That seems way too harsh to me. I have strong opinions on the US War on Drugs and it's failure to meaningful deal with drug use/abuse in the USA. And I feel even worse about how it's spilling out into the rest of the world as we go "global" with everything.
I can't say I know every detail of the case but I don't recall anyone getting killed or even hurt by Mr. Ulbricht so in my mind the punishment does not fit the crime. IMHO the death penalty should be off the table completely (go Nebraska!) and life in prison reserved for only violent offenders. You can argue that he enabled people to harm themselves but I think that's stretching it. If people want to take drugs, even take too much drugs their going to get it somewhere. If drugs were legal and treatment of abuse the focus instead of punishment Silk Road wouldn't have existed in the first place.
You have to understand that the "murder for hire" evidence was introduced as part of the trial (at which point Ross' lawyer could have disputed it, but didn't) so it could be used as part of the sentencing decision... and that kind of takes the luster off of the "non-violent crime" argument.
This is the key point. He is going to spend the rest of his life in prison, pretty much, for running a website. Not for hurting anyone, not for even threatening to kill anyone - those charges weren't a part of his conviction - but simply by enabling the exchange of drugs he apparently should be locked away forever.
Even the most ardent proponent of full legalization usually acknowledges that many drugs are very harmful--they just believe the people should be free to do things even if they are harmful to themselves.
I generally support decriminalization or even legalization, but I would be reluctant to allow internet sales. I'd require sales to be through licensed dealers and in person, so that an addict cannot completely cut themselves off from human contact. Internet sales make drugs too easy.
Licensed & regulated dealers (aka pharmacies) would be great.
In regards to the harm from drugs-- I'd add the obvious point that prohibition comes with a really high cost.
I recently did dry-january and I was really happy with the results of cutting back on my drinking. I wake up more rested, and had more energy in the evenings. I've been thinking that going totally dry might be a good thing to do in my life.
But would I make alcohol, one of the top killers in america, illegal? (ref: http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm ) Absolutely not. If you went to US high school you know why--- alcohol-dealing gangs took over. People turned to bad products (wood alcohol, that potentially included methanol) to get their alcohol fix. I imagine we needlessly jailed a lot of alcohol drinkers and pushers.
> Why does the general public consider drug prohibition to be that much different than alcohol prohibition??
Because they have been told by the media, over and over, for decades. At least that's my theory. Consider how often the phrase "drugs and alcohol" is used in the general context of substance-based addiction.
Because it is socially accepted. Being a connoisseur of fine wines or whiskey is something many people consider sophisticated. Being a connoisseur of, say psychedelics or stimulants is, apparently a criminal offense.
My theory is that the media tells people what they want to hear, in order to sell the most papers, page impressions etc. If they told stuff that the general public disagreed with, then they would probably lose readers/viewers.
Alcohol has a long tradition in the western civilization, so people feel somewhat comfortable with that. Other drugs probably seem very new and scary to the average guy.
My theory is that the media tells people what they want to hear, in order to sell the most papers, page impressions etc. If they told stuff that the general public disagreed with, then they would probably lose readers/viewers.
There is a feedback cycle, where the media both manipulates and responds to public opinion.
Not sure why people and especially lawmakers keep separating alcohol and other drugs. Alcohol is a drug and one of the more dangerous and addictive ones at that. If that is legal than so should a lot of other drugs be. And trying to make it illegal, as you say does not work; it makes it things worse.
> Why does the general public consider drug prohibition to be that much different than alcohol prohibition??
The average IQ of most western countries, including the US, is around 100. That's probably significantly lower than the average reader here on Hacker News. I'm not sure if a person with an IQ of 100 ever asks themselves intelligent questions like yours...
I was recently in a conversation where it was pointed out that my rather cold analytic nature when it comes to these kinds of things puts me at odds with more emotionally driven decisions. Even without agreeing, I can see the point.
That said, in my mind short of violent action, I find it hard to see how having to serve more than two decades in prison is any kind of justice for any kind of non-violent crime. I also find that seeing the U.S. prison population at near 1% is rather depressing, and that most drugs probably shouldn't be criminalized and their use are more representative of other social issues at hand.
When black markets exist to the extent that the drug trade does, it usually indicates that the law is probably wrong. A black market for anything will always exist, but when you're starting to see it affect even 1% of the population as it does in this case, that should indicate that legally, the position should change in a way that reduces the need for such markets. However, time and time again governments try to push in the other direction, the U.S. revolution from England is in a large part based on this.
There is no justice in this sentencing. The sentence is to set an example (words of the judge) which by it's very definition is unjust. Regardless of what you think of the laws relating to this case everyone deserves the same treatment under the law.
IQ basically measures the speed of the brain, so it seems likely that there is some correlation between IQ and good political judgement. High IQ people basically have a greater capacity for thought.
> so it seems likely that there is some correlation between IQ and good political judgement
Considering that many smart people believe in opposing ideologies, many of those being extreme and some which I think are really stupid, I can't believe that. I'd consider empathy and open-mindedness much more likely to correlate with support for good policies. Also people tend to disagree on what policies are good. People disagree on what good basic principles are, what the likely outcomes are, and whether those outcomes are good or not. There is disagreement even among smart people, even after the stupidity of much of the drug war.
IQ attempts to measure the speed of the brain, via a proxy designed by humans who probably on average think a bit highly of their own intelligence. No risk of cognitive bias there....
Even as a proponent of full legalization I know that as little as a few minutes spent in water can kill someone, and often does.
Why people are allowed to casually dive into this toxic substance is beyond me. No licenses, no regulations, practically any body of water you can find you're allowed to jump into totally unsupervised.
Most places don't even have signs warning people of the danger, and worst yet, many children practice a dangerous activity called 'swimming' in this substance often daring each other as to who can drop the highest from a rope into a potentially fatal body of water.
Also, once you start drinking it you need to find at least 4 litres of this a day to keep from going into water withdrawl, commonly known as dehydration, this can happen in as little as 3 days with out your daily fix.
There's a difference in degree and in kind. Water does not create addiction that forces you to consume it in amounts that are seriously harmful to your health.
It's not true that areas unsafe for swimming are not marked - they are; moreover, there's both infrastructure in place to increase safety (e.g. lifeguards) and a significant amount of effort put towards educating people about the dangers of things like jumping into the water in a potentially unsafe place.
But that's all beside the point. Laws and rules do not exist in vacuum, and humans are not spherical cows of uniform density. Time and again history has proven that most people can handle exposure to water safely, while they can't handle being exposed to hard drugs. You can blame this on individual stupidity, but people don't have perfectly free will, and if this stupidity predictably touches big fractions of a population, it's time to mitigate it.
Also, can you please avoid drinking water for the next 4 days... I think you might be addicted, if you're not addicted you won't show any signs of withdrawl.
Addicts suffering from water withdrawl often drink amounts that are unsafe for their health which is why marathon runners have to be given water adulterated with mind altering metals like sodium and highly toxic chlorine to make it safe for them to drink.
It's kind of insane that water addiction would drive people to ingest water in such vast amounts that you'd have to add chlorine and sodium to make it safer.
If you think places unsafe for swimming are marked I would hazard a guess that you haven't spent much time in the outdoors.
> It's not true that areas unsafe for swimming are not marked - they are; moreover, there's both infrastructure in place to increase safety (e.g. lifeguards) and a significant amount of effort put towards educating people about the dangers of things like jumping into the water in a potentially unsafe place.
It's not true that products unsafe for smoking are not marked - they are; moreover, there's both infrastructure in place to increase safety (e.g. physicians and filters) and a significant amount of effort put towards educating people about the dangers of things like using tobacco in a potentially unsafe manner.
I believe that time and history has proven that prohibition solves little, where infrastructure to increase safety and effort put towards educating people results in "less harm" -- a much better outcome for all. Some people will make a harmful choice (e.g. heavy smoking, fast food diet, sedentary lifestyle, using chainsaws alone), but society as a whole should not be punished for the choices of the few.
As far as hard drugs, Ron Paul has done excellent surveys amongst hardcore Republicans (who generally say they'd do drugs if allowed) and found that most of them would not do heroin if given the choice.
> There's a difference in degree and in kind. Water does not create addiction that forces you to consume it in amounts that are seriously harmful to your health.
Neither do most drugs, especially most illegal drugs.
Many legal drugs do (the most addictive of all being nicotine), but that also doesn't matter and is besides the point.
The poster above me implied that Ulbricht's actions did not hurt anyone. Hence, harm from drugs is relevant, because Ulbricht was selling drugs.
Ulbricht was not selling water, so whether or not water is harmful is completely irrelevant to my point, which is that Ulbricht is not going to jail for "running a website".
Do you apply this logic to alcohol as well? It's a drug and there are many addicts, so similar to other drugs I don't think it should be sold online. Where do you come down on that? I only ask because many people implicitly omit alcohol when discussing drugs, even though it is one.
I'd be reluctant to allow it, just like with other drugs. As with other drugs, if it can be shown that a particular drug is not overly addicting, then I'd be fine with that drug being sold online (but only from licensed and regulated dealers, with enforced quality standards).
So, online beer would probably turn out to be OK, as would online marijuana.
Cigarettes are an interesting case. Nicotine is pretty high up on the addicting list, but experimentally even heavy smokers don't seem to consumer so much that they ruin their lives the way, say, a heroin addict might. Probably because cigarettes don't really impair your functionality. So probably they should be allowed online.
Cars and guns also hurt people but pretty much anyone can sell those.
I agree that drug sales should be regulated but that doesn't in any way make sentencing someone to life in prison for running a website any less fucked up.
> Cars and guns also hurt people but pretty much anyone can sell those.
The following applies only to the US. Since 1968 you need a license granted by the federal government to sell guns (https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/who-can-obtain-federal-firea...). The law allowing you to carry a firearm was passed in 1791. Driver's licenses have been around since 1899. You can't sell a car to someone without one.
When thinking about this issue, I've found the following thought experiments useful:
(1) Should someone who ran a multi-million dollar illegal gun operation get life in prison, even though unlike drugs, the right to own firearms is explicitly protected by the Constitution?
(2) Should someone who ran a multi-million dollar website selling only weed in legal venues (Colorado, etc) be convicted of any crime, never-mind sentenced to life in prison, even though it is against federal law?
Personally I answer (1) as YES and (2) as NO, and place Ulbricht's conduct significantly closer to (1) than to (2).
> Driver's licenses have been around since 1899. You can't sell a car to someone without one.
You most certainly can. And it's completely legal. Driver's licenses have nothing to do with buying and selling vehicles. Some (all?) dealers might not do it, but there's other reasons besides legality for them to worry about.
Interesting, I stand corrected. That said, to legally carry out the act with a car that might actually hurt someone else (driving it), you need to be both licensed by the government and compliant with a suite of regulation (insurance, etc). So I think the point still stands.
How about we both draw out our positions more explicitly? I present two scenarios where someone is selling a harmful product to people-- one in which someone is selling a product that US citizens have an unassailable right to in an illegal fashion and one in which someone is selling a product that people have a weaker claim to in a legal fashion. I support jail for the former and not the latter simply because my position is that the peoples' right to have product is irrelevant, it's whether you are selling it legally or not. If you're selling someone harmful in an illegal manner and you do multi-million dollars of business per year you should go to jail for a long time, even if the people have a right to said product.
I'd greatly appreciate if you could elaborate, because I'm finding myself confused as to what you're getting at, and I have no idea which point you're addressing. I think I follow, but I'm not convinced my interpretation is correct.
Honestly, I can't tell if this block is because I'm conflating the context of the greater discussion (the Ulbricht trial) with the more nuanced points of timsally's comment.
FWIW "addicted to cars" has results with headline in major news outlets - it's a common trope.
In human geography terms it simply means that giving up cars is a supremely difficult thing for society to do - particularly in some Western areas that are designed around the idea that all people have cars available [cheaply].
This has enough similarity to addiction that people use "addicted" commonly like this - "I'm addicted to coffee" or "I'm addicted to chocolate" usually just means you'd find it hard to give it up. [I don't know if clinically those statements are true for some though.]
As it happens I've given up alcohol, chocolate, coffee, videogames, and cars at various points and the car was definitely the hardest requiring the most change in my lifestyle.
I've gone barefoot a few times - it's a bit sore on gravelly ground but other than that not terrible. Supermarket chiller sections feel very cold.
>Disagree with your definition of addicted //
I made pains to show that "addicted" was being used metaphorically. I was describing common use not presenting an alternate definition. That said the roots of the word are in having an inclination towards something and it is still defined in some dictionaries as alternately relating towards habits rather than solely pertaining to psychological or physiological dependency.
Well, gun violence is definitely a pretty big problem in the united states. More importantly, banning or restricting gun ownership is effective at reducing gun related injury and death. The same cannot be said for drug prohibition (see: American alcohol prohibition, Portugal's drug decriminalization).
Drugs, like spoons, hurt people. Some other items that kill people include:
Cars. Motorcycles. Trees. Water. Too much air. Too little air. People. Dogs. Sticks. Bath tubs. Guns.
In the end, drugs are no more inherently harmful than any of the items listed above.
What usually kills people, however, is not drugs, but things associated with drugs that exist only because we have decided they should exist:
- Drug gangs and cartels and the violence associated with them are the product of US government policy, not drugs.
- Drug overdoses are the product of US government policy, not drugs (in most cases), because especially with illegal drugs people don't know what they're getting or how much of it or how to use it.
It is primarily we that kill people. Look around you. If you see a face that supports the drug war, that person is partially guilty in all drug related deaths.
The irony of this case is that Judge Katherine Forrest is now much more responsible for the drug-related deaths she is trying to prevent.
>Yeah, I remember reading news stories all the time about how Canadians overdose on maple syrup or how Egyptians overdose on water. Truly, all drugs are just as innocuous as air and puppies.
Do you seriously think people wouldn't OD on drugs if there were legal sources?
People ruin their lives pretty well currently with highly addictive drugs, and I don't see how increasing supply would stop that from happening.
You can be clever that sticks kill people all you want, but that's completely sidestepping why people are worried about drug legalization: many drugs have extremely well documented negative effects on people, and these effects end up affecting others as well (hence "no smoking in public places'-style laws), and it has a real cost to society (hospitalisation, and just the human cost). Last I checked Sticks aren't that costly to civilisation in recent times.
Trying to be clever with semantics won't convince anyone of anything.
> People ruin their lives pretty well currently with highly addictive drugs, and I don't see how increasing supply would stop that from happening.
I don't see how prohibition and the War on Drugs prevented them from happening too. All that was achieved by the War on Drugs was a massive waste of taxpayer money[0], the creation of a large, organised, violent and powerful criminal underground[1], filling up of prisons with non-violent offenders[2], denying treatment to millions of addicts and treating them like criminals, and the violation of the rights, freedoms and liberties of large numbers of innocent people[3].
What would you say the impact of the prohibition and the war on drugs have had on the number of people who are negatively affected by drugs? That must be considered too.
It's pretty obvious that drugs being illegal isn't stopping people from OD'ing, so I don't understand how this can be used as an argument against legalizing drugs.
I'm not arguing against legalizing drugs, I'm saying GP's argument is no good.
If you actually want to convince people on the fence (GP's comment is clearly meant only for the audience of those already convinced), it's more important to actually use convincing arguments. "Sticks hurt people" convinces no one.
Yeah, I remember reading news stories all the time about how Canadians overdose on maple syrup or how Egyptians overdose on water. Truly, all drugs are just as innocuous as air and puppies.
from the historical record I'm pretty sure that the USA gov has caused/allowed more drugs/chemicals/radiation/weapons to cause more harm/deaths to innocent/civilian people than Ross ever has. I don't see any US President or Senator, etc., in jail, because of that.
example: drop tons of Agent Orange on the lands/people of Vietnam? Just an oopsie! and they move on, wipe their hands clean. People dead and children deformed. Oopsie! Our mistake. Next meeting.
Exactly. What about "There must be no doubt that no one is above the law"? Every time I learn more about history, politics etc I'm more and more frustrated. The system/law doesn't work the way it is presented and people/institutions that are "in charge" have an incentive to left it the way it is (otherwise 50% of them should be in jail).
Any ideas what can we do? I like projects that try to give more power to the people (like DemocracyOS), but I think it's rather kind of a bugfix for a badly designed system - it's important to try to improve it to keep it somehow working in the short term, yet (IMO) the whole architecture is broken and won't work in the long term when everything changes so fast...
Give me a break. I also think the punishment was excessively harsh (the murder-for-hire stuff likely played a role even though he was not convicted on that), but saying he is getting life in prison for "running a website" is a huge oversimplification of the ruling.
That being said, I think this is the federal government showing, through the courts, how terrified they are of people running things they cannot control. Bitcoin terrifies them. They want to send a very clear message.
"As explained above, the murder-for-hire evidence is probative both as evidence of the charged offenses and to prove Ulbricht’s identity as DPR—a key disputed issue in this case. In addition, the charges in this case are extremely serious: Ulbricht is charged not with participating in a run-of-the-mill drug distribution conspiracy, but with designing and operating an online criminal enterprise of enormous scope, worldwide reach, and capacity to generate tens of millions of dollars in commissions."
Eh, the evidence for it does seem pretty damning, even accounting for the fact that Ulbricht hasn't had the opportunity to defend himself (although, given the showing at the actual trial, perhaps he's better off). I would bet that he's guilty, though not even at 2:1 odds.
That's not to say that, strictly speaking, this isn't a miscarriage of justice - it is. No one should be in prison merely for selling drugs or facilitating the sale of drugs. But, Ross Ulbricht is likely a danger to society.
The people supposedly "murdered" never existed... the names did not belong to real people, nor did the photo id's match anyone of record, etc. It's a rumor that they were Fed baiting him... and likely why the Fed never tried to charge him on the murder-for-hire counts.
Curtis Green is a real person, who really worked for Ross, who really was afraid Ross would have him killed, and who in fact Ross did try to have killed. See the very beginning of Joshuah Bearman's "The Rise and Fall of Silk Road" in Wired.
You forgot the part where he wanted Curtis Green dead because of a theft of USD$350,000.00 in Bitcoin commited by the dirty undercover DEA agent who he then hired to murder Curtis Green.
