Unsealed Transcript Shows How a Judge Justified Ross Ulbricht's Life Sentence
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1-2 years seems about right.
You think about the very low barrier to starting a site like that up, and then you think about the kind of person likely to stumble into that scheme, and then what it would take to deter them and others from trying it, and it seems like you want enough of a sentence so that it's for real, but nothing more than that.
But for paying to have people killed? Life seems appropriate. Maybe, if you want to take a more Scandinavian approach to sentencing, you'd say "10-15 years". Long enough that the convict comes out of prison effectively living a different life than they were before. Enough to completely disrupt their previous connections.
People would have no reason not to commit crime if the stakes were "give back what you stole". "Fitting the crime" includes deterrence up to a sane amount. In general the punishment needs to be more than the crime. Say ~5x. Steal $1,000. Pay $5,000 "worth" of your time in jail.
There's a really virulent meme that Ulbricht was never tried for the assassination scheme. But he was: the murder-for-hire scheme was a predicate on his "criminal conspiracy" charge. Not only was it brought up in trial, but it was brought up in a way that put the onus on the prosecution to prove it.
nice choice of words - "tried" instead of "convicted" :)
>But he was: the murder-for-hire scheme was a predicate on his "criminal conspiracy" charge. Not only was it brought up in trial, but it was brought up in a way that put the onus on the prosecution to prove it.
not true. The Judge clearly states that assassinations come through on "preponderance of evidence" which is a lower standard from "beyond reasonable doubt" the prosecution must prove for a trial and conviction. There is absolutely no surprise that a testimony from a [still unknown to be corrupt] federal agent met the "preponderance of evidence" threshold.
This is also why they only accused Ross of 5 hits instead of 6 (The 6th was the one setup by the corrupt agents).
man, we're in different Universes. They dropped 5 charges out of 6 and the 6th has made it only as far as an indictment (in Maryland) completely based on the Force's testimony. And that indictment was used as the reason to deny bail and poisoned the rest of the trial.
I find that there is ample and unambiguous evidence that
Ulbricht commissioned five murders as part of his
efforts to protect his criminal enterprise and that he paid
for these murders. There is no evidence that he was
role-playing.
the 5 had only chat logs as "evidence". The 6th had chat logs and the Force's testimony. This is why the 5 have never made it anywhere in the proper court procedure - they even didn't made it as far as formal charge, and the 6th stuck at the indictment once the Force's corruption became known. The 5, ie. the chat logs, chronoligacally appeared after the Force's one.
Chat logs and of course the payments, from wallets known to be controlled by Ross, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars that correspond precisely with the chat logs.
From the judge again;
He commissioned the hits, there is no discussion of
hypotheticals, he paid actual funds. He paid hundreds
of thousands of dollars which were, in fact, paid. He is
told when the murders are completed, he was provided
with a photo of the murder scene with random numbers
that he had provided to the would-be assassins. That
there had been no confirmation of any of the deaths
does not eliminate the fact that he directed violence
and directed the use of violence.The judge dealt Ulbricht additional punishment just on the base of preponderance of evidence as seen by the judge. Thus effectively punishing Ulbricht for the alleged crimes of murder-for-hire. Such loophole is a clear violation of :
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury,..."
and
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury ..."
Ulbricht wasn't indicted, nor prosecuted, nor convicted by a jury for these 5 alleged murder-for-hires. Thus he can't be punished for them. Whether he actually did it or not, what happened in those proceedings isn't a justice.
I'm not discussing whether he actually did it. I personally just don't know. The issue here is punishment without proper conviction. The judge's conclusion isn't sufficient to convict and punish. The charges should be brought and tried before a jury and the jury should conclude beyond reasonable doubt that it was a real thing, not just a role play or whatever. Only then he could be punished. Innocent until proven guilty. No murder for hire charges have so far been brought and tried before a jury. So he is innocent, according to the law, of the murders-for-hire. Yet he was punished for them. It is obvious violation of the basic principles of justice in US.
I get that you're coming from ignorance and probably not malice, and I remember seeing the Article headlines too when it came out; but bro, it's Oct 2015 and we now know those charges are bullshit.
"Silk Road Was Just Another Tech Company Outside of the tech press, Winter notes, a lot of the media coverage on the Silk Road has been “drugs and guns and hitmen—just wildly off-base.” Off-base, he says, because when he started interviewing the people who knew Silk Road he didn’t see an outfit that was all that different from those littering Silicon Valley. “I started to meet all these core architects within the Silk Road: vendors, engineers, sellers, administrators, people who were helping with scaling,” he says. “It’s obvious in retrospect but it was just like any large tech company. But it was just not represented that way in the media, so even I was caught off-guard.”"[(http://www.wired.com/2015/05/deep-web-silk-road-alex-winter/...]
