Sorry, how did he cause several deaths?
(Long version: he ran a platform where people sold the victims drugs, from which sales he financially profited). Victims who subsequently died.
I assume you think that they would have overdosed from other peoples' drugs anyway, but as I wrote, I don't accept that, so we can probably not discuss this productively.
It's a stretch to say that he caused their deaths because a third party willingly sold them drugs on his platform that they then willingly ingested.
He was involved in their deaths, yes, but he did not cause them.
(Otherwise the sellers would claim, that the marketplace is the real culpit, and they just sold some stuff)
There are certain limits to it, so that totally far-flung causations don't count, but this is not a close call.
People have been buying and OD'ing on opiates for centuries. They could easily have happened without SR.
How would you ever convict a thief if "someone else could have stolen it, had the defendant not been there first" was a valid defense?
You need to look at the concrete situation and in that situation the drugs came via Silk Road.
Although since dying of a drug overdose does not (directly) harm third parties, it's closer to trying to convict the manufacturers/sellers of rope for cases of suicide by hanging.
There are some drugs which can kill you which no one can legally sell.
There are millions of non-drug items someone can sell you which can kill you.
So I think it has nothing to do with whether people died from items sold on the marketplace, but rather that the marketplace as a whole was de facto illegal.
Contrast to OpenBazaar.
> Again, the law doesn't care about "could".
Which is it?
Every single customer could then and can still withdraw cash at an ATM, and then visit down the chain of "guy that knows a guy" until their non-narc bona fides are established, and the psuedoanonymous cash-for-drugs transaction occurs.
He's in prison for life because the War on Drugs principals needed to set up an example as deterrent, because their usual methods of investigation and interdiction were less effective at fighting obfuscated online services, and his was the most popular at the time. The judges went along with it, because they balanced the interests of the government against one guy who is almost definitely a sleazebag, and found that turning the negative PR from the apparent untouchability of Silk Road users into a win by shutting down the system, seizing the Bitcoin, and railroading the operator was fine. Even if they got reversed a few years later, after it was mostly out of the news, that was still an acceptable result. The claim that he tried to hire a hitman for contract murder definitely put a thumb on that balancing test. Without it, you're just tossing someone in prison for starting up a better Craigslist.
From what I know about the case, the prosecution was probably more influenced by politics than justice. If he were market-making for insider trading tips and discreet temporary matchmaking services, instead of drugs, stolen property, prostitution, and murders, he'd still be in business and richer than Croesus. They nailed him with a pseudo-plausible argument and a pressing need to get online black markets out of the mainstream news. It's the same reason Pirate Bay keeps losing domain names, while lesser-known trackers never seem to get the same level of opposition. The first rule of your online black market is to not talk about your online black market. If it gets too popular, it becomes the enforcement target pour encourager les autres.
There's no way in Hell he'd merit a life sentence without the attempted murder claims. Silk Road wasn't intrinsically more criminal than Visa or Mastercard payment clearing services, aside from it not automatically banning merchant accounts suspected of engaging in certain lines of business that are illegal in most jurisdictions. Silk Road was making the War on Drugs actors look like chumps, so they made Dread Pirate Roberts their public enemy number one.
I don't think he deserves the sentence that he got, but I also don't think they're ever going to let him out, because he's back in the news the instant they turn him loose. It'd be nice to believe that the justice system was more about the justice than the system, but I just can't.
But he knowingly fostered the sale of controlled substances, which itself is a crime.
Presumably illegal substances are illegal in part based on risk, so even participating in the transaction you're assuming that risk.
The key word here is "presumably".
I don't think most people intend or want their customers ODing on their product, but it understandably will happen with some given the power of the addiction.
Even still I think where this thread is going is reaching in some respects. Sure people died from the drugs that were sold on the silk road, but from my understanding they wern't sold by Ross directly. Sure it he was getting a profit for the use of the silk road basically being the ebay for illegal stuff, but that to me seems more like organized crime and being a kingpin of sorts.
It is of course an eminently reasonable thing to contend that some non-violent crime can have as much or more on the lives on its victims than violent crime. That's a different conversation though, than "we should change the classification of this act".
Also, what distinction do other market places use to avoid any prosecution, a terms of use agreement?