Your "because" is wrong. DPR's own words about killing Curtis: "ok, so can you change the order to execute rather than torture? ... he [Curtis] was on the inside for a while, and now that he’s been arrested, I’m afraid he’ll give up info." So, Ross himself says that the reason he wants Curtis killed is simply because Curtis might help the authorities (which Curtis did).
I wasn't aware suspecting someone of embezzling (whether or not its the proceeds of your criminal enterprise) was generally an accepted justification, or even significant factor in mitigation, for torture and murder.
What law allows killing to prevent a robbery? I think you're mistaken. Some places allow using lethal force when your own life is threatened. I am not aware of any place in the US where one is justified in killing merely to prevent a robbery.
And if there is, can you show me a law in the US where a citizen can go after a robber long after the robbery is over and then kill them?
The laws do seem to allow less after the fact, with good reason. My point was that we clearly allow for people to value money over lives.
When is a robbery over? The stuff never stops being yours, and they never stop running away with it.
A lot of things come into play here, but I'm pretty sure you could still post a reward, 'dead or alive'. I think it's legal to try to catch the robber yourself indefinitely, and defend yourself if threatened in the process.
Our wild west laws are only slightly less savage than what was alleged in this case.
From your source " the protection-of-property element of the deadly force law is “pretty unique to Texas.” ".
If this type of law is pretty unique to Texas, let's look at the Texas law, instead of necessarily simplistic summaries.
Here [1] is the actual Texas state law. The relevant section is 9.42. The law states that deadly force may only be used in the case you claim if the person meets (among other conditions) that "the use of force other than deadly force to protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury.". Section 9.42B.
So no, you're not just free to shoot people for robbery, willy nilly. There are several steps that, even in Texas, need to be met.
>When is a robbery over? The stuff never stops being yours, and they never stop running away with it.
and
>I think it's legal to try to catch the robber yourself indefinitely, and defend yourself if threatened in the process.
is just nonsense. Even Texas requires that a person be defending their property or (Section 9.41b) "if the actor uses the force immediately or in fresh pursuit after the dispossession and:" with some more constraints after that. You cannot just chase them months later and do anything.
So, "laws don't allow killing for robbery," unless there are quite a bit of other circumstances, and very few places allow it for any circumstance except when there is presumed lethal threat to the defender.
And absolutely certainly the laws do not allow Ulbrecht to hire someone to kill another no matter what the circumstances.
Please cite law statute or legal cases with links. Poorly researched news stories and opinions are much less useful.
The point was the motivation of protecting money. Under the Texas law, the defender doesn't need to be defending life, only seeking to recover property. Most of what you've said isn't a counterargument to what I said. Willy nilly was never a claim.
Louisiana appears to allow lethal force just to prevent unlawful entry into a dwelling, place of business, or motor vehicle.
You're also looking at one law about one situation to dispute what I conjectured about a different situation. Is it not legal to chase down the thief yourself? If you are threatened in the process, is it not then legal to defend yourself? Are 'dead or alive' bounties not legal? The effect may well be the same.
> Please cite law statute or legal cases with links. Poorly researched news stories and opinions are much less useful.
Nothing you've posted allows Ulbricht to hire someone to kill Green, no matter how Ulbricht obtained the money to begins with. Until you cite a law by statute you think allows this, we're done.
>Odd that laws allow for killing to prevent a robbery
Your assertion, not true as stated, and only party true except in very specific circumstances. You claim Texas; I show that's not true in such generality; you drop that line. I'll vote this one as "Not backed up."
> I'm pretty sure you could still post a reward, 'dead or alive'
Your assertion, not backed up. And wrong.
> I think it's legal to try to catch the robber yourself indefinitely, and defend yourself if threatened in the process.
Your assertion, not backed up. And wrong.
> Is it not legal to chase down the thief yourself?
Your assertion, not backed up. And wrong.
>Louisiana appears to allow lethal force just to prevent unlawful entry into a dwelling, place of business, or motor vehicle.
And now just simply move your original goalposts from robbery, since your original claim about Texas was not the slam dunk you hoped.
>Are 'dead or alive' bounties not legal?
Your assertion, not backed up. Also wrong.
Do you see why I asked for you to provide statute, since all your unbacked assertions are just wrong?
>So... you make up an assertion I'm supposed to back up? Nice.
You make up assertions, are unable to support them when asked multiple times, and then try to blame me? Classic.
The Texas and Louisiana and other laws do back up the assertion I actually made. It was a broad assertion by design. I only mentioned Louisiana because it's an even lower bar than I expected.
I'm sorry you thought my statement had 'such generality' to apply to any defense from any robbery. If you look back at the point I was making you'll see why this isn't relevant.
While it's nice that Force is responsible for the theft and not Green, Ulbricht didn't know that and so can't be given any 'credit' for that mistake. He arranged for his own employee to be tortured and murdered, even if his idiocy (and only his idiocy) in choosing hitmen prevented an actual fatality from happening.
You should have stopped there. Unless you're trying to claim that Force somehow zombified Ulbricht and then mind-controlled him into placing the hit...
So you agree that Alupis' item is completely false, which was my sole point.
As an aside, you conveniently neglect to mention that Curtis Green feared Ross would have him killed simply because Curtis had been arrested and Ross knew that he might spill the beans. And since Curtis knows Ross better than you or I do, and the fact that he managed to predict that Ross would try to have him killed, brings into question whether the money really made a difference.
You can still be charged with soliticing a minor if you happen to be a star on To Catch a Predator. Just because the minor in question never existed doesn't mean it's not a crime.
I think that is also silly. If finding yourself on To Catch a Predator is soliciting a minor, then by that logic the showrunners are purposefully endangering a minor.
Is it not known as entrapment to present a false situation in order to get a conviction or indictment, even if it's to confirm on behalf of the target a tendency or willingness to participate in the activity were to be real - and illegal because of its implications for abuse and its lack of real damage?
There are a lot of misconceptions about what is or is not entrapment. A lot of things like lying about not being a cop when under cover, putting out a bait car, or just watching you commit a crime without warning you it was a crime are not entrapment and the reason why is explained in the guide.
It's only entrapment when they do something to overcome some resistance you put up to committing the crime. So unless you can show that they somehow changed your mind, the entrapment defense won't work.
Sure, the thief wouldn't have stolen the bait car if they knew it was a bait car, but the question is whether they would have stolen any car.
So in this case wasn't a crisis situation (there being a defector with SR secrets) fabricated by the police and a third of a million dollars disappeared? Would this sort of thing count as doing something to overcome resistance? It's not likely that an anonymous person offering to 'help take care of the situation' would have enticed him - he needed a scenario that compelled him and this scenario was fabricated.
It's hard to see how being blackmailed regarding the details of one's illegal activity could count as entrapment for murder.
It seems to me that DPR came up with murder as the 'solution' to this problem, even if we claim that the problem itself was entirely manufactured.
Entrapment defenses are only supposed to prevent innocent people from being coerced by police into committing a new crime, not to provide a get out of jail free card to criminals who were somehow fooled by the police.
So the real question is not whether the police gave him a reason to hire a hitman, it's whether he ever would have hired an assassin at all.
According to Wikipedia: Blackmail is an act, often a crime, ... Essentially, it is coercion involving threats of ... of criminal prosecution.
Similar searches for the legal distinction between extortion and blackmail consider blackmail a form of coercion.
Given (A) that blackmail is coercion (psychological pressure), and (B) coercing someone into committing a crime is entrapment. Would (A) and (B) then not imply that (C) blackmailing should count as entrapment?
DPR did not come up with a hitman as a solution. Law enforcement made the suggestion. They did not use the words, just had their fake identity offer to take care of the situation.
I think the law guide I linked it to would file this under "there is no chutzpah defense." He had legal options that did not include "hire a hitman" ("do nothing" is a valid option) and he had a big hand in creating the problem to begin with, or there would be nothing to blackmail him with in the first place. And the state didn't corrupt him, he was already leading a criminal operation when they set out to catch him. You don't get to protect yourself from a lot of things you otherwise would when the problems are caused by your own illegal activities and you'll see this again and again with the other defenses, if you read more of that guide. It refers to those scenarios as a someone trying to invoke the "chutzpah defense," following on from the old story about a child who murdered their parents requesting mercy because he is an "orphan."
The overarching point here to protect people who weren't committing crimes from being dragged into them ("corrupted") and the rules are set up to avoid protecting criminals who were merely fooled by the police into exposing their criminal nature.
Nobody made him hire a hitman. They gave him a reason to, but they didn't make him do it. If he needed protection from a blackmailer, he could have turned himself in as well as the blackmailer.
Doesn't "there is no chutzpah defense" imply that he is guilty of a range of other things - then not yet determined in court?
And does it really work that way? You can be entrapped so long as your defense has no chutzpah?
Isn't it the case that law enforcement can be guilty of entrapment AND the defendant guilty of a crime? Hasn't this been established many times before? Wouldn't this exclude 'chutzpah' arguments?
I'm not sure that this really replies charitably to the premise of the discussion - i.e. that there was coercion. According to your argument nothing short of law enforcement physically forcing someone to take an action would be entrapment; so long as there are choices - even bad ones. Nor was there a reply to the fact that the hitman wasn't his idea.
It seems to me that those wishing the justice system overlook these issues already had decided on DRPs guilt and were convinced to get it at, even if that meant sacrificing due process and papering over it.
DPR can be behind bars - I don't care. But due process is something that even those wishing it were ignored for this conviction rely on and need, even if they don't think so.
He was found guilty of a wide-ranging criminal enterprise. I've already quoted the judge's own words regarding what DPR was charged (and later convicted) of, but HN seems to think it's a lot different than what the court documents reflect.
Further, offering you hitman services is NOT entrapment. This would never ensnare an innocent person: they'd say no!
To the best of my knowledge, DPR's lawyers have not even alleged that the police committed any crimes. That would have allowed them to suppress the evidence and, as learned in the link I posted earlier, the evidence that he hired a hitman WAS allowed in court because it was part of the crimes he was charged with.
I did reply to your other post about it 'not being his idea'. That EXACT argument is explained in the law guide, right here: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=646
The short answer is that, even if they offer you a hitman, all you ever had to do was say no. Giving you an opportunity is not entrapment. It just shows that if it hadn't been for the police, you would have committed a crime (solicitation for murder, here).
Finally, 'due process' means that he had his day in court. He got that and was sentenced by a jury of his peers. You can disagree with the reasons behind it, but there are good reasons for these rules which are clearly explained in the guide.
The fact that he was willing to deal with hitmen is the problem here. It's not self-defense, nor can it be. It's not a solution a non-criminal would ever accept. The fact that he had only bad solutions was due to his own guilt--there would be no illegal activities for the blackmailer to expose if he had not engaged in any. And if the blackmail was false, he'd have every reason to want to cooperate with the police and prove his innocence by working with them to catch the blackmailer.
Well, I gave links to a lawyer's explanation. I everything you're saying is entrapment is listed under the 'entrapment myths' so I don't know what to say here.
Right, it was just an explanation on an issue that wasn't a charitable representation of the DPR case. Which is what we were trying to resolve. Thus both our frustrations. It's cool, man. Let's both give up. :)
This. If he hadn't created a multi-million dollar drug empire, there would've been no blackmail. Therefore, the fact that he had to resort to murder to stop the blackmail is no defense at all.
Not to quibble, but it's also not the case that 'hire a hitman' is the only solution to being blackmailed. That's not exactly the first idea a law abiding citizen would come up with as the solution now, is it? It's his own fault he couldn't go to the police for help with the blackmail, so the court cannot reasonably excuse him for not doing so.
It doesn't matter what the police offer, if he chooses to hire a hitman (even a fake one) with their help, he's guilty, because an innocent person would say "no".
You don't get to kill other people to cover up your own crimes, period. Self-defense is the only possible justification, and that requires an imminent threat to his life (or at least grievous bodily injury). Threats to incriminate you don't count for anything.
Please refer to the guide, it explains all of these myths. If you think things work some other way, cite law to the contrary.
Can you be specific about which webcomic had law enforcement blackmailing someone? I didn't see one that covers our case there.
> 'because an innocent person would say "no".'
Doesn't that imply that all entrapment is legal? And is it even true? People can be blackmailed for things they haven't done and even easily give false confessions of guilt...
Thanks for the conversation Natsu. I don't think you're the legal expert I was hoping would be in this thread. Again thank you for sharing your opinion.
There are limits, though, to what sort of crimes, explained in the guide. Assuming they haven't overstepped those bounds, they're not in trouble, and you are. Not only that, but YOU can even get charged for the crimes they did if you were both members of the same criminal conspiracy.
=====
If you're under duress, is it okay to kill someone to save your own life?
They should make a web comic university. I wonder if someone could pass the Bar Exam...
None of these cover the scenario. They do not have to do with whether using coercion (let's say the leverage in the third example) counts as entrapment if done by the police.
The answer is yes.
You are continuing to try to use web comics to argue a strawman.
They are interesting web comics, for sure.
Whether it is okay or not to kill someone if you are under duress is tangential to whether it counts as entrapment.
Both can be true. It can not be okay - illegal - AND be entrapment on the part of the police.
The argument is that it was entrapment.
The argument was not about whether hiring a hitman would be okay or not.
Please, if you feel like getting the last word in, for the sake of readers who stumble onto this, cover the issue and not another straw man.
I'm sorry you don't agree with me, but I can't help but point out that you've offered only your own opinions. You've not cited any law or description thereof, nor have you cited any of the court papers in this conversation. I've cited both and given sources for my reasoning.
Further, this is all 1L stuff (i.e. the basics). DRP's lawyers know all this stuff. And yet, as far as I can see, they didn't even try this argument. There's only one reason a lawyer doesn't raise an argument that would get their client off the hook: because it's bogus. (Raising bogus arguments in court is a bad idea... it wastes everyone's time and angers the judge, do it enough and you can get sanctioned.)
And they did cover the hitman issue--they most certainly did try to suppress the evidence that he hired a hitman (just not with arguments over entrapment). You can read more here:
But not once did they say 'entrap'. You seem to be trying to argue that DPR wasn't predisposed to hiring hitmen before the cops got there, but that the cops convinced him that it was his only option.
I've covered why that doesn't cut it: the police CAN join your conspiracy, they CAN lie to you, they CAN give you the means (and the idea!) to commit the crime, and he DID have other options (he doesn't have to like them). Each of those cuts out elements of his defense, leaving nothing.
So the case you have to make is that the police overcame his resistance to hiring a hitman, but the chat logs given never show him saying "no, I don't want to do this" they show him as eager to make use of this "solution."
To establish a claim of entrapment, you have to show that he resisted the idea and that the police overcame this resistance. From there, courts may follow one of two approaches: deciding whether this defendant had been predisposed to commit the crime or whether this approach would have caused any law-abiding citizen to commit the crime.
I've been pointing to the latter approach, as I think it's more productive to take an objective approach than a subjective one. Were a law-abiding citizen in DPR's shoes, they would NOT have hired the hitman. A law-abiding citizen hit by this would have turned to the police for protection from the blackmail, not to a hitman.
The discussion of necessity and duress is relevant to whether he had "other options." Both of those are arguments that one does not have other real options. Because both of those unqestionably fail, he had other options.
To establish entrapment, you have to prove that he had no way out and that they used this to overcome resistance. In the example of actual entrapment, we have someone shown as refusing to commit a crime for money, then agreeing only because someone's life is at stake and the papers aren't really important.
Nowhere have you cited any of the chat logs with him showing resistance to hiring a hitman (this is required!). And then you have to show them overcoming this resistance.
Maybe if you can show the police telling him that police protection is worthless or shooting down his ideas for avoiding hiring a hitman you could get somewhere, but... no such evidence is on offer.
Rather, all of the evidence points to the fact that he was predisposed to commit this crime. From the legal brief cited above:
The next day, Ulbricht told another coconspirator, CC-2, about the theft. (Id.) Ulbricht expressed surprise that the Employee had stolen from him given that he had a copy of the Employee’s driver’s license. (Id. at 6-7.) Later in the conversation, Ulbricht and CC-2 discussed the possibility that the Employee was cooperating with law enforcement, and CC-2 remarked:
[A]s a side note, at what point in time do we decide that we’ve had enough of someone[’]s shit, and terminate them? Like, does impersonating a vendor to rip off a mid-level drug lord, using our rep and system; follows up by stealing from our vendors and clients and breeding fear and mis-trust, does that come close in your opinion. (Id. at 7.) Ulbricht responded, “terminate? execute?” and later stated, “I would have no problem wasting this guy.” (Id.) CC-2 responded that he could take care of it, and stated that he would have been surprised if Ulbricht “balked at taking the step, of bluntly, killing [the Employee] for fucking up just a wee bit too badly.” (Id.) Later that day, Ulbricht told CC-2 that he had solicited someone to track down the Employee. (Id.)
So if you want to argue this, take facts cited from court papers (e.g. papers filed by DPR's lawyers), then fit those to the elements of entrapment. Show me from the chat logs or similar sources where he exhibited resistance to the idea, then show me how the police convinced him to give up that resistance.
For the very same reasons through the rest of the thread, you continue to argue a straw man.
You sound like you're a very insistent and dogged debater.
It would be becoming of you to take your passion for argumentation and apply it to the arguments being made by the opposition. I'm certain that if you did this you would have more success.
I would reply point by point but as they say "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results."
Thanks again for the discussion. Hope to see you continue to be verbose (but perhaps more charitable) in other threads around HN.
I'm not sure I really follow because the comics didn't describe anything that presumably would be entrapment.
Is anyone here a lawyer in this area of law? I don't really trust webcomics....
But let's talk about this alleged hitman situation. Didn't the police come up with the idea and create the situation where a third of a million dollars appeared to have been stolen and a volunteer appeared to defect with information and a threat to bring down the organization?
What exactly does count as coercion? If the police were to make your incentives work out a certain way - let's say they were aware that a non-call-girl was in dire straights was potentially willing to accept money for a personal night, they freeze her bank account and provide a good looking and safe opportunity with a load of cash to do it - would that count as compulsion?