That's so disingenuous it's condescending. What the hell were they scaling, exactly? That Silk Road was a scaling experiment, not really a mechanism to sell drugs? Seriously?
The more I read about the guy, the more the root of the word "privilege" seems appropriate (i.e., private law -- he wanted one generous and lax law for him, and another violent and harsh law for the people who got in his way).
In my case, I was convicted of a crime that was for the physical theft and sale of circuit boards, had nothing to do with the Internet or hacking, and yet I was banned from the Internet upon my release from prison. This part of the sentence was out of the blue, and we had no opportunity to even prepare a defense for it (and in 1995, no one in the court room really knew what the Internet was except me and a few of my friends who attended the hearing). It's really fucked but it's their modus operandi.
I do appreciate the color from your own experiences. It's certainly not my contention that sentencing is in general fair, or even that this particular sentence was fair. Certainly: sentencing for computer crimes is egregiously unfair.
But the Ulbricht trial gets past a lot of these issues. The judge notes:
* Ulbricht paid to have someone killed. He was told that person had a wife and child. Ulbricht paid anyways. The money was taken. There is no evidence he was role-playing.
* Later, Ulbricht paid to have someone else killed. The would-be assassins informed him that the target lived with 3 other people. Ulbricht paid extra to have those people killed too. The money was taken. There is no evidence he was role-playing.
At this point in the transcript, it's like: what do you think is going to happen?
I might be biased, since ToneLoc is what got me started programming.
he wasn't. Alleged murders, without ever being tried before court, were used to cause sentence enhancement. All the "evidence" and "testimony" for the murder charges weren't even enough to sustain the charges, less bring them for trial. At the time of the conviction, it wasn't known that the agents were corrupt and thus, not surprisingly, the Judge gave their testimonies all the possible weight and came down that hard on the Ulbricht.
stand corrected. Judge did know that the agent was corrupted. The murder-for-hire allegations used at the sentencing didn't even have as much as a testimony of corrupt agent behind them.
>* Ulbricht paid to have someone killed. He was told that person had a wife and child. Ulbricht paid anyways. The money was taken. There is no evidence he was role-playing.
>* Later, Ulbricht paid to have someone else killed. The would-be assassins informed him that the target lived with 3 other people. Ulbricht paid extra to have those people killed too. The money was taken. There is no evidence he was role-playing.
if remember all these were based only on the testimonies of those couple of corrupt agents, and all these charges were quietly dropped. The charges were never tried before any court, including the court where drug related charges and conviction happened. The charges were only conveniently mentioned by the prosecution and judge took them account. Thus a cyberpunk became blood thirsty low-life drug dealer. Pretty dirty, though standard, trick one can say. It makes a joke out of "not guilty until proven".
It was not a predicate, it was one of three different overt acts charged in furtherance of the conspiracy. At least one overt act must be found for a conspiracy charge, but the charge to the jury did not require separate factual findings on each charged overt act. While each juror must have found it true beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed some overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy, we don't know if all, some, or none of them found the murder for hire one to have been proven.
So, really, there was no meaningful finding relating to the murder for hire allegation at trial; in sentencing, yes, what you say about it as an accelerator is accurate.
narcotics trafficking; distribution of narcotics by means of the Internet; narcotics trafficking conspiracy; continuing criminal enterprise; conspiracy to aid and abet computer hacking; conspiracy to traffic in fraudulent identity documents; and money laundering conspiracy.
notice that "attempting to have multiple people killed" is not something he was convicted of.
The murder for hire thing is on page 5.
That's lying, Tom, and it isn't right.
Ulbricht's directed violence here is and
relates to the murders for hire which he is alleged to
have commissioned and paid for. The Court must
determine whether these allegations have been
demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence and I
find that there is ample and unambiguous evidence that
Ulbricht commissioned five murders as part of his
efforts to protect his criminal enterprise and that he paid
for these murders. There is no evidence that he was
role-playing.
The Court finds that the evidence is clear and
unambiguous and it far exceeds the necessary
preponderance findings, that Ulbricht believed he was
paying for murders of those he wanted eliminated, and
that he believed they had in fact been murdered.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/283722300/Ross-Ulbricht-Sentencing
>"No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court. It is a privileged argument, it is an argument from one of privilege. You are no better a person than any other drug dealer and your education does not give you a special place of privilege in our criminal justice system. It makes it less explicable why you did what you did."
You can argue that our drug laws are wrong or the punishments are too extreme, but singling out Ulbrich for the specifics ways in which he clearly and repeatedly violated those laws is showing favoritism. If his crimes didn't involve the Internet, there would be nothing newsworthy about his arrest and sentencing.
http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-the-fbi-found-on-r...
I'm personally pro-legalization of a lot of drugs. I do not want to close myself off to the clear negative effects of said drugs though. I think we should all remain honest and proportionate about them.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=psychedelics+suic... http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/02/25/026988111456...
