transcripts of DPR's emails and online conversations regarding the allegations, it doesn't look very good for DPR either. In fact I think those transcripts was what soured the general public on DPR when many people like myself at first thought (and still think) the punishment seemed really excessive for what he was charged and tried for. That said I do think he has served reasonable time and the pardon at this time is not a bad thing.
I don't think anyone in here is making the case that Ulbricht is a "good person", but comparing Escobar to Ulbricht is next-level delusional.
One of these people attempted to place hits on 3-4 individuals, the other one planted a bomb on a passenger plane that resulted in the deaths of over a hundred people.
Because in my opinion the ethics of operating a drug ring is not as black as white as you state.
The existence of drug rings is an inevitable outcome from the war on drugs and I would argue the blame lands on the politicians who maintain the status quo that incentivises the creation of the black market for drugs.
He did order (and pay for) at least one murder. It just happens that both the victim and the would-be hit man were both informants so they staged the murder. Ross’ argument is that he knew it was fake, but that makes no sense in context.
It was right that they dropped the charge because it was quite obviously entrapment. But none of it reflects well on Ross Ulbricht’s character.
>we don't truly know the extent of the fbi's corruption in this
the corruption what we do know about already tainted the case to the point that it should have been thrown out.
I don't care about Ulbricht, and whether he is guilty of all or some of the charges or innocent. What bothers me in this case is that the government can get away and in particular can get its way in court even with such severe criminal behavior by the government.
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening."
Trump even personally called Ulbricht mother. I start to wonder whether i have been all that time in blind denial about Trump.
> A heartbreaking story is currently unfolding that’s sure to have devastating ramifications for years to come. Just moments ago, without any warning, the worst person you know just made a great point.
You shouldn't necessarily change your negative opinion of someone, just because they're right about something. To invoke Godwin's law: Adolf Hitler was a staunch opponent of smoking, in a time when many Allied cultures thought smoking was great, but that doesn't mean you're wrong about him.
imagine if your physical theory of Universe works perfectly for the Universe at all scales, all times, all places except for one small star whose behavior contradicts your theory - that means that your theory at least requires an adjustment and at worst it may be total thrash. Your smoking example doesn't have such contradiction - whether he was anti- or pro-smoker is orthogonal to the rest of the story. On the other hand Trump showing empathy and correcting gross injustice stemming from the gross government corruption doesn't fit well into my perception of Trump and thus seriously challenges it.
If your model of Donald Trump is "cartoonishly evil and incapable of empathy", then yes, of course you need to adjust your model – but that's a bad description of Adolf Hitler, too. He genuinely cared about the welfare of certain people, and opposed smoking because of the harm it caused those people: if you pegged Hitler as generally pro-death, you'd be wrong. But that does not in any way redeem him, and it shouldn't cause you to update your "Hitler wants to kill a whole bunch of people" prediction.
Suppose it's 1940. You know that Hitler ordered Aktion T4, and conclude that Hitler wants to kill people. Then, you learn that he opposes smoking because he doesn't like it killing people. You shouldn't start doubting that he's the sort of guy to sign mass death warrants: you've learned some information about his internal thought processes, but it's not very useful information if you want to predict his future actions.
"Orthogonal" is subjective. All things are interrelated. That does not mean that our descriptions should be highly-sensitive to noise. Update your internal model of his behaviour, by all means, but if you have predictions that don't require that internal model, consider whether or not this evidence should actually affect those predictions.
>You know that Hitler ordered Aktion T4, and conclude that Hitler wants to kill people. Then, you learn that he opposes smoking because he doesn't like it killing people. You shouldn't start doubting that he's the sort of guy to sign mass death warrants: you've learned some information about his internal thought processes, but it's not very useful information if you want to predict his future actions.
you've just described orthogonality between his stance on smoking and his real-life mass-murderous actions. And as far as i see it is very objective orthogonality.
Your perspective on Hitler is based on the work of many historians, allowing you to easily see the orthogonality – but every seeming-contradiction like this is actually orthogonal. Remember: you don't observe people's intentions, only their actions. Even if somebody does something you consider "compassionate", that doesn't mean it's based on what you'd call "compassion".
A 10 year prison sentence was apt. He did knowingly break the law (the marketplace defense doesn't really apply, since admins had to create the categories that were obviously illegal). A life sentence was ridiculous, and added punishment for unconvicted crimes, however likely, is a gross violation of constitutional protections.
Why this person specifically? And why at this time? Perhaps the discussion shouldn't be about the actual subject of the pardon, and perhaps more about the motives of the pardoner...
Trump came to the Libertarian Party convention and specifically promised to free Ross if he got their support. He actually promised a commutation; I wonder why he upgraded to pardon. He also promised a libertarian in his cabinet; oh well.
The LP chairwoman has made very interesting political moves this election.