Or is it just by appeal to words that counts as compulsion?
How can a court decide what you would have done otherwise?
It seems like a pretty difficult area of law - and one that the defendant could argue?
For the record I do not support trafficking of drugs and illegal materials, nor calling of hit men: but I do want to make sure that the tools to get a conviction do not further enshrine precedents that have fascistic qualities to them - e.g. parallel construction, entrapment, others.
IANAL, but from reading lots of the law comic (which is by an actual lawyer), the basic answer is that the state has to have 'corrupted' them into being a criminal here.
The police are allowed to give you the idea (you are required to refuse), they're allowed to give you the means (they can sell you the gun/drugs/etc.), they're allowed to create opportunities (bait cars), they're even allowed to become a part of the conspiracy with you and to lie to you about it (undercover agents).
What they're not allowed to do is to force your hand or corrupt someone who wasn't committing crimes to start.
So it's not going to count if the only reason they would have otherwise refused to commit the crime was because they were dealing with the cops and it's not going to count if the reasons they decided to commit the crime stem from their own wrongdoing. If you want to protect yourself from someone blackmailing you over criminal acts you've done, you turn yourself into the police. You don't hire a hitman and add yet another crime to the list.
> Is anyone here a lawyer in this area of law? I don't really trust webcomics....
I think you can trust this one. The author of the webcomic is a lawyer [0]:
"
Yes. I went to Georgetown Law, where I was an editor of the American Criminal Law Review. I started out defending juveniles in D.C., then was a prosecutor with the Manhattan D.A.’s office for about 9.5 years, first in the Special Narcotics office and then in the Rackets bureau. I’ve been doing mostly criminal defense since then, both white-collar and street crime, federal and state.
"
That was one case, but he also seemed to have hired another hitman who pretended to kill multiple people. He seemed to have been addicted to hiring hitmen, eventually it probably would have led to actual murders.
In general, entrapment is when the police convince you to commit a crime that you wouldn't have committed otherwise. So, if you want to kill your wife, and your friend (FBI agent) happens to say one day, "Hey, I do a little killing on the side, just for gits and shiggles," and you hire him, that's not entrapment.
In contrast, if the agent is manipulating you and saying, "Hey, your wife is going to divorce you and take your stuff. Killing her is the only way to prevent ruin" and slowly convincing you to do it, then that's entrapment.
Bottom line: Already predisposed to doing the crime and probably would have gone through with it if it hadn't been the police? You're screwed. In contrast, if you're normally completely innocent and the person has to convince you to commit the crime, it's entrapment.
I completely agree, the point is a 1 year sting is plenty of time for someone to cross the line, and they did not bring the charges up for some reason, so it’s a possibility.
I suspect it's more likely they wanted to convict him on just the SR charges because that's better publicity, but it’s still odd.
They don't have to remove your choice. They need to significantly change your mind.
Basically, if the undercover cop suggests X and you say no. Then come on nobody will know, and you say no. And then they spend the next six weeks convincing you it's a good idea, then that's entrapment.
The issue is he was on a sting for over a year and that's plenty of time to cross the line.
Of note, asking several times and catching someone at a moment of weakness is not entrapment. So, if you have been clean for 10 years then you’re out of luck.
The guy he tried to kill was a corrupt law enforcement officer who was stealing from him. If the same trick were deliberately pulled by law enforcement surely the defense could argue entrapment. It's ironic at minimum.
He was never charged with that. I think the JD held those charges back so they had something else to their at him if this first trial didn't go their way. As such, the sentencing should only be about what he is charged and found guilty of committing.
Yeah, I've been seeing the other comments about that. As I said I'm not 100% up to speed on the details. I'd like to see more evidence that he actually was being convicted of that though and not just that it was a factor in determining sentencing. I don't doubt it's possible he was trying to contract a hit but the stories about the FBI stinging him, etc. make me a bit suspicious.
> I'd like to see more evidence that he actually was being convicted of that though
He was not charged for murder itself. During the trial testimony, they were very clear about this (regardless of whatever tptacek may say based on a few random pretrial documents); they worded it so the plots entered in as SR related activity and Bitcoin transactions but that was not part of the charges. From the trial itself: https://www.capa.net/case/2014-cr-00068/page/2159
> Here is the text where he says after redandwhite said I prefer to kill all four, DPR: Hmm, okay, I'll defer to your better judgment. 500,000 has been sent to bitcoin address, transaction number. You look it up on the block chain. There is the payment. The payment was made. How do we know that the payments were made by the defendant? Because they were sent directly from the defendant's bitcoin wallet. That's what Special Agent Yum testified to. Those payments came from addresses that were found on the defendant's laptop, the same wallet we were just discussing earlier, the wallet that was moved to the defendant's local machine right around the same time; in fact, it was moved to the defendant's laptop on April 7 and then on April 8th, he's making the payments. So it was the defendant who made these payments. It was the defendant who was trying to murder five people. Now, to be clear, the defendant has not been charged for these attempted murders here. You're not required to make any findings about them. And the government does not contend that those murders actually occurred. The defendant may have fallen for a big con job, which would only go to show that the Dread Pirate Roberts is not a criminal super-genius that the defendant wants to make him out to be, but what the murder-for-hire exchanges do show is how far the defendant was willing to go to protect his criminal enterprise if users got the idea that their anonymity wasn't safe on Silk Road, that their identities could be leaked en masse, they weren't going to use the site, and the defendant was going to lose business, and he was willing to use violence to stop that from happening.
The Green hits did not come up at all, as far as I know, but I don't think we have all the transcripts yet (the last of them seem to be locked until tomorrow) so maybe the prosecutors managed to work them in tangentially.
> Prosecutors said he was more like a drug kingpin, profiting from cyberspace sales of illegal wares, and that he allegedly tried to arrange at least five murders to protect his business. The government said it didn’t believe any were carried out. Forrest said there was “ample and unambiguous evidence” of the plots.
He wasn't being convicted of ordering hits on people since there isn't evidence that he was successful in killing anyone; however, I think the justice system operates here on the idea that he could have eventually been successful at ordering a hit, given all the effort he was putting into it.
Just because someone didn't die doesn't mean that ordering a hit is okay. From the chat logs I've read, DPR ordered a hit on one of the SR employees (Green, I believe) who had gotten arrested. When DPR found out, he thought Green would talk, so he asked another SR employee, Force (who was an FBI member and was actually participating in Green's arrest), to kill Green. Force agreed and pretended to kill him and faked photos with Green. DPR thought he had killed someone. Does that make it not a crime because Green didn't actually die?
Anyway, that's not even what this case was really about.
He should have called it collateral damage. Isn't that the term preferred for killing people that get in your way, but is a legally sanctioned killing and not prosecutable?
There was no such thing introduced for the trial. It was in the original press release, then it was withdrawn. Maybe it was because of Mark Force's transgressions, or maybe it was just for effect. Regardless, he never got the chance to defend himself against those particular allegations.
So which of the charges is it (from your link): " charging Ulbricht with seven crimes:
Narcotics Trafficking (Count One), Distribution of Narcotics by Means of the Internet (Count Two), Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy (Count Three), Continuing Criminal Enterprise (Count Four), Conspiracy to Commit and Aid and Abet Computer Hacking (Count Five), Conspiracy to Traffic in Fraudulent Identification Documents (Count Six), and Money Laundering Conspiracy (Count Seven). (ECF No. 52.) "
The murder for hire scheme was the second overt act charged in Count One (an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy is an element of conspiracy.) [0]
> So a murder is hidden under a less serious offence?
No. Soliciting a killing for pay ("murder for hire" in informal terms) as an act to advance a conspiracy is included (hardly "hidden") as one of the alleged overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy, at least one of which must have been found by a juror to have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt to vote to convict on the conspiracy charge.
> unfortunately there is no "killing for pay" in the document you linked either.
Actually the document uses the phrase "murder-for-hire".
Your word search probably failed because its an image scan and has no searchable text.
You actually need to read it. Which should be helped by the fact that where I linked it, I told you where in the document the murder-for-hire scheme was addressed.
It's right there on page 3 ("II. Background A. The Murder-For-Hire Evidence") and continues for quite some length. I'm not a lawyer and haven't been following the case, but if he was convicted of what the government alleges in this section it pretty much eliminates the "non-violent" argument.
Here is exactly what you said, kicking off this long and unproductive subthread:
There was no such thing introduced for the trial. It was in the original press release, then it was withdrawn. Maybe it was because of Mark Force's transgressions, or maybe it was just for effect. Regardless, he never got the chance to defend himself against those particular allegations.
By "no such thing", you were referring to the words <<the "murder for hire" evidence>> in the preceding comment.
Let's pick it apart:
1. There was no such thing introduced for the trial. Not only was it introduced for the trial, it was an explicit part of what Ulbricht was indicted for.
2. It was in the original press release, then it was withdrawn. It was never withdrawn; he was indicted based on (among other things) the explicitly asserted "overt act" of commissioning a murder. The murder-for-hire scheme wasn't innuendo, but a rebuttable fact introduced not just as evidence but as one of the legs of the case.
3. Maybe it was because of Mark Force's transgressions, or maybe it was just for effect. It may have been either of those things, but if so, it was also actually one of the predicates of the conspiracy charge he was convicted of.
4. Regardless, he never got the chance to defend himself against those particular allegations. Yes, he did; his legal team mounted multiple arguments against the allegation, and did not prevail at trial. Ulbricht's team had not only the opportunity to defend him against the allegation, but the obligation to. Conclusively refuting that allegation would have significantly harmed the prosecution's case, knocking out one of the predicates for the conspiracy charge.
From what I can tell, you made a fairly complicated series of assertions, none of which turned out to be true.
Hey, this may be weird, but I've got this football field where the goalposts were installed in the wrong place, and I need them moved. After checking out your comment history I think you'd be a good fit for the job; let me know if you'd be interested.
Dude, it's right at the very beginning of the exact page that he linked you. The fact that it says "murder-for-hire" with hyphens doesn't somehow make it not say "murder".
EDIT: Whoops I see that zorpner said basically the exact same thing just a couple minutes before me.
Yes, it was a factor in his sentencing (the whole debate about whether or not it was charged was because it was included as a factor in the proposed calculation for sentencing.)
Ok, he wasn't sentenced for murder but it was "factored in" in another sentence. Wow.. I'm not sure there is a more serious crime than murder though. Wouldn't it be that the other crime was factored in under murder?
> Ok, he wasn't sentenced for murder but it was "factored in" in another sentence
Its not "murder", its "soliciting murder in the furtherance of a conspiracy". Which is not a separate crime, but manner in which the crime of conspiracy is achieved.
(Soliciting murder itself can be charged as a crime, and Ulbricht is charged with that, too, though those charges were not tried with these charges.)
Ok, so he wasn't sentenced to murder, thanks. Neither to "solicinting murder in the furtherance of conspirancy either" actually. Or, which charge was it exactly if you look here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9627263 ... Seems as if there was no such charge.
From ArsTechinca: "Prosecutors' allegations that Ulbricht tried to arrange several murders-for-hire also came up at trial, but he was not charged for them in this case. Instead, one of those six accusations is pending in Maryland."
Ok, I can't reply to the one answe saying that this isn't true but accoring to the wired articel "Ulbricht, who the prosecutors have sought to prove is that Dread Pirate Roberts, hasn’t been charged with murder-for-hire in his Southern District of New York case, though he faces charges that include conspiracies to sell narcotics, launder money and more. (He does, however, face murder-for-hire charges in a separate case in Baltimore.) " This is the NY case
Please remember: the argument isn't "did the government conclusively prove that Ulbricht attempted to commission a murder".
It is: "There was no such thing [here: <<evidence of a murder for hire scheme>>] introduced for the trial" (exact words taken from the comment rooting this subthread and the parent comment that provoked it).
That's not only false, it's pretty much the opposite of what happened: not only was evidence of the murder-for-hire scheme formally introduced at trial, but it was ventured at trial, in a manner that put a part of the prosecution's case on the line for it. Not only did Ulbricht's team have the opportunity to rebut it, but they were obligated to do so in the course of competently representing him.
> The indictment is the whole premise of the trial.
No, the indictment is simply the initial document filed years ago which started the case and the specific charges can be, and were (right up to before Ulbricht's sentencing, even, where I believe some charges were combined or something) amended and strategies changed. You seem to think that indictments are immutable and all you have to do is quote a line from it, but you are not a lawyer.
> That's not only false, it's pretty much the opposite of what happened: not only was evidence of the murder-for-hire scheme formally introduced at trial, but it was ventured at trial, in a manner that put a part of the prosecution's case on the line for it.
The prosecution did not introduce the murder for hire and during the trial, as I already quoted, explicitly disclaimed that it was trying to do so and that they were only talking about other things like control of Bitcoins.
The indictment to which we are referring was filed on February 4, 2014. It does not appear to have been superseded, and is the indictment the prosecution makes direct references to.
Is there a newer indictment you can point us to? One in which the murder-for-hire scheme is not ventured as part of the case?
I don't know what you want besides the explicit quotes from prosecution during the trial itself clarifying what they were and were not claiming. Whatever your interpretation is, it seems to be either wrong or irrelevant. Which interpretation should be trusted more, a crypto guy on HN trying to interpret indictments or the prosecutors during the trial?
You, just one comment prior, suggested that the indictment had been changed in a manner relevant to this thread. I cited the most recent indictment --- and took the time to try to verify that it was the most recent indictment. Now the indictment doesn't matter?
No. It very much mattered. The indictment formally documents the charges Ulbricht faced. His lawyer, a relatively well-known defense attorney, was fully aware of his obligation to rebut the allegations in the indictment. Ulbricht is, of course, innocent of charges until proven guilty. The prosecution produced what appears to be very compelling evidence. The defense produced something much less compelling.
A variety of things that aren't findings of fact at criminal trials can, unfortunately, be material to the sentencing phase of a trial. The murder-for-hire scheme isn't one of those things: it was an explicit component of a criminal charge that Ulbricht was convicted of, supported by evidence, provided to the Ulbricht defense during the earliest phases of the trial.
Practically every filing from the case is trivially available with a single Google search, so I'm not really at all interested in how Ars or Wired chose to summarize it.
Agreed. From the FBI press release on his conviction[1] no mention of the murder-for-hire charge. This conviction and sentencing all stem from the drug-selling business enterprise.
Our war-on-drugs sentencing is quite disproportional, IMHO; imputing societal harms that are unfounded. After all, Mr. Ulbright simply provided a safer way for consenting individuals to enter personal financial transactions.
Silk Road is a drop in the bucket compared to all the transactions arranged over SMS messages and using cash - but we don't hold AT&T and the Federal Reserve responsible for running a criminal enterprise.
=====
ULBRICHT, 30, of San Francisco, California, was found guilty of: one count of distributing narcotics, one count of distributing narcotics by means of the Internet, and one count of conspiring to distribute narcotics, each of which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years; one count of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison; one of count of conspiring to commit computer hacking, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison; one count of conspiring to traffic in false identity documents, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years; and one count of conspiring to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The maximum sentences are prescribed by Congress and are provided for informational purposes only, as the sentence will be determined by the judge. ULBRICHT is scheduled to be sentenced on May 15, 2015.
Er, you're drawing a completely ridiculous parallel.
If AT&T made a Text 81841 For Guns and created an anonymous infrastructure for arms dealers to sell guns to gangsters, yes, they would be in trouble.
Here's another example - I'm sure that some people have used Reddit for illegal transactions, but no one is going after Reddit for facilitating drug trafficking because it's a small part of their customer base.
In contrast, the Silk Road was wholly dedicated to selling illegal goods. That's why it was created, and that's why it made money.
Does that matter? There was nothing drug specific about the site implementation - you could sell anything you wanted to (gold, collectables, etc).
He provided a system that could be used as a valuable service for legal activities. It could also be used for illegal or banned activities in various jurisdictions.
I'm just saying that it's a dangerous precedent to say that anyone creating a communication or transaction platform can be held liable for conspiring with users who use it to commit crimes.
It does. If you create "the drug and other illegal products and services" market place, it is hard to argue you are not a drug dealer. Intent is a big deal when determining whether a behaviour is criminal.
Intent absolutely matters, yes. Silk Road was promoted by the staff as primarily a drug marketplace. Ross grew mushrooms to sell on the marketplace. It had links to drugs on its sidebar. They had a doctor to give advice to drug users. It was designed specifically not to comply with the law. These are all factors when determining criminality. If a site like Amazon accidentally sold child porn (as an example) via self publishing features, then they wouldn't be liable because Amazon was designed and promoted as a way to sell legal things that follow the law, and they would action the removal of those items when brought to their attention. These would make a strong case that there was no criminal intent on Amazon's part and that the fault was with a third party and so nothing would come from it.
It is extremely obtuse to act as if this sets a scary precedent By reducing the situation to absurd levels. Context has always mattered and will continue to matter.
What is really interesting about this transcript is the people are named in full, with some addresses and other details (married, etc.) The hits, I'm assuming, were fake because the contact was undercover, but what happened with the targets? Did the one threatening him have to play along and no longer send the threatening e-mails once the undercover told him the job was done? Were they prosecuted in any way?
Do you have a journal proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have been written by icelancer that includes them discussing how they paid to have a person killed? And did you also confirm that the payment for that supposed hit was transferred? Because these facts were shown at Ross's trial. Its alleged because he hasn't yet been specifically convicted on these charges, which are still pending in Maryland.
Do you have a journal proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have been written by Ross Ulbricht that includes them discussing how they paid to have a person killed? Because a jury has yet to decide whether the government has such a thing, too.
My point is, we haven't seen the evidence, a jury hasn't decided about the evidence, why are we talking about this? We can't pretend that Ulbricht's sentence for drug trafficking was fair because of his charges for violent crimes, because the charges for violent crimes have yet to complete. This sentencing happened in a court of law, where speculation about the result of different court cases is as valuable as some dude on the internet saying icelander killed people.
> Do you have a journal proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have been written by Ross Ulbricht that includes them discussing how they paid to have a person killed?
Yes. That was literally a critical piece of evidence at the trial. The defense tried to claim that it wasn't Ulbricht's and failed.