A study failing to find a link between psychedelic use and suicide doesn't mean that psychedelics never cause suicide, it means that on average they don't seem to.
Banning psychedelics will lead to at least some deaths. Not banning psychedelics will lead to at least some deaths. This is true of many many policies.
Ultimately the question is a cost-benefit analysis.
Seriously?
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE SPECIFICS. Accidentally beat someone to death in a fight you started and you might serve a decade or two. Beat them to death for fun, eat their heart, feed the rest to a dog and light their house on fire while you're at it and you'll likely serve life. Both are 1st degree murder but that's about where the similarity ends.
"So, we also have your own violence and there is no doubt -- really none -- that you wanted to and paid for the murders of five people to protect your drug enterprise. That is not the conduct of conviction but it is relevant conduct, so how is that consistent with harm reduction?"
But from a drug policy perspective, this language jumps out at me:
> Ulbricht’s defense had argued the site reduced harm because it kept drug deals off the streets and allowed users to share information about drug safety. The transcript from the final day of court proceedings shows how Forrest categorically rejected that claim, outlining the social costs of drug use from an individual level to mass scale. “The social costs of drugs are manifest,” she said. “The user is only one part of the equation, that is where much of this harm reduction argument comes from and it is focused on the user. The user is one part of a massive, massive worldwide scheme of drug trafficking and if you sat where I sat you would see that the user is not the end… So, harm reduction focused on the user is missing the point.”
First, let's make the assumption that all those users would have obtained the drugs some other way without the Silk Road. In that case, all that trafficking cost that happens before the seller lists the drug on the marketstill would have occurred. Silk Road was just as responsible for that cost as the end user[0].
Now, let's make the assumption that all those users would not have obtained the drugs some other way. That's basically saying that trafficking - which is an avoidable cost - is what makes the Silk Road so egregious. In that case, the right action is to address the drug trafficking trade itself. Again, Silk Road had only a small role in that. If we fixed the issues with drug trafficking, perhaps we would have a very different kind of marketplace than what Silk Road was (with a very different kind of person running it).
In case it's not obvious by this point, I think the drug war is pretty backwards. I don't really have any sympathy for Ulbricht or the Silk Road, but I'm also not impressed by the judge's arguments in this sentencing.
[0] this is not counting, of course, Ulbricht's own actions (e.g. attempting to hire an assassin).
I think the judge is missing the point here, the point being an understanding of harm reduction and apparently, surprisingly the effects of drugs on society. No wonder she gave him life. She doesn't even understand what "harm reduction" is. The rest was just nonsense.
As others have noted, I doubt the judge spent 100 hours making this decision (that's two and a half person-weeks full-time). I don't condone what Ulbricht did but I don't think his sentencing was rational.
Breaking a treatment regimen to use a drug that wreaks havoc on the specific neurotransmitter the antidepressant acts on doesn't work.
There is no way to reliably control the outcome of stopping treatment and taking street drugs.
I was wondering if the judge was considering increased risk of suicide due to withdrawal from the antidepressant. But in my quick layman's research that particular anti-depressant doesn't seem to have that issue.
Two days later on April 8 you write: "Sent payments to angel for hit on Tony76 and his three associates. Began setting up hecho as standby" -- I have no idea what that is -- "refactored main and category pages to be more efficient."
Ouch, terrible strawman; freedom doesn't mean freedom from all laws. It does entail freedom from some unreasonable laws.
Too many people say "but this is so much better than drug dealers on street corners. No-one gets harmed this way, and there's no violence".
And that's absolutely incorrect.
You might want to read "El Narco", or many other documentaries that talk about the pipeline from growing to cultivation, production. There's still huge amounts of violence in the system, that are in no way alleviated by having some magical fairy happy land online marketplace.
Forrest spent a year at the Department of Justice before being confirmed as a federal judge in 2011. Her handling of the case was pay back to her sponsors at the DOJ.
From the transcript: "No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court".
Her comments smack of racism and classism. She reveals her implicit belief that since illicit drugs are associated in the media with oppressed minorities or less affluent communities, Ulbricht isn't entitled to such an "uppity" defense. She clearly can't fathom any possible reason why anyone might be opposed to prohibition and mass incarceration.
The transcript: "What Silk Road really was was a social market expander of a socially harmful drug that we have deemed in our democratic process to be unacceptable"
Except polls show that most Americans are opposed to US drug policies, even for "hard" substances like heroin [1]. Any discussion about drug laws that doesn't acknowledge its racist roots or the commercial interests involved is missing the point.
[1] http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2014/04/new-pew-poll-confirms...
Ultimately though the guy was guilty and should have spent 5-10 years in prison.
This is what it looks like when the system works. Society is safer with Ross behind bars.