Yeah, I'm pleased that Ross is out after serving over 10 years, but I wish it had been a commutation. He was guilty. The problem is the judge wildly over sentencing. Ten years served is about right for what he was convicted of.
Guilty of what exactly? Facilitating drug dealing? Something we both know is going to occur whether the nanny state permits it or not. Ross made it safer for those involved, and even those not involved. Inner cities are war zones because drug deals must be done in person. He deserves a full pardon.
These two thoughts are incompatible though, aren't they? Politics and shenanigans around the case aside, the original sentence should have taken into account the possibility of rehabilitation. But he got life without parole.
That said, it was entrapment and everyone involved should be deeply ashamed and prosecuted. At least those two agents did get some wire fraud charges [0], but the entrapment angle got explored because the charges were dropped.
According to Reuters he was found guilty of "charges including distributing drugs through the Internet and conspiring to commit computer hacking and money laundering." In addition to running an illegal market bazaar for 4 years.
Yea right. Drugs and violence are never mixed together /s. Just because he didn't commit violence himself (let's exclude his murder for hire. ahem.) does not mean no violence was ever caused because of his market place.
I'm not pro life sentence but the guy who was selling literally tons of narcotics online from which people overdosed and died and the guy who was ordering murders of his narco enemies gets to spend only 10 years in jail is indeed ridiculous. Imo he should've spent 10 years more because this way it seems like he "just" robbed a bank or something and got 10 years and now it's like nothing happened.
I'm stressing it out again, multiple people died from overdose because of him and multiple people were about to get executed because he hired hitman to kill them.
They wouldn't get their supply elsewhere? The junkies liked it because they didn't have to worry about getting robbed. You want to get rid of junkies? Enforce capital punishment of possession like Singapore.
That argument doesn't have any validity taking in consideration that it was still illegal to sell drugs online. In another words; legally it doesn't mean anything that it was safer to sell drugs online than it is on the streets, both are illegal. I have no sympathy for such "noble" entrepreneurs.
Did he actually sell the drugs, or did he just create a communications platform? Should all communications platforms be liable for what people do on them?
He actually sold a ton of drugs too.. you don't need to raise these questions as unknowable hypotheticals, it's literally a google search away to find out. The first sales on the site were trashbags full of mushrooms that he grew in a cabin in Texas.
- sackler family engineered opioid crisis and went unscathed
- hacking is a bogus charge applied to everything touching PCs
- money laundering is another victimless crime that very few actual money launderers gets charged with, for some reason
Case law obsessively cites other case law. So yeah, that's how it works. His trial was a farce and was meant to send a message to others to not, um, do drugs online or something.
They dropped the contract killer charges - it appears that they were fabricated to try to turn public opinion against him and get him jailed. But as soon as they went to trial the charges were dropped for lack of evidence.
They were not fabricated although it may have been challenging to secure a conviction and in any event Ross was going to be sentenced to many decades in prison.
Do you have a reference which shows they weren't fabricated or is this just your opinion? Because I feel if we know for sure they weren't fabricated they'd have at least proceeded to trial with it. Particularly considering they claimed they posed as hit-men to entrap him, which would be solid evidence. But later they dropped that claim entirely.
I personally find it ridiculous that people agree with the sentencing when you compare to sentences for tobacco industry practices, opioid epidemic, etc..
So many people are in jail for crimes they didn’t commit, or for non-violent offenses that were committed out of hardship and a need to eat.
They gave evidence he tried to have someone killed, and that he saw confirmation it had been done.
Even if the accusation is somehow false and he didn’t order that killing, how many people did he actually kill just by running Silk Road?
I’m so sick of the narrative that aww shucks he’s a good kid from a good family and he just made a boo-boo and didn’t mean to build a multi-billion dollar illicit fortune from trafficking deadly drugs and outright poisons all over the world.
If this dude wasn’t a money-raised white kid from California no-one would care.
He didn’t deserve to be imprisoned that long in the first place, ergo, he deserves to be released. The fact that nearly half the US prison population deserves to be released doesn’t change anything about this guy being deserving too?
People generally don’t get locked up for life even if they do kill someone (in civilized countries), as long as they can be rehabilitated.
What? - whatever nasty stuff happened because of those drugs being distributed and sold still falls back on that guy, and lets be real, some shitty stuff has to have happened with a direct link back to those drugs.
This was the first time many people had access to clean drugs in a comfortable way. It's easy to blame him, but the reality is that the alternatives are worse for customers.
> I think it's clear he did many things in the same vein
It is clear as mud. We now know:
* At least four other people had access to the DPR account, by design.
* One of those people (the person whose murder was supposedly ordered, who has vehemently defended Ross!) asserts that he knew that Nob (who we know who was a DEA agent) was one of those four people.
* Nob is a serial liar, and is now in prison for having stole some of the bitcoin from this operation.
...what about that make clear that Ross was within a mile of this supposed 'murder for hire' business?