Take a look at the post I'm responding to here. A lot of people in this thread are acting like the murder for hire thing is just some crazy rumor when there is a really compelling body of evidence behind it. Reasonable people can disagree on whether it should be a factor in the sentencing in the drug trial, but to act like there isn't a very high probability of Ross having attempted murder is.. Well it's not reasonable.
I don't need to look at the post you're responding to, I wrote the post you're responding to.
In the court of law where Ulbricht was tried for drug trafficking, the murder for hire thing is a crazy rumor. The murder-for-hire case is a separate case, which remains untried. The evidence in the murder-for-hire case is probably compelling, otherwise the government probably wouldn't bring the case. But that's utterly unrelated to the sentencing for drug trafficking.
If Ulbricht was sentenced to life for hiring hit-men, we wouldn't be having this discussion--I have no objection to people being sentenced to life in prison for violent crimes. But he wasn't sentenced to life in prison for violent crimes, he hasn't even been tried for violent crimes yet. He was sentenced to life in prison for drug trafficking. And that's not justice.
> I don't need to look at the post you're responding to, I wrote the post you're responding to
You do because that's the context of the point I am making. Right now you're having an argument with some point I didn't make, and it's coming off as a bit silly.
>In the court of law where Ulbricht was tried for drug trafficking, the murder for hire thing is a crazy rumor.
First of all, I'm talking about HN here and the persistent need for posters to pretend like the specific evidence we have of Ross being violent was shaky. It's not. We have very good evidence that Ross was a violent person. I wasn't making claims about whether that should have been used in sentencing, so the fact that you keep harping on that is weird.
Second, the fact that he tried to hire murderers was material to the criminal conspiracy charges. So it's not just "a crazy rumor" from the courts point of view. The current way sentencing works is that evidence introduced in the trial can be used for sentencing as long as it meets some burden of proof , and this evidence was there and met that burden.
My gut reaction here is that the burden of proof should be higher (ie an actual conviction) and that the sentencing in question was highly inappropriate from a social standpoint, but I don't have background in law to understand why the rules are the way they are.
At the same time I'm not going to rally behind a guy who incompetently tried to murder people as a way to express my distaste for the American justice system and the drug war. There is such a thing as picking your battles and this is not the hill I want to die on. I am aggrevated that people who share these views seem to be stuck on Ross and are trying to retconn away the evidence rather than pick a better battle to fight. There are myriads of drug war victims and avenues of tackling the problem, but we're going to try to bang a square peg into a round hole here because the guy is a white upper-middle class programmer and we think Bitcoins and Dark Webs are cool? Right.
The strongest statement I will make is that the life sentence is clearly unjust. People should be given second chances with very very few exceptions. Ross should be one of these people.
> My gut reaction here is that the burden of proof should be higher (ie an actual conviction) and that the sentencing in question was highly inappropriate from a social standpoint
It's just amazing to me how just alleging something by press release then withdrawing the allegation from the trial is enough to sentence somebody in the mind of the public. Just look at how people here are voting.
It's amazing to me how people can be pointed to literally where in a charging document you can find where the government actually included murder-for-hire as part of the charges against Ulbricht and yet "people here" can still manage to avoid seeing it...
Except presumption of innocence is supposed to be a cornerstone of the american justice system. Until that he hired a killer is proven in a criminal court, we all ought to refrain from making the assumption that such accusations in any way reflect the truth of the matter.
Indeed. This is an exemplary jail sentence: in theory it should be possible to create a perfect dark market, and there is nothing that the FBI can do about it, so they have to implant fear to try to reduce the amount of people who are willing to create the next SR...
I would say that theory would only stand if you lived in Russia, were politically connected, never left Russian territories, and never allowed any sales to CIS/Russian territories. Note the part about being politically connected because the Russian militsia (or w/e they are called these days) will simply be tipped off by the FBI to your whereabouts and go shake you down for hefty taxes. Even if two countries officially don't have any extradition or other MLAT type treaties doesn't mean there isn't low level negotiation between law enforcement, or straight up bribes by the FBI to have local PD shut you down. Maybe you could move to Crimea or Donetsk Republic and get NAF to be your personal bodyguards.
I think it's pretty much impossible to run that kind of a global darkmarket otherwise. Even if you were the world's most experienced sysadmin and could lock down your server(s) (and NSA/FBI httpd/nginx/apache 0day doesn't apply) you still have to worry about Bitcoin laundering and many other issues, you'd have to run around like Jason Bourne everyday and nobody can sustain that discipline without making mistakes. You only have to make one mistake and you're joining Ross at ADX Florence (where he's likely going, nobody convicted of the "Kingpin" charge ends up anywhere else besides supermax prisons)
I think that it might be possible to set up a dark market (and even then, it's unlikely). The problem is making money off of it. You have to spend the money somewhere, after all. And unlike cash, which is very difficult to trace, spending Bitcoins can be tracked. "Gee, the wallet that everyone pays money to is spending it on X, Y, and Z! I wonder whom that's for!"
That's not enough, because the blockchain contains the transaction history. It is possible to anonymize Bitcoins via Tor. You would anonymously create many wallets, and transfer through mixing services. Then, using https://blockchain.info/, you would check for taint among your adddresses.
However, that would not be so easy for hundreds or thousands of Bitcoins. It's hard for a snake to discreetly swallow a pig. Numerous wallets and small transactions would be prudent. But the process could probably be automated.
I don't see how your location could be relevant here: you are not selling/shipping products from your home, you are only operating an online marketplace. To make things easier: you aren't even making any profit from it, you are just doing it because you support the idea of a drug market or whatever, so there is no laundering.
It's still conspiracy to traffic narcotics and nobody in their right mind would do so without taking the money since life in prison is likely. Risk must equal reward, and I wouldn't trust any software to protect you from a nation state set on shutting you down. You need the protection of another nation state.
Instead of imprisoning for drug usage - provide treatment and rehab. It's cheaper and has better results. One could argue culture differences in drug usage, but that looks like an attempt to "knock it before you try it".
That's without going into how broken the US prison system is! See: privately owned prisons that require a quota to be filled [0].
There is a huge legal difference between getting caught doing drugs vs facilitating the trafficking of mass quantities of controlled substances. I don't think casual marijuana smokers should get all up in arms like "hey man they are just going after everybody now!", do they offer the same support to heroin cartels?
Even if you're against the war on drugs I don't think you should really take it as a personal slight when someone operating on this scale gets arrested. Unless you really 100% believe that distribution of heavy narcotics doesn't damage society.
If people are going to take drugs, somebody has to produce and distribute them. It doesn't make much sense to me that possession and consumption of drugs should be legal but manufacture and distribution shouldn't. Regulation would be nice, but the state is falling down on its duty there.
Please read the parent I responded to. Especially the closing statement.
>If drugs were legal and treatment of abuse the focus instead of punishment Silk Road wouldn't have existed in the first place.
I cited Portgual, a country where drugs are legal and the focus is on treatment of users. Giving an example of where such a system exists and works. The "war on drugs" is the wrong approach. I implied, rather indirectly, that prison quotas have a lot to do with keeping drug use illegal. It makes it easier to fill quotas.
Now then - the parent and my focus were both more on the users and the wrong approach for the "war on drugs". A response to me focused more on distribution and extrapolating the legal stance of Portugal. So I cited a Wikipedia page that was more specific and re-iterated that my focus (and the parent I responded to, by extention) were more focused on drug users and treatment doing more good than going on witch hunts for distributors.
Congratulations, you caught Ulbricht. Now what about all the other dealers that people will turn to? Especially local dealers who might lace their drugs or have improperly manufactured drugs (ie. containing arsenic) that may lead to more deaths of users?
I have no idea how the Silk Road worked, but I imagine dealers had accounts and received feedback. This meant there was some level of Social Quality Control over the drugs. Anyone selling faulty/laced drugs would be quickly rooted from the market. Providing a 'safer' place to buy, even if still illegal, does more good for the users than having to trust shady dealers.
This is very, very related to the war on drugs. It's a criticism of the policy of it all.
I'll quote myself from another post I made:
"Mistaking some delusional world of zero crime doesn't do any good for people living in reality."
Maybe the best long-term policy is drug decriminalization and treatment (etc), and maybe were that already the case, Ulbricht would not have been tempted into doing anything bad.
Nonetheless, that has no bearing on this case. Once somebody is dabbling in murder, they need to go down, because they are clearly not somebody we want in society. That they were "tempted" into it by potential profits enabled by misguided prohibitions is irrelevant.
So yeah, decriminalize drugs, focus on treatment, etc. Maybe that will make the future of our society brighter. But Ulbricht belongs behind bars.
I don't disagree with your points. I don't like the War on Drugs either. I think it is destructive.
Ulbricht was a legitimate kingpin who at least tried to have people killed. I don't have much sympathy for him and I'd rather distance his actions from real issues with the War on Drugs.
I still disagree that Portugal's policies regarding users is that relevant here. You are right in what you are saying, though.
> See: privately owned prisons that require a quota to be filled
That's not quite correct. The contracts do not require that a certain number of prisoners be kept in the prison. They require that a certain number be paid for. The contracts are essentially of the form that the state will pay $X to house up to Y prisoners, and $Z/prisoner for any prisoners beyond Y prisoners.
Since private prisons are only a small fraction of the prisons, the people that should be most annoyed by this are the employees of state run prisons. If crime goes down in a state and they want to close a prison to save money they most likely will make sure to fill the private prison first (since they are already paying for it) and cut staff at the state prisons.
(NOTE: this does NOT mean I'm saying private prisons are fine--just that contracts that guarantee a minimal payment regardless of occupancy are not necessarily bad. Private organizations tend to have less oversight than state run organizations, so it would not at all surprise me if the private prisons have staff that are not as well trained or as accountable as state prison staff. If I were setting up a prison system and it was going to allow private prisons, I'd probably require that the warden be appointed by and employed by and answer to the state, not the prison owner, and has the ability to fire private prison employees who are in jobs that involve direct interaction with the prisoners. I'd also require penalty clauses in the contracts that reduce payments if conditions are not at least as good as those required of state prisons.
It would be interesting to look at the strength of whatever public employee union represents state prison employees in each state, and see if there is a significant correlation between that and state use of private prisons. I'd expect weaker unions would increase the chances of private prisons.
So if someone opened a website in Portugal and sold illegal drugs, weapons and stolen financial data, that person would be looking at a few months of talk therapy?
Context of who I was responding and what they were saying is extremely important when reading. You should give it a try! Or do you enjoy making silly strawman attacks against things that were never said?
Try reading the parent I responded to once more - then my response. If it isn't clear how they correlate, focus especially on the closing sentences of the parent before reading my response to them. If still confused - press the "Panic!" button and I'll do my best to assist you.
E:
I see the "Panic!" button was pressed. Do you require assistance?
Drug policy and private prisons are completely irrelevant. This dude operated a massive organized criminal enterprise, and was willing to kill to protect it.
Frankly, whether he was selling stolen stereos, cocaine or moon rocks isn't really relevant in the eyes of the law.
Apparently you aren't - seeing as your original response to me had absolutely nothing to do with what I and the parent were talking about and instead was a strawman attack against things that were never said.
In addition to the murders for hire that the other commentators mentioned, the prosecution presented 6 case studies of people dying because of drug overdoses/other related effects of drugs bought on silk road. The prosecution also had two parents in two of these cases come to court to give a statement, one from Boston and one from Australia.
Weapons were on SR in the early days, but were removed with the launch of "The Armory", a weapons-specific site. That site didn't last long, and eventually died for lack of interest.
Well, it helps if you are sentenced for things you are convicted of then.
Because, even by the "Hang them by the neck until they are dead" gung-ho standards, you generally have to be convicted of something before being punished for it.
He was charged with murder-for-hire in a separate jurisdiction, and he hasn't faced trial for those charges yet. Today he was sentenced to life in prison for a number of victimless crimes.
He was also charged in a separate jurisdiction, yes, but murder-for-hire was actually a component of one of the charges he was accused of in this trial.
Either way enough relatives of deceased drug abusers testified at sentencing, and enough heartless chat logs of DPR's were introduced as evidence, to rather eviscerate the idea that Silk Road was completely "victimless".
> Either way enough relatives of deceased drug abusers testified at sentencing, and enough heartless chat logs of DPR's were introduced as evidence, to rather eviscerate the idea that Silk Road was completely "victimless".
By that logic relatives of deceased drunk-driving victims should be testifying against bars and liquor store proprietors as well.
I think while most expected this kind of outcome, the comments coming out in support are really a round-about kind of way of expressing various posters underlying opinion about U.S. drug laws and policies as ridiculous, draconian, counter-productive and harmful.
Or if you don't grep, you could just start from the beginning; the judge essentially leads off with the murder-for-hire subplot right from the beginning of her ruling.
As mentioned by dragonwriter, this murder-for-hire scheme was an overt act charged as part of Count One of the indictment (p5)
That is because a lot of people are simply ignoring the evidence available since they have an ideological stake in Ross's non-violence. The balance of probability here is that Ross intended to kill 6 people and fucked it up.
The evidence in question, Ross's journals and chat logs, were presented in trial and subject to rebuttal. He wasn't being tried for those crimes; those charges are still pending, but they were material to the case and the defense failed to dispute them. At the present moment, it is highly probable that he intended to have 6 people, including the innocent roomates of his targets, murdered.
While I also think this is excessive, within the context of the federal sentencing guidelines, this is a proportionate sentence. Because of the amount of drugs involved, along with enhancements for actual or threatened violence during the commission of the crimes and using a computer based "mass-marketing" model to distribute the drugs, the guidelines recommended a sentence of 30 years to Life. Given that there were only aggravating and no mitigating factors, it's easy to see how the judge arrived at life.
I don't believe the death penalty was ever a possibility, following Kennedy v. Louisiana ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Louisiana , "the power of the state to impose the death penalty against an individual for committing a crime that did not result in the death of the victim is now limited to crimes against the state (e.g. espionage, treason).")
The full quote was:
"Our concern here is limited to crimes against individual persons. We do not address, for example, crimes defining and punishing treason, espionage, terrorism, and drug kingpin activity, which are offenses against the State."
Surely drug traffickers in the USA are complicit with the US Government? They respond to one injustice (victimisation of users) by inflicting another injustice (drug cartel violence). They exploit the law to further their own interests at the expense of innocent bystanders. Yet you act like this guy is some activist who has never hurt anyone!
I agree that's it's simply too harsh. I share a bit of his Libertarian views, although as I've grown older I've realized that there's no way the Libertarian philosophy could ever form the paradise many of its practitioners describe.
The prosecution didn't make a very good case for the 5 deaths; a lot of missing information and they were using other drugs and had other health issues.
By "other health issues", you are might be referring "Jordan M", who was found cold to the touch with Silk Road open on his computer, a looped belt by his dangling arm, and an open express mail package full of heroin on his desk, who was found at autopsy to have died of intoxication by xanax, heroin, and valium --- all three of which he ordered on SR. The "other health issues" here are the fact that "Jordan M." was, as Ulbricht's lawyer described him in his sentencing memo, an "overweight 27-year old black man".
It's interesting to note that even if one of these overdose victims had health problems that predisposed them to overdose mortality --- something that is pretty far from being established --- there is actually a legal rule that contemplates this circumstance directly: google "the eggshell skull rule". The prosecution memo invokes the rule.
No, I was referring to Jordan M's other health problems which went well beyond 'overweight', to how the Australian teen had multiple drugs in his system, the lack of autopsy and other relevant documents, and to several other issues raised in Ulbricht's lawyer's original filing criticizing the health issues. I would pull it up out of PACER but I don't feel like spending $3+ again to go through the docket and find the full filing again.
tptacek, if you're going to act like an expert on this case, you should read all the documents, not just the indictment and one or two of the shorter things.
Jordan M. did in fact receive an autopsy, which confirmed he died of an overdose of drugs of the kind he ordered on Silk Road. The defense attempted to refute the autopsy using their own pathologist, who did not conduct an autopsy. The defense witness was an expert-witness-for-hire who resigned a position as Rockland County medical examiner under a cloud of accusations about incompetence.
Your suggestion that I read more of the documents in this case is rude, uncalled for by anything I said, and unproductive.
It is totally reasonable for you to be skeptical or even cynical of the prosecution's case.
It is not at all reasonable for you to demand that everyone else on this thread share exactly your perspective on the case, or to suggest that people who disagree with you must do so because they're uninformed --- an accusation I would not have considered making about you.
Edit: rereading your comment, just to make sure I wasn't out of line (I don't think I was): you don't need to go to PACER to get the Taff declaration (about all 6 pathology cases). All of these documents are available from a Google search, from DOJ, "FreeRoss", and Cryptome.
> The defense witness was an expert-witness-for-hire who resigned a position as Rockland County medical examiner under a cloud of accusations about incompetence.
That would be a good point if it were medical incompetence but the criticisms of Taff were that police did not like his management style and thought personnel arrived at scenes late because they lived outside the county, no? I didn't see anywhere that the prosecution brought this up, even though hearsay is allowed at this point.
> The defense attempted to refute the autopsy using their own pathologist, who did not conduct an autopsy.
He doesn't need to conduct an autopsy to point out problems in how things were done (waiting 4 days to do Wilsdon's autopsy? not doing an autopsy at all on Bridges?) or that the prosecution is straining to associate any death it can with and trying to ignore the long histories of poor health or multiple drug abuse and multiple drug sources.
> Jordan M. did in fact receive an autopsy, which confirmed he died of an overdose of drugs of the kind he ordered on Silk Road.
The Lewis affidavit says that the autopsy confirmed the presence of brain hemorrhage, liver problems (in addition to spleen), and that specifically, "the autopsy report correctly attributed death to multiple/combined drug intoxication. Heroin/opiate, however, was not singled out primary cause of death, and of course, for reasons unknown, the brain hemorrhage was ignored by the authorities conducting the investigation of Mr. Mettee’s death."; in addition, he had other drugs such as diazepam in his system which the prosecution does not claim he bought from SR.
> an accusation I would not have considered making about you.
Nor one I would make about you... about your area of expertise, as opposed to the DNMs.
