For running a free market. It's fucked up.
My view is that if someone wants you dead, it's just a matter or time, or price. Maybe the Pope and POTUS are out of reach, the rest if you can't finish them with a handgun you can with an Ar-15.
John F. Kennedy would like a word.
Now they shut entire cities
Honestly, most kidnappings are parent without custody snagging their own kid. Rich kid kidnappings are a thing though.
US Conservatives: Do you really want European-style socialism assassins?
edit: i stand corrected
Or are you just trying to manipulate public opinion?
It was explicitly a sentencing factor; the way federal criminal sentencing guidelines work, the charge sets the outer bound of punishment and influences the sentencing calculation, but other sentencing factors play a significant, often overwhelming, role in determining the actual sentence, so it's not at all inaccurate to say that a person is serving time for all of the things weighed in sentencing.
> On the last day of trial, Serrin Turner, the NY lead prosecutor, addressed the jury and stated that none of the six contracted murders-for-hire allegations occurred.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht
It seems like it would be unlikely to take the murder-for-hire allegations into account in the sentencing after the prosecution have already stated that they were false allegations.
(1) Ones that cite no other source and should be viewed as extremely unreliable, and
(2) Ones that cite some other source, which should be reviewed and evaluated to assess the claim.
The one you point to is in the latter category, and cites as it's support a Guardian article which describes be prosecutor not as claiming that the six attempts to procure murders for hire had not occurred, but that he did not believe any of the murders Ulbricht had attempted to procure had occurred.
Do you have anything from a legitimate source on this? I'd like to read more. My understanding of this entire thing came largely from brief news reports on it.
I recall reading that the FBI had admin access to the site at the time the incriminating messages were sent, which I'm still looking for a source for, so it's quite likely that the messages were sent by the corrupt agents. Particularly when you consider the libertarian ideology around Ross and the site in general. Soliciting a murder would be completely out of character.
For what it's worth, the FBI agents on that case ended up going to jail as well. The case was a huge mess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Silk_Road,_arres...
I don't recognize this as a legitimate offense to law in a free society. I see it as, yes, "running a free market". That the state chooses to serve its interests by finding differently is unsurprising. But why do you?
>Because it is contested, the Court must make appropriate factual findings if it is to include it. The standard by which I do that is by a preponderance of the evidence. 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.
https://freeross.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Sentencing_2...
Maybe you think he didn't try to commission murders. Maybe you think judges shouldn't have so much latitude in deciding sentences. But the simple fact remains: Ulbricht is serving two life sentences mostly because the judge found that he tried to kill five people.
Sure scares me. Why wasn't he tried for the other crimes if his punishment is going to be based on them? This isn't a little difference to take into account when sentencing, these are important crimes on their own deserving a right to trial.
Or are all purveyors of the 'free market' automatically heroes in your eyes?
No, I don't even like the guy. Why must I consider someone a hero to feel they deserve a trial for their punished actions?
And, even if you know mathematically without a doubt that "they did it" in point-of-fact, and you have all the evidence to back you up such that you're really sure that if you did have a trial, it'd be an open-and-shut case... you still can't assume. Because it's not about whether you see guilt or innocence when you look at the evidence; it's about whether the jury sees guilt or innocence when they look at the evidence.
Jury nullification means a jury can just decide, arbitrarily, that somebody's not guilty of something. And then double-jeopardy means that you can't ask that question again. It's been resolved, permanently: the accused has been declared innocent, in the eyes of the law—however strong your proof was! And any further judgements by the courts have to take, as input, that innocent verdict that came out of the trial; not the proof-of-guilt that went in but didn't survive.
What that implies, to me, is that in the Al Capone example, he should never have been treated as anything other than a regular tax evader, and should only have received a regular tax-evader's sentence.
I'm reminded heavily of the recent p-hacking controversy in science. Imagine a world where we "pre-register" a trial when an investigation is begun, and are then forced to go through with it (and pretend the government has the infinite money required to enable this.) In this world, that trial would likely declare the suspect innocent a lot of the time... and all the evidence gathered to do so would be "used up" by that trial. You couldn't turn around and use the same evidence to prove that "because he's guilty of X, it's more likely that..." anything else. Because, in the eyes of the law, he isn't guilty of X, and anything that proves that, doesn't. The evidence itself was nullified when the verdict was.
In the real world, just to save time and money, we don't bother to prosecute trials we know we'll lose. But shouldn't the effects still be the same as if we did? An optimization shouldn't change the semantics of the system.
Honestly I don't think judges should sentence based on what was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt. It is was so clear, why wasn't he charged for it?
https://web.archive.org/web/20160305020239/http://www.thegua...
You're omitting very important details.