The presumption of innocence is a legal principle that every person accused of any crime is considered innocent until proven guilty.
Under the presumption of innocence, the legal burden of proof is thus on the prosecution, which must present compelling evidence to the trier of fact (a judge or a jury). If the prosecution does not prove the charges true, then the person is acquitted of the charges.
> The presumption of innocence is a legal principle that every person accused of any crime is considered innocent until proven guilty.
That should be "considered innocent by the legal system". People are still free to come to their own conclusions--and act on them--even without a jury rendering a verdict.
Rather famously, for example, OJ Simpson was acquitted by a jury of murdering his wife. But most people these days would agree with the statement that he murdered his wife.
It is also the case that prosecutors need to decide both the probability of conviction, the effort needed to do so and whether likely conviction on other serious charges are sufficient for the people to feel that justice has been done.
My understanding is they never brought the charges in the first place. The supposed online hitman and the victim were both FBI informants. They never filed any charges because it was clearly entrapment and no one was ever in any danger.
The prosecutors later used that evidence as support for their sentencing request after Ross was convicted of only non-violent offenses, which has a much lower standard of evidence. The allegations of murder-for-hire were never tested at trial. They may have evaporated under cross-examination by a competent defense. Our system of justice holds that Ross is innocent of those allegations unless convicted at trial.
You don't become guilty or innocent based on legal proceedings. The point of a case is to establish guilt for the purpose of punishment.
But an innocent person doesn't become "guilty" even when the evidence shows that in the court. A guilty person remains guilty whether a court can prove it or not.
He should be considered innocent by the courts - and he was (innocent of the murder for hire charges, I mean). In the public we aren't obligated to follow the same standards of evidence as the courts. I think he almost certainly did pay to have those people killed, and that can shape my opinion of him.
That's perfectly reasonable - but I don't think it should really have a bearing on whether he should be pardoned. That is not exactly a matter of the courts (by definition), but I think as an official public act it should be subject to the presumption of innocence as well.
What makes you think I support those people being locked up either? Also, afaik Ulbricht didn't sell drugs himself, he simply provided an unmoderated marketplace.
If the law is unethical then you may be pushed to do "bad" things. For example if you are a Jew living with family in a Nazi Germany and someone know your secret and he feels he need to disclose it to the authorities then you may consider... murdering him. Would you really be a bad guy?
Ross Ulbricht was widely regarded by friends and family as a fundamentally decent and idealistic person—if admittedly naïve about the implications of his actions. Those who knew him personally describe him as thoughtful, intelligent, and motivated by a vision of a freer and more equitable society. His philosophical motivations were rooted in libertarian ideals, particularly the belief that consenting adults should have the right to make decisions about their own lives, including the substances they consume.
I just learned that he was an Eagle Scout.
Not exactly the résumé of someone getting locked up and the key thrown away.
This argument is problematic because it implies that a person from a different background who committed the same crimes (e.g., a poor, black, uneducated person without any fancy philosophical ideals) /should/ be locked up and the key thrown away. It doesn’t work that way. The law applies the same to all, and that’s the way I like it.
The problem is that if the law is arguably unethical or arbitrary, you're going to catch more "good" people in it. My comment was not so much a defense of Ross as it was an accusation against unjust drug law.
Imagine a hypothetical law which arrests anyone who trades in red shirts. Someone comes along and doesn't see what the big deal is and decides to trade in these shirts on the black market. Lives are saved because it is impossible to get shot at while paying for red shirts over the Internet instead of in person. Then the dude who ran the red shirt marketplace and seems like an opportunistic idealist gets locked up with the key thrown away.
Anyway, it is arguable that the Silk Road saved lives, given that black markets are persistent regardless of legality.
Seriously, that was pretty blatant "he was one of the good guys like me and so the law shouldn't really punish him, not like one of those other people with different value that should be punished to the full extent."
I mean there's a legal concept of motivation. A murder is sentenced very differently if it's premeditated, or not.
The idea of looking at someone's motivations to determine their sentencing is critical to our legal system - otherwise important defences like the "Battered Wife Defence" wouldn't work.
I think most of us can also see a difference between a poor person stealing some gloves to stay warm in the winter and a rich person stealing those same gloves for the thrill. The only difference here is you don't like the fact that Ulbricht's motivations were more high minded than your average crack pusher (cough CIA cough) - the judge didn't either - in fact he sentenced him harder for it to make an example of him.
First of all, leniency is usually expected (and this was the exact opposite of leniency) if it is someone's first offense or if they seemed like a good citizen prior.
Then why did he run a site which allowed people to order hits on people? If it was just an online drug marketplace, that would have been a different matter.
That said, I do think he absolutely deserved to be released, not because he didn't deserve to be locked up in the first place, but because he's clearly been rehabilitated and has done great work during his time in prison. All that considered, ten years seems like a not unreasonable prison sentence for what he did. I hope he'll continue to do good when he's released.