> All of these documents are available from a Google search, from DOJ, "FreeRoss", and Cryptome.
Not all of them. They are all in RECAP, but that seems to be broken tonight and not allowing downloads of any of the Ulbricht filings.
I agree. In all likelihood, he'll be found guilty on the murder for hire, which is yet to be tried: give him 20 on the drug marketplace, since he'll likely get life on the murder for hire.
> When the court give out harsh punishment, they also de-incentivize the next person from limiting the scope to only drugs. [...] Why not hire or even sell hitmen, you can't get into more problem if they get you.
One of the factors in the life sentence was that evidence was presented in the trial that Ulbricht did not limit the scope of his enterprise "to only drugs", and that elements of the enterprise included trying to hire a hitman to eliminate problems.
So, I think that this case stands for exactly the opposite proposition than "hiring hitmen won't get you into more trouble than restricting your crime to just drugs".
That seems way too harsh to me. I have strong opinions on the US War on Drugs and it's failure to meaningful deal with drug use/abuse in the USA. And I feel even worse about how it's spilling out into the rest of the world as we go "global" with everything.
The US War on Drugs is ridiculously harmful and shortsighted, absolutely. But the sentencing is consistent with US policy, however wrong it is. People are getting two-figure sentences for carrying small amounts of drugs themselves. Someone who facilitates the selling of an illegal product on a much wider scale should not get a lighter sentence.
The whole concept behind the War on Drugs sucks, but this sentence is consistent. If it were a shorter sentence, then it'd be similar to the legal inconsistency around cocaine: the form wealthy white people tend to use (powder cocaine) is much less penalised than the form poor and minority people tend to use (crack cocaine), because...?
It's interesting. On one hand, if a leader of a traditional drug distribution network landed a life in prison sentence, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. With Silkroad though, I'm actually convinced by the defendants argument: that it provided safer, more trustworthy drugs to users.
I've had friends who've died from purchasing bad drugs at raves from people who were looking to make money and run. In one situation it ended up being rat poison. The guy had other drugs in his system, and combined with the poison his body went into shock. With darknet markets and independent lab testing networks, this type of thing doesn't happen.
People are still going to use drugs. I'd rather law enforcement go after the guys who are selling rat poison at raves than the guys who are setting up safe distribution networks.
An important thing to remember is that SR did NOT just sell drugs. They also sold hacking tools, identity theft kits, credit card fraud kits, and weapons.
It was not a harm-free marketplace. It was basically 'whichever criminal shit made him money' marketplace and drugs happened to top the list.
LOL @ getting down voted by Libertarians for a COMPLETELY TRUE statement that they wish wasn't true because it fucks up their bullshit narrative.
Though I agree with you about the "safer drugs" argument, Ross' site was the worst possible thing that could happen to the supporters of safe, anonymous marketplaces- The evidence that he was willing to use brutal mob-style violence to support his business has yet to be disputed by anyone in a credible way.
His mistake was shitty opsec - he should not have allowed any third parties into a position where they could extort him. However, after the fact, if you're facing someone threatening to imprison and destroy the lives of many vendors and patients, then what is the lesser evil? The extortionist choose to attempt to endanger people. You can't use the state. What other ethical choice is there?
I'm not saying this is the case for Ross, but it's a possibility, at least for one of the contracts. Using violence to protect innocents is not something bad. It's just unfortunate he created the situation in the first place - instead of an extortionist, he may have confided in a LEO, thus hurting his users. (Which is apparently what happened.)
Anyways, the big lesson is that when your startup has major security requirements, go slow and don't break things. There's no real reason he shouldn't be retired now, enjoying his life while enhancing others. Just technical incompetence.
Sorta. But one difference is that Silk Road wasn't out robbing or murdering anyone. So there's no justification in extorting it or informing on it. Where for a gang, an informant might be trying to overall save lives.
Another difference is scale. The extortionist that was after Ross was threatening to leak data on hundreds or thousands of innocent people. Do gangs usually find themselves in such situations?
If a gang is just selling drugs, not otherwise robbing or killing or hurting others, then I'm not very troubled by them killing extortionists, no. I just doubt that scenario makes up a notable portion of gang violence.
I'd be curious to know if there is really an "Agorism 101" type website that says it's preferable for a business owner to use murder as part of their business dealings, as opposed to relying on a central authority to enforce laws.
It's clearly less efficient for all involved, so it's obviously not "preferable". The problem is that all the usual avenues of justice are unavailable.
Basically the argument of the deleted argument was that it's OK to murder people as part of your business dealings if you are operating outside of a traditional legal structure.
Given that he was creating jurisdiction from scratch, it makes sense to compare him to other such entities. USG, for example, will often murder people (overt wars and covert actions) for them simply not wanting to do business.
Harm reduction is a reasonable argument for a Country to make for changing its drug policies, or for a person to make in an effort to advocate for a change to a Country's laws.
It is not a reasonable argument for an individual to make to try to justify their illegal get-rich scheme.
If the law is hurting people, and breaking the law helps people, it's completely reasonable to use that argument to morally justify your illegal behavior. I'd be interested to hear your argument why it is not.
Edit: Though to be clear that wouldn't work to justify all your illegal behavior, if that included like hypothetically trying to have someone killed.
I'd agree that lawbreaking is a reasonable moral choice, but not in this case. Moral lawbreaking, in my view, is done when there is a clear benefit or reason to the lawbreaking. And by clear I mean clear to a reasonable and moral person, and not just a speculative personal opinion.
Given that frame of reference, I would argue that (1) the notion that online drug dealing would lead to harm reduction for a drug addict is speculative rather than clear; (2) the harm caused by improved access to hard drugs by more potential addicts would be tremendous and therefore likely exceed any potential harm reduction; (3) given Ulbrict's apparent willingness to hire hitmen, I find it impossible to believe he was in any way motivated by concern for others.
So then, you don't believe that harm reduction doesn't justify illegal activity, you just think what Silk Road specifically did doesn't qualify as "harm reduction"?
That's fine; I disagree, but I'm not interested in litigating it here. But your original parent actually was arguing along those lines, cf. "rat poison" et cetera, so perhaps you'd like to retroactively not reject that as "not a reasonable argument".
In the original, "not a reasonable argument" was specific to this instance. I try to avoid generalizations as one can almost always manage to find a corner case exception.
Whether true or not, the intention behind drug laws is physical harm and addiction. Additional harms like risk of violence or overdoses due to impurities are secondary at best.
Unless there's judicial activism going on, making that admission is pretty much just handing the keys to freedom over. Why even bother with a trial? Should have done a plea bargain.
Maybe I've watched Scarface one too many times, but I think the reason leaders of traditional drug distribution networks get life sentences is because they frequently resort to brutally violent means of running and defending their drug operations. Because they hold the supply of drugs rather than simply being a two-sided marketplace like the Silk Road, they have to physically defend that supply and the locations which house it (from rival organizations, the Police, etc). In a way, not only were the drugs being sold on the Silk Road safer, but the process of selling drugs was probably safer.
EDIT: This argument would probably hold up a lot better if Ulbricht hadn't tried to have people killed. sigh
With darknet markets and independent lab testing networks, this type of thing doesn't happen.
I agree that darknet markets are safer than traditional drug markets, but the poisoning risks can still apply. There was recently a huge flux of PMA being distributed as molly on Agora and other markets from sellers who have known to be reputable in the past. If you know anyone that is purchasing this stuff, encourage them to always test it themselves before using.
Well, I'm glad you're convinced, because I'm certainly not nor does it appear that the judge was either.
"Forrest rejected arguments that Silk Road had reduced harm among drug users by taking illegal activities off the street. “No drug dealer from the Bronx has ever made this argument to the court. It’s a privileged argument and it’s an argument made by one of the privileged,” she said"
No drug dealer from the Bronx was reviewed by buyers for all to see before making a deal with them. Arguably, a dealer from the Bronx would be on the streets so couldn't make that defense in the first place... so the comparison doesn't hold up.
>It’s a privileged argument and it’s an argument made by one of the privileged
I'm unsure what this is even supposed to mean. I tried searching for a definition of "privileged argument" and found nothing. My search phrase was:
>“Silk Road created [users] who hadn’t tried drugs before,” Forrest said, adding that Silk Road “expands the market” and places demand on drug-producing (and violent) areas in Afghanistan and Mexico that grow the poppies used for heroin.
>“The idea that it is harm-reducing is so narrow, and aimed at such a privileged group of people who are using drugs in the privacy of their own homes using their personal internet connections”, she said.
Through its drug market Silk Road incentivized (horrific) drug violence across the US and other countries. The best you could say is that they had no effect on it.
The privilege criticism is that Ulbricht wants leniency despite the overall harm reduction being marginal. It might have been safer for him and for the dealers, but not significantly for any other group.
I think she meant that we're used to having our drug dealers dark skinned and underprivileged from the Bronx, and it would be much easier to deal with according to precedence if we kept it that way. A sophisticated (though not enough, as it turns out) technological attempt to subvert the status quo is inconceivable.
The sellers aren't anonymous, they have identities and buyers select sellers based on their reputations. There is a power law distribution in sales with reputable sellers capturing a large part of the market.
Hard drugs are one of those things that have different consequences for different types of people.
An intelligent, wealthy, employable person can dabble with them, have a good time, and usually get away with it. Should they get addicted and screw up their lives, they can usually get help and bounce back without permanent consequences.
People who're a little less well-off intellectually and economically aren't so resilient. Should they get addicted to hard drugs and screw up their lives, they usually don't bounce back from it - their lives are ruined forever.
Since HN is full of intelligent, wealthy, employable people, the comments on this thread don't surprise me a bit. And yes, I agree that drug policy in the United States could stand to be reformed a little. But when evaluating the harm a person's actions can cause to society, I wish people would think a little more about not just themselves, but that vast chunk of society that's not lucky enough to not be as privileged as we are.
This isn't just about the effects of addictive drugs. I think most people agree they can be devastating to people and families. The trouble is that you seem to be suggesting that US drug policy in any way helps people and families affected by addictive drugs. I can't look at the war on drugs and see any remotely feasible interpretation where it's helping people affected by addictive drugs.
For me, it doesn't seem like a massive logical leap to suggest that shutting down a particularly convenient and unique part of the supply chain will have an effect on consumption and therefore the negative effects of consumption. Shutting down The Silk Road isn't quite the same thing as arresting the corner dealer.
Aside from that - let's posit that Ross Ulbricht's arrest and punishment and the shutdown of The Silk Road doesn't impact consumption and the consequent negative effects at all. I've still got no real moral qualms about punishing someone who enriches themselves off so much harm to others. Yes, there are many people in this world who do equivalent harm that we don't punish, and that's unfortunate, but that doesn't change the rightness of Ross's punishment one bit.
> it doesn't seem like a massive logical leap to suggest that shutting down a particularly convenient and unique part of the supply chain will have an effect on consumption and therefore the negative effects of consumption.
It seems quite likely that Silk Road was one of the safest ways to acquire these drugs. It seems likely to me that shutting down Silk Road would have two effects: reducing consumption by casual (non-addicted) recreational users who will not bother with less convenient and safe sources, and driving addicted users to less convenient and safe sources. You might argue that the first effect is slightly beneficial, but I think it is far outweighed by the harmfulness of the second effect.
> I've still got no real moral qualms about punishing someone who enriches themselves off so much harm to others.
This is just another way to rephrase the claim that Silk Road did net harm to others, which we were just debating.
I agree with your overall point, but you're forgetting a third effect: preventing non-current-drug users scared of more conventional venues, but not by Silk Road (which, as you point out, is comparatively convenient and safe), from buying drugs from there (and then possibly developing an addiction). I don't know how large a segment of the population that might be, but addictions have to start somewhere.
The overwhelming majority of opiates that kids begin experimenting with are found from professional chemists, with testing requirements on purity -- and are safely packaged in their parents' or friends' parents' cabinets.
Spending the money on the Silk Road trial on ads talking about how addictive and dangerous stuff from the pharmacy can be -- even more so than stuff on the street -- and that you need to be careful experimenting with medicines would likely do more to keep people safe from opiates than shutting down Silk Road.
(There's a similar argument to be made about stimulants and ADD/ADHD meds.)
Really, the only things that people can find on Silk Road which doesn't have a ready medical analog that's abused by people all the time is marijuana and hallucinogens -- the drugs on the safest end of the spectrum.
If your conjecture is true, and Silk Road gets people out of their pill cabinet on to safer things to experiment with, then it's actually making people safer to let them explore like that.
The problem with these debates is that drug policy involves a complex network of different pieces that are interlinked, and what seems like a straight forward solution to one issue actually ends up backfiring when the effects move through the network.
I am curious what people think a fair sentence would be, given the sheer amount of drugs sold on SR. Selling over a pound of weed here in NYC will cost you 15 years, which for most people would be about 1/6th of their life.
Also, I am interested with the number of people saying he didn't actually do anything that wrong. I wonder if they are saying the same thing petty drug offenders. Maybe people do but they don't vocalize it, but I think if we saw this kind of empathy for all non-violent drug dealers, things would look very different here in the US.
This kind of rationalizations may ruin your entire life one day. You cannot and do not know where will any experimentation with drugs bring you to.
Remember that the first step of the twelve steps is "admitting that one cannot control one's alcoholism, addiction or compulsion". Finding reasons why you are more privileged than others makes this step even harder.
One thing that should be kept in mind is that not all drugs are the same thing. The "drugs are bad" or "drugs are good" discourse breaks down fast, simply because they are gross generalisations.
For example: nicotine is much more addictive (has to do with the speed with which tolerance for a substance is increased) than, say, THC. Which is yet again different from LSD. There are a whole host of factors, and a spectrum of "how dangerous $DRUG is".
(disclosure: it's my pet peeve when people make lump statements about "all drugs")
You are right about the addictiveness of nicotine. Also, alcohol is a really nasty one - withdrawal can be lethal in some cases. Even heroin does not do that.
I recommend you reading about the delta FOSB protein. There is promising research towards unifying all, or almost all, addictions with a single, coherent theory. In this light, drugs are really beginning to look very similar to one another.
I guess this depends on your definition of "100% safely", and probably also on your definition of "drugs". Let's assume that "drugs" means "psychoactive drugs". In that case, I'd suggest that you can take a cup of coffee pretty much as close to 100% safely as is achievable for anything in the world that you can ingest. And coffee is psychoactive. So, it is possible to take drugs 100% safely.
Even alcohol can be taken safely: so long as you keep the dose low, and you're not someone with a special sensitivity to it (e.g. an alcoholic), you can have a glass of red wine with pretty much zero chance of anything bad happening.
That also applies to all the other psychoactive drugs in between: speed, cocaine, LSD, heroin, mushrooms, peyote, MDMA, whatever. They can all be taken 100% safely. The key in all cases is always the same: good education and moderation.
All of these drugs can also be abused. You can kill yourself with caffeine too (though unlikely in coffee form - you'd need about 50-100 espresso shots). I recall a story of someone who ate a whole pack of caffeinated candy, thinking it was normal candy, and died.
Shit happens.
Shit happens more often without good research, education and clear guidelines.
Shit happens even more often without good research, education and clear guidelines, and with dodgy suppliers who may or may not be selling you the thing you think you're buying because they're all criminals.
The real culprit in every drug death? The three branches of the government, who have failed to do the right thing on this topic for 50+ years now.
There's some kind of phrasing problem when you exclude a sensitive group of people in order to state that something is 100% safe.
I think that"100% safe" is an exaggeration intended to emphasize that the risk is manageable and it would be more polite to simply state that many substances can be ingested with minimal risk.
Fooling yourself about safety. There's more to it than moderation and education. Look in the news for evidence: how many deaths related to meth overdoses, vs caffeine overdoses.
More powerful psychoactives can make education and moderation moot. Then the addictive qualities can drive the user down a well-trodden road. Ignore this at your peril.
The amount of prescription opioids being sold in the US is insane, this is my opinion on the subject. It cannot end well in the long run.
There are already millions of Americans that started their opioid adventure with oxycodone or hydrocodone, often coming from the "upper spheres". Addiction does not discriminate. Changing the name from amphetamine to Adderal will not give you more control over your addiction. You will have none, regardless of your income level.
You are right about the safety level though, this is about potential short-term complications. Prescription stuff is not contaminated, a doctor can give you some good advice, or a vial of emergency Naloxone.
If you have a decent income, it is possible to live with a oxycodone addiction. You know that the substance is free of adulterants and is consistently dosed. Pure oxycodone should have limited side effects.
However, if you are not in such a good financial position, a heroin addiction will almost certainly ruin your life. From the financial burden of the substance itself, to side effects from adulterants and the impredictability of a dose, you roll the dice every time you shoot up.
I'm not convinced that heroin ruins your life only because the dose is unpredictable. There's much more to it than that. Lets not pretend a heroin addiction could be a safe and normal way to live.
I was given the impression that all therapy for addiction has a pretty poor record. If there was something that actually got good results, everyone would be using it. Unfortunately, brains are complicated, and everyone's brain is different.
I'm not an expert here actually; do you know what could be considered a more reliable program? I find addictions very interesting, especially given the discovery of the FOSB protein.
Anecdotally, there are many compounds/experiences that seem to be highly effective (even to the point of eliminating withdrawl symptoms): cannabis, ayhuasca/DMT, ibogaine, and other psychedelics.
I have not experienced it personally, nor do I personally know anyone who has experienced it.
I do personally know someone whom personally knows others who have directly experienced (high dose cannabis edibles for alcohol addiction). There are many claimed first, second, and third hand reports out on the Internet. There are also quite a few professional documentaries about the topic, many amatuer videos (directly capturing the experience and the people involved). I have also come across some peer reviewed literature as well.
I don't maintain a list of such reports and can't look for them at the moment, but they shouldn't be too difficult to find if you are interested.
It is not 100% effective. Some will definitly not change their behavior much, even though they claimed to want to.
