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Comment by modzu | Hacker News Reader

i thought the harsh sentencing was because he tried to pay a hitman to kill 5 people?

edit: apparently the murder charges were dropped[0] but the evidence that he hired a hitman was deemed "unambiguous" and factored into his sentencing[1]

these facts should probably be acknowledged, even if disputed, on the freeross page, otherwise it reads like propaganda.

a related and interesting twist: it was an fbi informant he paid to be his hitman, who staged the murders. so nobody actually died, even though he believed they did. crazy.

[0] http://www.dailydot.com/crime/silk-road-murder-charges-ross-...

[1] https://freeross.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Sentencing_2...

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He forgot the cardinal rule of hiring a hitman... don’t. Your probability of talking to the police or a buffoon who will get you caught is close to 100%. Actual hit men work for established criminal organizations, and don’t look on Craigslist for freelance gigs.

one has to wonder how much the fbi was involved in entrapment here

Agreed. Just about every “foiled terror plot” in the 00’s were people coerced into the action and provided instructions if not materials for carrying it out by the FBI.

It goes back much farther than that. It took a sawed off shotgun, a bunch of crispy children and a dude with a box truck to convince them to only entrap minorities.

The FBI and federal law enforcement more broadly has a long sad history of misdeeds.

> It goes back much farther than that. It took a sawed off shotgun, a bunch of crispy children and a dude with a box truck to convince them to only entrap minorities.

I feel like there is a story there, could you please provide a little more info?

The sawed off shotgun is a reference to Ruby Ridge

The crispy children is a reference to the Waco siege.

The box truck is a reference to the Oklahoma City bombing.

If you choose to research those first two terms they will lead you down a very deep and dark rabbit hole of government misdeeds. You've been warned.

Sting operations are not entrapment.

Entrapment requires coercion by the police to push you into something you wouldn't have otherwise done.

Selling drugs to an undercover cop? Not entrapment.

Selling drugs to an undercover cop because they said they'd kill your family if you don't get them some drugs? Entrapment.

There have been "sting operations" where cops offered somebody a ridiculous low price on some drugs, then busted them for going for it. Easy to get caught trafficking several kilos of coke when you paid $100 a kilo. Sounds like entrapment to me though.

That's not entrapment, at least not in the USA. A normal law abiding person doesn't deal cocaine even if it's really cheap.

A normal wealthy person, maybe. To many people, an offer like that is a ticket out of poverty.

So's stealing an unattended bag of money off the back of an armored truck. Still criminal; still not a coerced act.

I mean, if I'm a regular user and I can afford and obtain a big supply for 1/10th the going rate I'd seriously consider that, even without an interest for selling it on. This would be true of any shelf stable product I use regularly and could effectively store

"Regular cocaine user" and "law abiding citizen" are in conflict. A cheap price isn't coercion.

Oh I know, I'm not arguing it is coercion.I'm arguing that it indicates an attempt to distribute is tenuous

by "wonder" i mean what actually happened, not what the prosecutor's narrative is. the agents were aggressive in taking down SR and making an example of it even before knowing anything of its operations. did agents approach ulbricht and offer to make his problems go away for a price? did they lead him to believe it was a neccessity for his own safety? etc. we may never know because ulbricht was not actually tried for these crimes.

If the government wanted to adjudicate that matter - for sentencing or any other purpose - it needed to charge him with those crimes. It didn't do that, precisely because the evidence is flimsy and most of us don't believe most of it for a second. The government's decision to use this "evidence" only as a public relations tool to justify an insane sentence reads like a fascist tendency, not the actions of the justice system in a free country.

Free Ross.

The murder charges were also mentioned during the appeal. IANAL but listening to it sounds like it played a role in denying his appeal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2nd_Cir._oral_argument._1...

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