So let's get this straight for the justice system:
1. misleading the American public into going to a series of costly wars through lies about WMDs -> not punishable
2. Weakening Glass-Stegal and encouraging questionable and irresponsible risk-taking at major banking institutions -> not punishable
3. Fraudulent evaluation of risk-ratings by trusted agencies for the sake of profit leading to worst financial disaster since great depression -> not punishable, actually, rewarded with billions in bail-out by tax payers
4. setting up and running a website to host underground drug trade with bitcoins -> punishable by life-sentence
Not that what Ulbricht did was right or that he shouldn't be punished... but his biggest problem was that his business didn't generate enough profit at the expense of the public. Justice might be blind, but even she can still smell money.
0. Torturing civilians - including torturing some to DEATH, aka murder - in a futile attempt to emotionally lash out at people who may have been involved in 9/11
... even though it was well know torture does not produce useful intelligence
... and having ratified (in 1994) the Convention Against torture which includes a duty to prosecute or extradite
... and 18 U.S. Code § 2340A being amended by the "PATRIOT Act" - before the torture occured - to include clause (c) which allows charges and all punishments (except death) to include anyone who conspires to comit torture
-> not even an attempt to prosecute
/* is there a clearer, more obvious way to demonstrate how the US no longer cares about the "rule of law"? perhaps, but I can't think of anything that would top what the CIA has already done /
/* before anybody replies with idiotic claims that somehow it is ok to torture foreigners with claims relating to jurisdictional boundaries, I suggest actually read 18 U.S. Code § 2340A (b) */
1. There is no evidence to support purposeful lying about WMDs. Bush admin rushed the intelligence agency and relied on Yes Men to build their story. I'm sure there was some law breaking going on but good luck identifying who what and when.
2. Glass Stegal wouldn't have prevented shit. In fact the combination banks Glass Stegal would have prevented--BoA and Chase--were the banks who were strong enough to absorb the shitty failed banks--merill and lehman--that were often just investment banks.
Taking irresponsible risks isn't a crime either.
3) No evidence of fraud. These agencies trusted the financial models and those models didn't work.
Fuckups aren't punished in our society the way intentional law breaking is.
Should be guillotine every founder whose company fails?
Maybe a better example is the tobacco companies. They were convicted of a 50 year conspiracy to mislead the public about the health dangers of smoking, an activity that has led to trillions of dollars in health care costs and the deaths of literally millions of people in that span (in the US alone). No one went to jail for this...the companies "just" had to pay a $200 billion dollar fine (global annual tobacco sales revenue is estimated at $500 billion).
> I'm sure there was some law breaking going on but good luck identifying who what and when.
Not meaning to go off on a political tangent, but it seems to me like there was a conscious effort not to ask such questions in an official capacity.
Imagine an alternate universe where we had Watergate-style hearings when Pelosi/Reid took over in 2007, or when the Obama administration started in 2009. In some circles, some people wanted that, and I think rightly or wrongly politicians decided it was not worth it. Easy to forget now, but it was certainly in political discourse 6 to 9 years ago.
> Should be guillotine every founder whose company fails?
Guillotine, probably not, but I'm okay with punishing every "founder" of a "company" that errantly spends billions of tax dollars on weaponry and uses it to kill tens of thousands of innocent people.
I would change "not punishable" to "not punished". Sure you could be punished for all those things, but there just isnt enough political will to do so. Ulbricht's error was being a criminal whose punishment affects nobody in power.
> 1. misleading the American public into going to a series of costly wars through lies about WMDs -> not punishable
Debatable. The justice system hasn't found that, no charges have been filed within the justice system over them.
> Weakening Glass-Stegal and encouraging questionable and irresponsible risk-taking at major banking institutions -> not punishable
While again this is untested directly, the legislative privilege in the Constitution makes this pretty clearly not punishable through the justice system. The punishment that can be dealt out for this is at the ballot box, not through the justice system.
You're comparing facts: "Ulbricht ran The Silk Road," with your own conjecture: "Banks encouraged 'questionable' risk taking." You're making a lot of extraordinary claims that are very very difficult to prove with no evidence to back them up.
And you're using this conjecture as evidence of... something? You don't really make a point. You just repeat popular internet tropes.
There's plenty of evidence that banks intentionally mislead consumers through predatory lending schemes, signing them for (and misrepresenting the terms of) loans that they knew that the borrower would not be able to pay back. They did so under the explicit premise that the bad mortgages would be lumped in with other investment products and then sold off.
A lot of people were defrauded. The economy is still trying to recover. I don't think people who lost homes or are struggling to find work and make ends meet would consider any of this to be an internet trope.
I think the deeper point is that people feel there's a disconnect from the perceived damage an action incurs and the punishment assigned to it. Rightly or wrongly that's how people feel, and what is the law for in the end?
It's called "Rule Of Law". Why the hell should anybody else bother respecting the law, when it is patently clear that the law as written is not actually what the "law" that is used.
When people that have clearly violated the law - like certain people in the CIA, for example - are not even prosecuted, it is hard agree with people that think it is "just" to give someone life in prison for allegedly committing as far lesser crime.
At worst, Ross Ulbricht is accused of an attempted conspiracy of murder. People in the CIA actually killed people, in ways that are always illegal.
That's the basis of the war on drugs. If it were about health soft drinks, cigarettes, junk food, and hard liquor would be treated like narcotics. If it were about preventing addiction, casinos would not be allowed to use cognitive neuroscience to optimize slot machines.
America, for all its prattle about freedom and individualism, is like most other societies an authoritarian collectivist state. Freedom is just a symbol, not a real thing.
You are allowed freedom within certain domains as long as you don't do anything too challenging to the "social fabric." If you do, a whole host both legal and quasi-legal options are deployed against you. Search for "cointelpro" for a good historical example. If you can't be legally prosecuted, you'll be quasi-legally or even illegally harassed and persecuted.
Alcohol is far worse than many illegal drugs, but it's legal because "normal" people use it. You can't make being a hippie illegal, but you can intensely prosecute certain things that hippies do. You can't make being black illegal, but you can do the same there -- crack and cocaine are exactly the same chemical, but crack carries a harsher sentence because minorities use it while rich white people largely use cocaine.
The reason a lot of this coalesced around drugs is that the constitution has nothing to say in that department. You can't ban religions, or speech, or styles of dress, but there's nothing in there about a right to sovereignty over your body, and the regulation of trade is explicitly permitted. So drugs, being something that correlates with certain cultures, serves as a wide open legal vehicle for attacking minority populations.
> did they see a cliff of less ODs / deaths in hospitals?
If they didn't, wouldn't necessarily show anything. BMR and Sheep began picking up the drug sales slack immediately, and were around because SR1 had proven the business model worked fantastically well.
Exactly. If anything, Silk Road seems to have made both acquiring and taking drugs safer. Prohibition doesn't work, so why not take steps to make the things people are going to do anyway safer, especially when they can only injure themselves?
Murderers get less than that. We are truly an interesting society, aren't we - somehow kids doing LSD, a mostly harmless substance, is causing us more harm, as a society, than, say, violence?
Yes, the Pickard bust[0] was an interesting example of this. A highly productive, extremely smart and insightful researcher was given two(!) life sentences(something even most violent criminals, rapists and murderers don't get) at a high security prison. His crime was manufacturing LSD, which has no recorded overdoses, is not addictive, and reports of it harming users are extremely rare. Here[1] is a brief account of his heartbreaking story, and here[2] is more information about him, also containing links to recent papers that he published.
I suspect that law enforcement's embarrassment over how long it took them to find him also had something to do with it. The equivalent of running from the police in a foot chase, they're going to punish you for it.
A few years ago, David Nutt and other drug experts rated the relative harms of drugs and found LSD was among the least harmful.
These were the evaluation criteria: drug-specific and drug-related mortality, drug-specific and drug-related damage, dependence, drug-specific and drug-related impairment of mental functioning, loss of tangibles, loss of relationships, injury, crime, environmental damage, family adversities, international damage, economic cost, and community harm.
I read the _Illuminatus!_ trilogy, and wondered if AUM could possibly be made real from a combination of already-known drugs. Following my curiosity taught me a great deal about natural and synthetic psychoactive drugs, and some of what I learned was not completely bogus.
As a result of my "research", LSD remains one of the few recreational drugs that I might ever consider trying in the future, given the correct circumstances.
It is certainly less harmful than nicotine, ethanol, and acetaminophen. But now that marijuana is legal in some states, I expect that it will soon displace LSD-25 as the least harmful recreational drug that I know about.
If you are also curious, my conclusion was that LSD-25 is probably present in AUM at a psychoactive, but non-hallucinogenic, dose, mostly as an adjuvant for the other ingredients. It would help bridge the gap between a drug known to have powerful, positive, short-term effects and one known to cause long-term but very unpredictable changes in behavior.
Well yes, you are right. But just the fact that something is difficult to overdose does not imply long-term safety of use. And as far as I know there are know connections between certain psychiatric issues and LSD usage. This is why I do not believe that "LSD is basically harmless".
It is harmless compared to many other substances, including aspirin and acetaminophen. Pretty much everything when taken in excessive quantities is harmful.
You're an idiot. Flashbacks are not a real thing. Pretty much every negative effect of LSD is exaggerated or based on biased reports by the government to justify making anything that gets you high illegal. An LSD 'flashback' is more like deja vu, like "Wow this is really similar to something I've experienced before", not like you just randomly go back into a full on trip. If you're schizophrenic you probably shouldn't take LSD, sure. But if you have heart palpitations you probably shouldn't drink Red Bull. People should be responsible for their own decisions, not you or the government or anyone else.
An idiot is "an intellectually disabled person, or someone who acts in a self-defeating or significantly counterproductive way". Does not seem to fit the definition.
How nice of the government to protect me from the minute possibility that a bad acid trip will give me PTSD. If only they cared as much about all the young kids they send over to the Middle East.
He wasn't distinctly charged with it, but according to the document tptacek linked earlier (https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1391...), the attempted murders for hire were considered to be an element of the criminal enterprise and conspiracy he was running. He was convicted of those charges, so as far as I can tell, he was convicted of something like that.
Drug dealers tend to handle the drugs they are convicted of selling.
Whilst I agree he deliberately set up a website designed for use for criminal transactions, I find it ridiculous that everyone (including the courts) would rather focus on people buying drugs online (if that was their big thing, then many of the major early newsgroup operators would be in prison for life, for having not even concealed names for newsgroups deliberately designed for buying and selling drugs), than on the selling of stolen credit cards and other identity theft sales.
Sure, drugs are bad m'kay, and we have to stomp on people who use, buy and sell them or something, but, how many lives are destroyed by identity theft?
Or do the courts think that is too complicated for people to understand, whilst the "He let drugs be sold on his website" is something even Fox News can communicate.
edit: this is something that vice news [0] reported that is apparently wrong.
> But despite these setbacks, Ulbricht was ultimately convicted in February on a raft of charges, including drug trafficking, computer hacking, money laundering, and hiring assassins to take out members of Silk Road.
No, he wasn't. He was never even charged with that; the story of one attempt to hire a hitman was admitted into the trial as evidence that he was running the Silk Road and knew what he was doing, but that was never one of the actual charges against him.
The prosecution sentencing memo rebuts this argument, pointing out that Ulbricht's attempts to procure murder for hire were explicit factual components of one of the charges he faced.
Ulbricht's argument to the effect that he wasn't properly charged with the murder-for-hire scheme was addressed in detail by the court:
> The prosecution sentencing memo rebuts this argument, pointing out that Ulbricht's attempts to procure murder for hire were explicit factual components of one of the charges he faced.
The prosecution memo does not rebut this argument, it rebuts instead the clearly different but related argument that the murder-for-hire scheme was uncharged conduct which could therefore not be considered in sentencing. It was -- as they correctly point out -- charged, as it was one of the overt acts specifically laid out in the Count One narcotics trafficking conspiracy charge.
It is nevertheless inaccurate to say he was convicted of hiring a hitman, since a conspiracy conviction requires (as far as overt acts go) only a finding that the defendant committed at least one overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy, there were several overt acts charged in that count, and the verdict form did not direct the jury to return separate findings of fact on each charged overt act.
I'm certainly not saying he was convicted of hiring a hit man. He was convicted of a conspiracy to traffic narcotics, one overt act of which was the attempt to procure a murder for hire.
The argument I'm challenging is the notion that the factual claim of Ulbricht's attempt to hire a hitman wasn't subjected to scrutiny during the trial. It was a specifically introduced factual claim, which Ulbricht's counsel was required to rebut.
That court opinion describes a list of alleged chats that the Feds planned to introduce as evidence. It does not say the court accepted that evidence as true in the form of a finding of fact. (Put another way, that document does not say what you says it does, and we all know there are two sides to every story.)
It seems to me that if the Feds were confident about their murder-for-hire claim, they would have charged Ulbricht accordingly. That they chose not to do so indicates they were less than confident, and we should draw our conclusions accordingly.
For all I know he may well have been involved in murder for hire; I haven't paid close enough attention to the case to have an opinion. But I've followed too many hacker cases to accept unrebutted DOJ allegations as gospel truth.
This is not quite true. While he was not charged in this trial with the most obvious offense that would flow from that (e.g., attempted murder, etc.), this was specifically charged as one of the overt acts of one of the conspiracy charges he was convicted of. But it wasn't the only overt act charged, and the guilty verdict doesn't include a finding on the individual overt acts charged separately. So, its not accurate to say he was convicted of hiring a hitman.
If by "proof" you mean "evidence", there are journal entries from DPR's laptop describing the attempted killings, records of messages between him and the would-be killer, and Bitcoin transaction records of the sizable payments involved. It certainly wasn't invented by the media.
The fact that he explicitly paid for the murder and torture of former employees and their roommates is enough for me to feel like life in prison is fair. Yes, an actual murder is a worse outcome than a murder-for-hire that never materialized, but if you're a rich and sophisticated drug-kingpin attempting to commission torture and murder to secure your criminal enterprise, the punishment should be the most severe. Murder is always a heinous crime, but in my view, it is more heinous to direct an organization that systematically orchestrates torture and murder for profit.
It's also a case where I don't think the fact the hitmen were part of a sting would vindicate him. I can understand the argument you were pressured into buying drugs. But actually paying money to have someone murdered? That would pass a moral barrier most people have. You can't use the fact it's a sting as an opt-out there.
Murder is terrible, sure. But if it was to save thousands of innocent vendors and customers, then perhaps it's justified. The government does exactly that every day. It's Ross's fault he allowed anyone into that position in the first place. But an extortionist was directly trying to ruin the lives of many people. It's not entirely different than shooting an intruder in your house.
The dual solicitations of murder put him well off the list of people I will ever have any sympathy for. Having said that, he's 31 and reading "two life sentences" and "no chance of parole," was a little bit of a shock. He didn't actually kill anyone and I would guess some actual murderers have served less time. I can't help but feel this is mostly meant as a warning to any other smart guy who might think about setting up a black market.
I'm very against making examples of people. Justice should be dealt entirely equally. Punishing one person more harshly as a warning to hypothetical criminals with a like mind is an unequal application of justice.
I didn't know he had solicited murder (it's not mentioned in the short article linked) so I was wondering what made a glorified drug dealer middleman deserve life in prison.
I didn't know he had solicited murder (it's not mentioned in the short article linked) so I was wondering what made a glorified drug dealer middleman deserve life in prison.
But the thing is: he wasn't even convicted for that!
Yes, but he can still be convicted for that in Maryland, right? So massively inflating this sentence due to the murder-for-hire allegations sounds like potentially convicting him twice for the same crime.
> and that at least six deaths were attributable to drugs bought on the site. The government recommended a sentence “substantially above” the 20-year minimum.
Man, that is a bit of a mental stretch to blame drug ODs on the runner of a forum. He did not make the drugs, sell the drugs, or transfer the drugs, but the prosecutors faulted him in the OD of people who used those drugs?
I think the sentence is obscene. I doubt my teachers growing up, who would shriek "just say no!" at school assemblies, feel the same way. I imagine they find the idea of little Johnny being able to buy meth over the Internet terrifying. Guess who votes. It's like stoning people for adultery in the Middle East. You have to really figure out why people consider drug use such an existential threat to the community to figure out why they suoport such harsh enforcement of these laws.
tptacek's comment [1] makes a convincing argument that Ross's attempts to hire a hitman were a legitimate factor in his sentencing. If so, then a life sentence seems quite fair based on what I've read.
No surprises there. The libertarian defense is hard to hold once fat stashes of cash and murder come in to play: the US certainly did a good and legally questionable job on public character assassination prior to the sentencing!
That said, one can't help but wonder if perhaps the movement in which characters as diverse as Assange, Dotcom, Snowden, ThePirateBay and Ulbricht can be placed is too powerful to snub out with mere regulatory reactionism... particularly given the economic state of much of the educated world and the imminent environmental challenges we face as a planet.
If there's one thing that the study of complex systems teach us, it's that there is strength in heterogeneity. Perhaps it's time for America to change its tune and stop pressuring countries worldwide to overpolice their populations in myriad ways (drugs, internet piracy, IP laws). May we live to see more enlightened times, progressive approaches to state-sponsored social remediation, and less of this nationalism "my way or the highway" / "with us or against us" claptrap that Einstein so eloquently summarized: Nationalism is an infantile disease: the measles of mankind.
The guy who ran "The Farmer's Market" AKA Adam's Flowers who was pre Silk Road and busted during Operation Adam Bomb was only given 10yrs for hustling MDMA/Acid/weed, and ran an impressive smuggling operation where he had US resellers pick up ocean freight shipments, and his plea has him serving time in a Netherlands prison.
The difference is he didn't make his black market political, which unfortunately Ross did. He also didn't try to kill anybody which although thrown out was still referenced by the sentencing judge. Still no word on what happened to the guy who was running SR 2.0 who worked for SpaceX and was busted.
I remember people peddling drugs on MindVox forums when Lord Digital ran it back in the day none of this is new except for Ulbricht trying to market his biz as a revolution. Online drug sales will continue regardless of this sentence.
No part of the allegation that Ulbricht commissioned a murder appears to have been "thrown out"; that accusation was a formal predicate (the second listed "overt act") of the conspiracy charge for which he was convicted.
Can someone help me understand why people keep suggesting that this murder-for-hire allegation was dropped? That does not at all seem to be the case.
Let's just ruin a mans life so maybe we'll deter %.0000001 of a billion dollar drug industry. Why does the United States continue with this nonsense "War on Drugs"? Could it have anything to do with the for profit prison system? Giant militarized police force? Booming civil asset forfeiture?
For a country that prides itself on freedom and fairness, why create a system that punishes for doing what they want with their body? What if we spent the billions we do now on a failed drug war for education, addiction treatment, mental health, job training? Why ban certain drugs and allow alcohol and cigarettes that have just as addictive properties and kills just as many people?
SR sold drugs, yes. It also sold identity theft kits, credit card fraud kits, hacking tools, and other gear that is meant to harm others through coercion.
Fuck Russ, and fuck you for repeating the lie that SR was nothing but drugs.
And more importantly, the guy tried to have people killed.
This is not a good prompt for a "war on drugs is evil" rant. I sympathize with the position, but using somebody as an example of supposed injustice, when a big part of his punishment is because he hired hitmen (plural!), is not going to make your point look at all good.
And the alleging being done by someone who is himself in quite a bit of legal trouble for stealing from Silk Road and embezzling bitcoin during the course of his official duties.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
It's not right, its not fair, and until the judicial industrial complex (private prisons, police forces & civil forfeiture used for revenue instead of proper tax increases) is dismantled, we'll continue to see these sorts of travesties.
We have a lot of cruft to cut from the US legal system.
“I strongly believe that my son would be here today if Ross Ulbricht had not created Silk Road,” said the man, who was identified in court only as Richard.
Such an ignorant comment it doesn't even deserve to be commented.
The court docs were taken down since Ulbricht's attorney messed up and uploaded unredacted versions, but if that's the guy I think it is;
His son had started abusing benzos but wanted to try heroin -- he bought some H on the Silk Road and then ODed after trying it once. When they found his body, the computer was literally open to the Silk Road page..
(There were 6 deaths detailed in the sentencing guidelines, so my recounting may be slightly off, but feel free to exchange this one for the 16-year old kid who bought LSD on the SR, had a terrible trip, then jumped to his death off of a balcony)
Making dangerous drugs vastly easier to purchase by those who had no previous source for them isn't harmless.
You can buy heroin everywhere. It's his job, as a father, to educate his son about drugs and other addictive substances. Blaming Silk Road is lying to yourself, but some people lack autocriticism and like blaming other people. In fact, I bet what they sold on Silk Road was of higher quality than what they sell on the streets.
The more I read about the war on drugs, the sadder I become. I used to be one of those that wanted to leave everything as it is today, and I've changed my mind.
I'd say that people have the right to partake in whatever mind altering substances they'd like even if 95% of others disagree. Your appeal to democratic collectivism is fallacious.
The rule of law and courts were supposed to protect such minorities (ie drug legalization through generalized privacy of Roe v Wade, and trade via the right to free speech). It's pretty fucked up that the legal system has rotted so thoroughly that the courts are harshly persecuting them while the majority of interested people dissent.
Then again, much of that rot is due to the "war on drugs" and its underlying philosophy that people exist to serve their government.
Unless you live in a jurisdiction where the purchase of narcotics is legal (Mars?) the meaning of "People have a right to buy drugs" is quite clear.
In a world where the laws you invoke are responsible for so much suffering and death, to come in with a "Well, legally" and pretend the moral dimension does not exist is... well, I've already said what that is.
Often times breaking a bad law, and helping others to break it, is an important step in moving public opinion, which is how you take it up with the Congress.
Try harder, like by working to convince the public that such a right should exist, so that other people join you in your effort to convince Congress to change the law.
Yes, radically changing everyone's idea about what rights should exist is hard.
Of course, you haven't provided any argument here for your position on rights, just a bald statement that the right you would like to exist does, as if that were some kind of uncontroversial, universally-accepted thing that required no justification.
And you've made a bald statement equivocating between the morality of legality of something.
Would you like a list of examples where extremely illegal actions are clearly and controversially moral, or can you think of historical examples yourself?
Actually, considering something has nothing to do with being a sociopath. Neither does doing something. A lack of conscience is a hallmark of a sociopath. Killing someone does not make you a sociopath. Showing no signs of conscience over the killing points toward you being a sociopath.
He doesn't seem like a sociopath. More like a power-hungry narcissist. He expressed regret and hesitation multiple times over (what he thought were) the murders, but simply insisted "it had to be done".
Not to detract from your point. I think he deserves life without parole for the attempted hits by themselves, ignoring every other charge. (Despite the fact that's not what he was convicted of.)
We're discussing rights given to us by the Laws of Nature, as understood by our founding fathers, not the meager rights dolled out by the federal government.
But I think the idea of natural rights is dumb. They're made up by humans. They're enforced by humans. Their exact nature is disagreed upon and debated by humans.
The idea that there is some set of core natural rights that comes from somewhere other than humans is a tactic used to avoid debate on which rights we should and should not have by people unwilling to actually support their ideas with facts or reasoning.
You might as well just say that god told us to do it that way.
Of course I am :) but natural rights have formed the basis of most modern (english revolution and forward-- american, french, russian) revolutions. Those citizens didn't care for what was _legal_ or _illegal_, they cared for their welfare and rights, even though it was essentially illegal. Webcomic for the choir: http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=469
If humans followed the law above all else, then we would not have democracy, or even republics. We'd have totalitarian nations of smiling slaves.
> but natural rights have formed the basis of most modern (english revolution and forward-- american, french, russian) revolutions.
The idea of particular divine ordinances -- which is what doctrines of natural rights are -- are fine ways to organize identity and action around that identity, including revolution.
That that is true doesn't, in any way, make any particular such quasi-religious concept correct. And, even if it did, I can't think of any of those revolutions that included, in their conception of natural rights, a right to buy drugs, as such. So, even operating in such a framework (and even once we've agreed which framework of natural rights we are operating in), you probably have more work to do than just simply asserting it to establish the claim "people have a right to buy drugs" is valid even within that framework.
> If humans followed the law above all else, then we would not have democracy, or even republics.
Yes, most people would agree that there are principals beyond the law that justify arguments about what the law should or should not be, and most would probably even agree that some of those principals are sufficient to justify breaking the law as it stands -- and even to justify soliciting homicides if they are threatened sufficiently.
However, that kind of high-level agreement itself is very different than agreeing that the "right to buy drugs" is in either the first or, more relevant to the claim that the Ulbricht verdict is a miscarriage of justice, the second class of principals.
Sure, humans renegotiate the law all the time. Sometimes peacefully sometimes at the point of the sword. But those are still rights as defined by humans not handed down by God/Nature.
There wasn't revolution because the people were aesthetically displeased at the fact that their natural rights were being violated. There was revolution because the people wanted something and they were willing to fight for it.
If income inequality keeps going the way it's going, one day we'll see the people revolt against the rich demanding a natural right to housing, medical care, education and who knows what else. You'll, of course, note that particular definition of natural rights far exceeds the Jeffersonian one. It'll be just as an illogical concept then as it is now. It's a nice rhetorical flourish though, and rhetoric goes a long way when you're asking people to risk their lives.
Speaking as someone who's on your side in this debate...
Rights are what you get if a bunch of rational, self-interested people get together and say, "What ought we be allowed to do without interference?"
There is a single, correct, rational answer to that: you ought to be allowed to do anything that doesn't initiate force against someone else. All rights are a function of that single fundamental observation.
Every rational, fully self-interested person (who has studied the topic a lot) will agree on this.
So that's where rights come from... they are a human construct, but there's also a single, objectively correct answer.
So they don't come from "Laws of Nature" or the Founding Fathers.
No, I think you're the one who doesn't seem to understand them.
> Rights are the things that we would all agree should be legally protected if we were all rational about it.
We, as a society, have a system in place to work out this sort of thing. That system has already decided that we don't have this right. If you were in fact able to convince enough people that your position is the most rational then your available rights can be changed. Your argument is valid but your conclusion is wrong based on the available facts.
Isn't it funny how the people who appeal to rationalism are the ones who happen to not manage it themselves? I mean, I'm not saying I'm rational, but I'm also not fronting about it.
What "rational", of course, usually means, is "agreeing with me", and so there are so very many false Scotsmen in attendance.
Ironically, that definition of "rights" is subjective (most people would agree with you, but not all). And what you define as a "right" is also very subjective.
A cursory Google search does not reveal much about this Jyoti Saran other than the details of his indictment [1] and the auction of his Arlington mansion[2].
Is little else known about this figure, even as he is nearing completion of his prison term?
> The 31-year-old physics graduate and former boy scout was handed five sentences: one for 20 years, one for 15 years, one for five and two for life. All are to be served concurrently with no chance of parole.
Meanwhile:
> Hu Wanlin was in prison for human trafficking. That didn't stop him from opening a medical practice while jailed. Once he was released after a retrial in 1997, Hu treated hundreds of patients with an herbal remedy that actually contained sodium sulphate. 146 people died of his treatments. He was arrested in 1999 and sentenced to 15 years in prison for practicing medicine without a license.
146 people dead.. 15 years in prison.
Run a website that helps people connect with drug dealers.. multiple life sentences.
Life without parole seems excessive. I think they're trying to make an example out of him due to how hard it is to detect and prosecute this type of crime.
The Bloomberg story[1] had some excellent excerpts from sentencing:
U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan rejected Ulbricht’s claim that he was naive and impulsive when he started Silk Road as an economic experiment.
“It was a carefully planned life’s work,” Forrest told him Friday. “It was your opus.”
and:
Ulbricht, who plans an appeal, asked for mercy in a May 26 letter to the judge. He called Silk Road a “naive and costly idea” that had ruined his life.
“I’ve had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age,” Ulbricht wrote. “Please, leave a small light at the end of the tunnel.”
Truth is, it's hard to run this sort of thing without getting ripped off, and then violence is the only way to discourage people from ripping you off. Watch Godfather movies, esp. part 2... Mafias arise out of human nature and the nature of the game.
One of the many ironies of libertarian extremists is that actions which are considered illegitimate when taken by a democratic government become OK when taken by concentrated private power to protect private property.
> One of the many ironies of libertarian extremists is that actions which are considered illegitimate when taken by a democratic government become OK when taken by concentrated private power to protect private property.
Huh? Libertarian extremists do not condone murder or murder-for-hire. Most libertarian extremists also support proportional self-defense and damages doctrine (Rothbard et al) so would not consider murdering someone who steals from you acceptable.
They might consider killing someone who has threatened to reveal information to a brigade of killers that will kidnap and imprison, or outright kill people who have trusted and relied upon them to protect those people from such actions as at the very least worthy of consideration.
That was the situation here; party A attempts to blackmail party B with revealing the identities of group C to entity D which will then ruin the lives of all people within group C. Is it definitely right or wrong to hire somebody to kill party A? What duty of care does party B owe group C? Entity D exists and is not going away and will continue to behave in the fashion which party A relies upon as the stick in the equation. Attacking entity D directly is suicidal and ineffective.
If party A was directly threatening to kidnap and imprison or murder all the people in group C, I think aggressive action against them would be much less questionable, and effectively that is what they are actually doing, given the behaviour of entity D.
Putting all those pieces in place already, what is the appropriate response supposed to actually be?
Any way you look at it, it's certainly an interesting situation that people who otherwise would think there was no problem here must take into account. It's all well and good to believe the state is a gang of thieves and murderers writ large (disclaimer; I certainly do), and go about constructing a parallel strategy to circumvent them, but that strategy can't just ignore them, or the consequences of their existence, either.
Hmmh, you could be right and I could be wrong. NYT article didn't say life without parole so I wasn't sure where that came from. But other people are reporting it.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, the kid rolled the dice in a high stakes game and was fully penalized. On the other hand, the logical basis behind the prohibition of illicit substances seems flawed.
I wonder how things would have turned out without the murder for hire angle.
> But prosecutors, in their memo, argued that praising Silk Road for “harm reduction measures” was “akin to applauding a heroin dealer for handing out a clean needle with every dime bag: The point is that he has no business dealing drugs in the first place.”
Mistaking some delusional world of zero crime doesn't do any good for people living in reality. That 'moral dealer' who hands out clean needles would be doing good. I guess the moral high-ground is ignoring the number of users who die or contract diseases from dirty needles? That's a pretty fucked perspective.
I see an issue with treating drug users (esp. recreational drug users) as somehow "less than human" because of their choices. If a heroin user dies or contracts disease from using a dirty needle, that is a sad thing and I would applaud a dealer who hands out clean needles to his clients to prevent it. Regardless of my stance on drugs and drug users.
Yes exactly, the reasoning proceeds from this silly world of "shoulds" which does not actually exist. In the actually-existing world, people buy drugs, and so there is value in addressing that demand as safely as possible. Instead we have cynical people like these, talking about how the real right thing is to just not sell drugs at all.
(And that's not even getting into the issue of whether we should be allowed to have drugs as supposedly free people)
> I see an issue with treating drug users (esp. recreational drug users) as somehow "less than human" because of their choices.
The justice system only sees them as "less than human" until they can conveniently be used to create an emotional scene which can be used as ammo against someone the government doesn't like.
See: the poor defenseless kid who would still be alive today if it weren't for the silk road forcing him to buy drugs and take them
Black markets exist because demand exists, whether we like it or not, whether we think it's good or bad. Black markets are self regulated and that is why you see so much violence in the illegal drug market. Restricting supply drives up prices and profit and increases incentives to increase supply. This is a vicious never ending cycle.
Ross was tempted by helping to increase supply. Maybe if we had a legal and regulated location where you could do any drugs but under the supervision of counselors we could help reduce demand and end the cycle.
I believe a church in the Netherlands did this in their basement. They provided discounted heroin that could only be used there and addicts reduced their consumption and had access to counselors.
I am not supporting what Ross did to give access to illegal drugs, I just believe because there is such demand trying to reduce supply is a losing battle where only law enforcement equipment supply companies win.
You don't really have to just believe. It isn't even the fifty years of historical evidence on the contrary in the US, it is how almost every nation south of the US boarder in our hemisphere has been systemically destroyed trying to supply all of the black market US drug needs.
FTA: "Judge Forrest told Mr. Urlbricht that “what you did in connection with Silk Road was terribly destructive to our social fabric.”"
Can't help but counter this claim by stating that buying drugs via Silk Road is probably not very destructive in any sane analysis, especially compared to street level drug dealing.
There's no corners to hold, no rivals to fight with territory over, no deals to go bad, no real access by minors, and no real impedance to the function of any tangible physical location or bystander.
Edit: I didn't know he ordered ordered 5 hits before writing this post, but i'm going to leave it up. I guess he got desperate and crazy towards the end
Seriously. The way he invokes the words "our social fabric" makes it out like Forrest was personally affected. It's easy to imagine Urlbricht rehabilitating and becoming a productive member of society but instead his life has just been destroyed. It's not justice and it's not the right thing to do.
If one person decides to put another person in a cage for the rest of their life, it's clearly a horrendous stomach turning crime. It's no less horrendous when the justice system does it. But we've decided that it's a necessary evil that society requires. We should be working as a society to minimize the necessary evil and rehabilitate people but we're not and it's a tragedy.
I didn't know he ordered ordered 5 hits before writing this post, but i'm going to leave it up. I guess he got desperate and crazy towards the end
Just to throw out an observation: the idea that being in this business kicked off a spiral of actions which led to him being "crazy and desperate" to the point of trying to have people killed is precisely the argument that's been made by people who support the drug war, about the slippery slope of consequences that follow from getting involved with drugs.
I am not sure why someone who so perfectly embodies the other side's narrative is being held up as a shining heroic example by supporters of legalization.
I think that this is completely disproportionate. He is being treated as if he was a serial killer or a mob-boss. Hell, even Al Capone was only sentenced to 11 years in Prison.
The real lesson should be don't serious commit crimes.
The whole of morality is not contained by the law. How about those folks who broke apartheid law by going to the University of Alabama? I stipulate that operational security is not exactly part of breaking apartheid laws, but still...
Copyright laws are going way way overboard. How about breaking those laws in order to expose corruption? That could happen, easily. "Don't commit serious crimes" is advice for the conformist.
Sentencing, based solely on creating/running the site, has more to do with the difficulty of finding, investigating and prosecuting these cases and therefore the value of harsh sentencing as a deterent to other current or would be offenders.
Effect might perhaps be to drive others who are or want to do this stuff to operate from Russia or other harder to reach places. It might have been wiser to keep him operating and under long term surveillance, and as such indirectly control the beast he created.
What are the other sentences people have received for attempted murder/ hiring a hitman?
People seem to be hinging their "this is a relatively fair judgement" opinions on the fact that he attempted to/hired one or more hitmen for one or more hits...
If that's what they're prosecuting on, then there's precedent, right? Is that precedent life in prison?
While I don't agree/defend what Ulrich was doing, I think the sentence is heavy-handed. I think arguments can be made for life in prison being worse (or more cruel) than death. And if we compare his crimes to some of the things governments do (or allegedly do) behind closed doors, I wonder if this is really "justice".
I don't know if there's much merit to him "more safely distributing drugs", but I wonder if a sentence this heavy would have been issued elsewhere outside the US.
[EDIT] - Reading other posts, it seems like he wasn't actually charged/convicted for the attempted murder/hitman stuff. If that wasn't the case, then I disagree with the verdict that much more
[EDIT2] - People who are under the impressions that Snowden should have stayed in the US to face proper sentencing should also note the sentencing in this case. Circumstances are different, but, I'm pretty sure Snowden could have faced worse, since Treason is pretty high up there (and makes you eligible for the death penalty). Ironic given that we (american culture) iconize Nathan Hale ("I regret that I have but one life to give...")
In a tragic miscarriage of justice, a man who made bucketloads of money from exploiting drug addiction and who hired hitmen, is sentenced. This innocent liar, drug dealer and moblord has been incorrectly sentenced for life. Free Ross Ulbricht, he never did anything wrong, except for all that stuff he did do.
Ross Ulbricht, who is tragically falsely accused of running Silk Road, is a hero for challenging the War on Drugs by definitely not selling drugs, and a nice guy.
If there is any justice, maybe he'll get a pardon in 20-30 years for good behavior.
The government said they identified six individuals who overdosed and died of drugs they purchased on Silk Road. The parents of two of those individuals—25-year-old Bryan B. from Boston and 16-year-old Preston B. from Perth, Australia—spoke at Friday’s sentencing, pleading emotionally to the judge to give Mr. Ulbricht a harsh sentence.
So he gets life for starting and operating a shady business that was "terribly destructive to our social fabric" and "lowered the barriers to obtaining illegal [goods and services]".
Great. Now that we have a solid benchmark for the minimum level of criminality possible to get a lifetime imprisonment sentence, we can finally start prosecuting those responsible for the financial fraud that caused the last recession. It was pretty destructive to our social fabric. There was a lot of bar-lowering going on, too.
Right?
Hello?
Anyone?
[mic goes dead, and house lights shut off]
I guess I'll just go home, then.
In light of the differential between the outcomes of prosecutions of highly publicized crimes, I think perhaps he was convicted for "failing to pay the minimum campaign contributions tax and lobbying tax on filthy lucre" and also got the mandatory minimum sentence for "we need to make a really big example of this guy because we are totally unprepared to handle anyone smarter and more cautious than him", with just a little shot of "X on the Internet is a thousand times worse than X in person".
It saddens me that acknowledging the war on drugs as being corrosive and detrimental is seen as extreme by mainstream modern society. Few seem to question extreme punishments for crimes related to the manufacture or distribution of drugs.
It's not that extreme of an opinion. What is extreme is thinking the Ross Ulbricht is somehow a champion against the war on drugs, or that his conviction should be considered as representative of a pattern.
Either way, people don't question these punishments because they don't fear them. And the don't fear them because they don't aspire to be drug lords or murderers.
Other figures running drug distribution operations at this scale stay physically outside the US and build up paramilitary defense/enforcement. They either face an identical fate to Ross or meet a violent end.
This is not a surprising outcome in any way, and his use of the Internet rather than traditional methods absolves him of nothing.
I knew Ross for a few years in college. I find it almost inconceivable to believe that he tried to have people killed. I also find the sentence completely disproportionate to the 7 charges he was tried and convicted of. This is a sad day.
edit: I also understand the point that his hiring the hitman was an overt act under one of the other charges, but, speaking as someone who is not a lawyer, it seems to me that such a weighty punishment should have to be based on a much more explicit charge than this. I sincerely doubt that they would have been able to make the case for life in prison if not for the murder-for-hire angle, and as such i think it should have been charged. This seems like a dishonest and sneaky way to prosecute someone. Of course, i have my biases.
This isn't really surprising. I think most "drug kingpins" would be able to get much shorter sentences by agreeing to turn in a bunch of smaller dealers. It seems like Ross' work was pretty solitary, so that wasn't really an option for him.
Everyone seems to be looking at this as some sort of travesty of justice. However, there is significant evidence that he tried to order hits on people. While there's no (public) evidence that he successfully murdered anyone, he clearly had lost his regard for human life.
We're in a day and age where people can cause tremendous harm to others using their mind alone, without throwing a punch or pulling a trigger. Just because he didn't personally cause physical harm to people doesn't mean he can't cause it to happen!
I think it's important for society to be protected from people with his mindset.
From other comments, it seems he wasn't tried for that stuff though. I don't think it's a good thing to include considerations in sentencing that he wasn't tried for. If there's evidence he did that, and you want to put him away for a long time because of it, then try him for it!
Punishing him for that without trying him for it seems like punishment without trial, which is bad. The alternative is that this punishment is just for nonviolent stuff, for which it seems excessive.
His convictions were for hacking (and I'd love to know the details on that... who exactly did Ross hack?) criminal enterprise conspiracy, and narcotics trafficking. The closing is in a pdf somewhere up the thread.
No attempted murder charges though.
This man is literally going to jail forever on the charge of proividing people a place to buy opium. Maybe he tried to hire hits, but that didn't make the final conviction list, though some in this thread are trying to say that "narcotics conspiracy" is a broader charge that somehow? includes murder for hire charges.
I'd say it's an unfair sentence, given that with bitcoin & a decentralized approach, it is unlikely that future versions of this sort of thing will be stoppable by any centralized government. They stopped & sued Napster. Did it stop file sharing? I think the government misplayed their cards -- again. Better to have partnered with Ulbricht -- and had a part in creating whatever future version of the market would be. Better to get some market share in whatever comes next -- then make some big busts that way.
I don't know. But hinging the argument on bitcoin and decentralization seems short-sighted and letting yourself fall into the same traps as the guys who have been busted.
Well I have no idea what will be the ultimate version of this, but like all ideas, it will probably continue to evolve and improve itself. software is just codified ideas you know.
As I stated much earlier (I believe it was during pre-trial), Ulbricht was convicted in the court of public opinion, even before he went to trial.
Some may hail this sentence as a victory for justice or some similar nonsense, but there is a deeper problem here. Civil liberties continue to be eroded at an extremely alarming rate in this country that the concept of "justice" applies in a very political context. It's pretty much a joke.
The message here is that if you attempt to live outside of this current system, you will be punished.
> Judge Forrest told Mr. Urlbricht that “what you did in connection with Silk Road was terribly destructive to our social fabric.”
Certainly his actions were destructive to a social fabric, or elements thereof. However, I don't think that anyone of good sense takes too seriously the nightmarish visions of a total collapse of order that Forrest's words summon to mind if the site had been left to run. The alternatives do not reduce to the current structure of a fabric and no fabric at all.
Nor does the charge itself make any particular sense, at least in terms of ideals to hold to. Progress is always built on the destruction, partial or total, of a previous way of life. Thus, when destruction becomes impossible, the liabilities that history places upon us, both in terms of mistakes and in terms of functions which no longer match the demands of life, come to dominate all attempts to adapt society to a more fitting form.
The sentence is, at least on those grounds, a farce. Some social fabrics should be destroyed - that something better may take their place. I'm not going to advocate either way on whether that's the case here, but to imprison someone simply because they perform an act with such a function is to reduce yourself to a tyrant.
Have any of the carding forum operators been sentenced to life in prison? Or any prison time? Or even been arrested?
I say this as someone who just found out he's had $500 stolen from him. Of course I half blame the banks and credit card processors who allow card numbers to be passed around so easily.
As an aside, since this is HN, I thought some portion of the audience here might be interested to know that the code for the Silk Road marketplace appears to have been in PHP, using CodeIgniter as the framework:
"In any case, I decided to rewrite the site in an mvc framework as suggested by my benevolent hacker adviser. So, while still manually processing transactions and responding to a bigger and bigger message load, I learned to use codeigniter and began rewriting the site."
Perhaps if he had made even a token effort to not permit illegal sales on SilkRoad he'd be hailed as the new Jeff Bezos. Instead, he'll be denounced as a drug peddling fraudster. A shame; I thought his ideas had merit.
Like many commentators here, I am tremendously opposed to the prohibitionist approach to law-enforcement of any sort.
One of the greatest tragedies of prohibition (and there are a multitude), is that it transfers so much money and other resources into the hands of existing criminal organisations. It also creates criminals as these profits incentivise illicit trade and legislates users as criminals.
That being said, what Ulbricht was doing was clearly nefarious and the punishment should come as no surprise.
Narcotics trafficking, distribution of narcotics by means of the Internet, and conspiracy to traffic fraudulent identification documents, participation in narcotics trafficking conspiracy, continuing criminal enterprise, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy.
Ross Ulbricht did more to civilize the drug trade, to prevent the violence and mayhem associated with dealing drugs, than any law.enforcement agency anywhere in the world ever has, and I can't wait for the day we finally abolish prisons and acknowledge this tragedy.
On the surface the sentence seems a bit steep doesn't it?
I expect it's because he attempted to have at least two people killed. I don't think either case succeeded but there was clearly intent to murder.
I don't know enough about this story to have an overall opinion, but this particular exchange made me angry:
> His lawyer, Joshua L. Dratel, in submissions to the judge, argued that the website’s “harm reduction” ethos made it safer than traditional drug dealing on the street.
> But prosecutors, in their memo, argued that praising Silk Road for “harm reduction measures” was “akin to applauding a heroin dealer for handing out a clean needle with every dime bag: The point is that he has no business dealing drugs in the first place.”
When one side of the argument is based in real-world impacts, and the other side has nothing but an appeal to existing rules, it's a pretty good indication that the rules need changing.
It's an infuriating power play to say "you had no business doing that" if you can't come up with a good reason why not.
Bear in mind that prosecutors have a professional duty to zealously argue the government's case just as the defense lawyers have a duty to zealously argue for innocence or lenity of their clients. Unfortunately judges no longer have that much discretion to weigh the competing arguments because of the mandatory sentencing guidelines Congress came up with. It has since been established by the Supreme Court that the guidelines are just guidelines rather than being binding, but sadly any judge that says 'these guidelines are crap, I've considered them and now I'm going to ignore them' is committing career suicide unless the high sentence would be so bizarre as to truly shock the conscience.
And the American legal conscience unfortunately has a very high shock threshold these days, as does the population in general. I mean, look at how many people cheerfully support torture despite the massive intellectual and ethical pitfalls involved. Many of those people are also indifferent to the Constitutional basis of the judicial branch and start foaming at the mouth any time a court says a piece of legislation is unconstitutional.
> Unfortunately judges no longer have that much discretion to weigh the competing arguments because of the mandatory sentencing guidelines Congress came up with.
You mean the ones whose provision making them mandatory was struck down as a violation of the right to trial by jury in 2005, and which have since been advisory only? [0]
My understanding is that this entire discussion is in the context of sentencing, and that the defense's argument here is in that context.
If the defense had made the harm reduction argument in the context of the guilty/not-guilty question, that would be one thing. But in the sentencing phase, it seems appropriate to take into account the actual harm of the crimes involved.
When the prosecution's answer to this discussion of harm is "it doesn't matter, it was illegal," that's when I get cranky.
Lex talionis has been a part of human legal tradition for at least 3700 years. The retaliatory penalty shall be equal or lesser than the harm caused by the crime.
This is a big problem with victimless crimes and offenses against the public welfare. The extent of actual harm to actual people cannot be easily measured, so there is no rational limit upon punishments levied against the offenders.
Evidence that a criminal intentionally acted in such a way as to reduce the potential harms wrought by his crimes is VERY relevant to sentencing, in my opinion. The same holds true for malice and negligence.
For instance, if you sell heroin, that's illegal. If you refused to sell heroin to people younger than 18, and also embargoed and beat the excrement out of anyone you discovered to be passing heroin on to minors, that would still be pretty awful. But it would also show that you were making some attempt to be less awful than you could be. If, perhaps, you kidnapped any customer who lost his job, and forced him to dry out and clean up in your own private rehab, that would still be pretty nasty. But it would also show a commitment to reduction of harm. You should probably get a below-median sentence, as punishments for drug kingpins go.
Contrariwise, if you keep your drug stash and your loaded shotgun in your baby's crib, then screw you, buddy; you're getting the maximum on all counts.
The Federal judges who apply the Sentencing Guidelines all "hold their Offices during good Behavior", so I kind of wonder what you mean by "career suicide" -- a reduced likelihood of elevation to a higher court?
Yeah. Also, judges are not very well paid so some of them work with the anticipation of returning to the private sector later on. IF they developed a reputation for having decisions overturned by appeal courts, that wouldn't serve them well in their private career. Although the ideal judge would be utterly impartial, in the real world judges are human and still subject to economic incentives, herding behavior and so on. Richard Posner (arguably America's most influential living legal scholar/jurist) has written extensively on this topic (as well as just about every other topic).
People support keeping drugs (with the exception of marijuana) by 70-80%. Presumably they have their reasons. They vote. It's not the prosecutor's place to justify or explain the law.
> When one side of the argument is based in real-world impacts, and the other side has nothing but an appeal to existing rules, it's a pretty good indication that the rules need changing.
One side is based on a "claimed" real-world impact. Its somewhat plausible but ultimately isn't backed by real evidence.
Sure but if the argument is in the realm of real-world impact, at least then it can be debated and the evidence weighed.
Maybe this "harm reduction" argument here is full of it, I don't know. All I'm saying is: if one side uses as their only argument "because I said so," then there is no real debate.
Nice show trial. The US justice system is a joke. Cops regularly murder unarmed citizens - nothing. The 'evidence' used to convict Mr Ulbricht should have been inadmissable as it was obtained illegally.
So what confuses me now is what happens if prohibition ends in ~20 years. Does he have any hope of re-evaluation then, assuming the Government decides not to separately prosecute the other crimes?
> So what confuses me now is what happens if prohibition ends in ~20 years. Does he have any hope of re-evaluation then, assuming the Government decides not to separately prosecute the other crimes?
An act becoming legal after one has been sentenced for it generally has no effect on past sentences. Executive actions like pardon are possible, but are not in any way necessarily impacted by changes in the legality of the act for which one was convicted. (Though, the same changes in the political landscape which produce changes to the law may influence the politics of discretionary executive actions like pardons.)
Creating a platform that can be used to buy/sell illegal goods shouldn't be against the law IMO. Are car manufacturers thrown in jail when someone drives their product when drunk?
No, because the vast majority of people driving are obeying the law (or at least are committing very minor crimes). In contrast, the vast majority of people on Silk Road were buying and selling illegal goods.
It boils down to intent. If you intend to make a legitimate platform for commerce that also happens to be used for illegal stuff, (Craigslist, for example) you're in the clear as long as you aren't actively aiding them.
In contrast, if you set up your platform with the explicit intention of selling illegal goods, then you're in trouble.
The thing that you need to take from this is the state re-asserting its primacy in the face of an incredibly disruptive* technology. I think that even if Ulbricht hadn't attempted to have people murdered the penalty would have been extreme. When challenged bureaucracy over compensates...through that lens the governments actions in several areas is explainable if not just.
I have the same amount of guilt you do when I use that word. But in this case I think it was probably the best word. Annoying when normal words get reclassed into buzzwords.
No. Intent and context matters. USPS/FedEx/UPS are businesses that primarily perform legal services, and follow US laws when its discovered that they were used for illicit purposes. On the other hand, Silk Road was built from the bottom up as a black market to service illegal goods. The idea that they just provided an anonymous marketplace and that unfortunately had illegal stuff happen on it is transparent lie that ignores the work Ross and his team put into promoting it as a drug marketplace.
Context and intent are important and laws aren't computer programs.
Not at all. I used to read the SR forums, and a common concern was dealing with packages getting inspected (without opening them - presumably drug sniffing dogs or some other drug detection mechanism) and then getting a letter/visit from the police. It was rare enough (and you had plausible deniability since anyone could have sent that package) that it wasn't a huge concern, though.
After reading comments here and on arstechnica, I'm terrified by the number of people who still seem to blindly trust our government and support the drug war.
Another scary thing is how many people have "convicted" this guy of things that he was never convicted of, and used those things as a point from which to justify his sentence here.
As far as I can tell, the only reason people are saying he wasn't convicted of murder for hire is because the top-level charge is "conspiracy" or somesuch, with "murder for hire" as one of the specific conspiracy items, and they haven't dug down.
Its astounding that anybody here would defend this guy. Are Hacker News readers left leaning in general, or just is it just a handful of loud anarchists?
The quote( not your comment ) is a logical fallacy. Even if was not accepted as hard evidence in the court, it was spoken, and has influenced the jury.
My condolences go to the mutual friends Ross and I share.
Honestly, I don't have much sympathy for him directly (due to his complete and utter stupidity and lack of opsec), but I know this is going to hurt some people I care about, people who were good friends with Ross back in college, and I feel bad for them.
I wonder why people assume Ulbricht tried to have someone killed? History has proven time and time again that police and prosecutors will fabricate information to get a conviction or even get bail removed. I wouldn't put it past the prosecution and DEA to stoop to such low-handed tactics.
The best information available suggests that he actively solicited hitmen. Yes, I suppose if you take the position that "absolutely anything incriminating is fabricated" then you could claim he didn't.
I was just thinking what it may have been like from his perspective. To him, it was the same set of actions as was required to start something like AirBnb or some such. You write software. You get your initial users, etc. You get feedback & you loop.
With the same set of actions & work, pointing in a different direction, he could have done quite well for himself working on another idea.
I'm guessing his biggest downfall really was in having an aversion to working with others. He could work with others at a startup and make some great stuff & quite possibly do well. Instead, he chose a more sure fire approach to making money on his own -- with the morality and legality of what he was doing as the cost.
You could make an argument that the alleged murder for hire attempts were simply self defense. The consequence of being exposed is life in prison, and I don't think any of us can say with certainty how far we'd go to avoid life in prison. It's not like he was trying to have innocent bystanders murdered. If selling drugs was not a crime, there would be no opportunity for blackmail, and nobody to silence.
You don't get to claim self-defense when your own illegal actions led to the situation. Nor when there isn't an immediate threat to injure you and threatening to expose your illegal actions just isn't going to cut it.
I didn't mean to imply that it could be considered self-defense according to the letter of the law. Just floating the scenario where you're running a business that, while illegal, is not morally wrong, and you're faced with the possibility of spending the rest of your life behind bars. What do you do?
They would tell you not to run that business because it's illegal. There are legitimate ways to protest a bad law and running an illegal business isn't one of them.
You run a business in the 1800s that frees blacks from the South and transports them to the North. If caught, you risk some severe penalties, maybe even death.
Someone finds out and blackmails you. What do you do?
I think it might be better understood if I said 'legal' instead of 'legitimate'. The law, by its nature, cannot excuse breaking the law.
EDIT: Also, in your example, this was eventually fixed by changing the law, not by breaking it. And, to the best of my knowledge, everyone ran the underground railroad for free, not for profit.
I can't say I know every detail of the case but I don't recall anyone getting killed or even hurt by Mr. Ulbricht so in my mind the punishment does not fit the crime. IMHO the death penalty should be off the table completely (go Nebraska!) and life in prison reserved for only violent offenders. You can argue that he enabled people to harm themselves but I think that's stretching it. If people want to take drugs, even take too much drugs their going to get it somewhere. If drugs were legal and treatment of abuse the focus instead of punishment Silk Road wouldn't have existed in the first place.