A $3B Silk Road seizure will erase Ross Ulbricht’s debt

Try this: Google [federal narcotics conspiracy "murder for hire"] (it's not a rare combination of factors!), pull up some DOJ press releases (I found several on the first search results page), and then look them up in PACER. I'm looking at Roger Key (a.k.a. "Luchie")'s 2015 indictment right now, and it's similar. This isn't some weird finagling the prosecutors did with Ulbricht; it's just how you get charged for this kind of conduct.

This notion that prosecutors somehow gave up on the murder-for-hire charge is Internet folklore. It's just not real. What complicated the charge isn't some bungling spy story about the agents involved, but the fact that the murder was a set-up and he didn't actually have anyone killed. But the prosecution established that Ulbricht tried to, and that's also the simplest and most reasonable conclusion to reach given the facts. I've never read an exculpatory explanation of Ulbricht's payment to arrange murders that made any sense at all.

For a criminal conviction, the standard is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt".

For sentencing, judges can consider evidence under a different standard, "preponderance of the evidence". As prosecutors introduced evidence of the murder-for-hire allegations in trial, the judge was permitted to consider it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Murder-for-hire_...

For my 2 cents it seems entirely reasonable that an armed gang backed by the state would consider themselves to be individually above the law, since they are constantly told that the ends always justify the means, no matter how odious those means may be.

If a journalist or academic gets found to have knowingly fabricated even the smallest detail it immediately calls into question their entire body of work, and even colleagues they may have worked with.

These are federal agents and the best standard we can hold them to is "oh, we don't have direct evidence of other crimes so we'll just assume the first time we caught you was the first time you did it"

They sold him details of the case for bitcoin into their personal wallets. It wasn't part of a sting or intel operation. The same cops that built the case against him were themselves indicted for money laundering payments they received from Ross. Multiple independent agencies and field offices with rogue agents undermining the cases they were building in real time for personal gain that was contemporaneously worth less than a million dollars.

Later

I removed ", and bets more of the case on it.", to dial it back a little.

Because they wanted to appease russia, which proven to be futile.

Your belief in the law doesn’t change its status. What he did was very illegal, with all use cases to support illegal activity. This wasn’t about possession for an individual, it was a mechanism for large scale distribution of illegal products.

It’s apples and oranges to compare the two.

Asking because I’ve read the story of Silk Road but didn’t hear about this other than the bitcoin theft

He created a market place which was available as a tor hidden service. It was primarily a website and a communications hub, this makes it a kind of meta-criminal enterprise where he enabled other criminals to sell often illegal drugs, though there was apparently much more.

The stated political goal at the time with using a website was to reduce violence at the time of a transaction. By that alone it was clearly more than a website.

In my view the answer is clearly yes. One kind is a prisoner of conscience. Prisoners of conscience are not claiming innocence, for example, rather usually the status is a commentary on the unjustness of laws or of punishment. He probably would never be considered as such by Amnesty International because of the extremely questionable murder for hire charges. Just a hint of a such a thing can sink an Amnesty endorsement of a prisoner.

There are other kinds of political prisoners. One can be a common criminal and be fairly and correctly considered a political prisoner due to political circumstances. The war on drugs is a political circumstance which results in disproportionate sentences. Consider that nearly all terrorism and espionage charges generally fall into the classic categories of relative or absolute political crimes. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_prisoner and note: “A political prisoner is someone imprisoned for their political activity. The political offense is not always the official reason for the prisoner's detention.”

In his case the majority of his charges are drug or conspiracy charges which are a major political issue for most of the western world at this time and at the time of his incarceration. Furthermore his incredible habit of journaling clearly shows his political views as they extensively detail the war on drugs, and his attempts to allow people to have access to a market for drugs that is safer than the street. American drug laws as seen by most of the rest of the world are insanely harsh in their punishment.

Consider The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe definition c, d, and e from the Wikipedia link. Do you dispute the judge sentenced him harshly to send a message to others? Do you believe his trial wasn’t marred by unbelievable corruption where several involved officers were arrested and jailed for their conduct?

He may very well be a scumbag, my claims aren’t a defense of him personally. Rather please try to read them as a good faith condemnation of the American judicial and American penal system. End the war on drugs, and end the insanely bad conditions for all prisoners. No one should have to suffer what he is suffering in prison, nor a tainted process which led him to prison. No one deserves double life sentences only to be beaten and (almost certainly, if rumors are to be believed) raped in prison for refusing to join a prison gang as a matter of literal personal political beliefs.

But you can tell me he’s not a political prisoner and that he gets what he deserves. That mostly tells me about you, and not about him.

But really: The state who has to expend resources (gotta pay for the officers time), the courts (he is costing them time by asking for a trial!), the prosecution (they probably had to work hard to hide the real sources of intelligence so it could be laundered into a court), the people who bought bad drugs through the market (in theory, I don’t think he was charged with anything specific like this), Ross’s family and friends (isn’t it really their fault for raising him so badly? Nope; but hard to miss an opportunity to victim blame), a lot of Tor relay operators DDoS’es by the Eff-Bee-eye to do intersection and circuit collapsing attacks (yes; they do this and more), almost certainly some NSA XKeyscore specialists were consulted (talk to some of them about it!), the DEA agents who defend our way of life (including the ones that went to prison for corruption in this very case: look it up, it’s amazing!), the secret service (again the ones who went to prison for corruption in this very case!), people who had to sit through the trial and lost faith in their entire country’s justice system (this isn’t most of hacker news which is very “law and order” which means cops can break the rules if the ends justify the means) and of course the children (no specific children, don’t ask so many questions). Never forget. Ahem, I mean, think of the children.

Meanwhile Ross is probably having his ass beaten or sexually assaulted in prison right now for refusing to join a white power group to save himself as a matter of principe. But don’t worry, this is fine because he did it to himself and think of the victims. The poor state, if they hadn’t gotten him, they might have lost the drug war. Good thing they racked up this political win!

There’s a war on drugs my friend, and to paraphrase bill hicks: every time you’re high, you’re winning it!

But is it worth a life sentence if the murders never happened? I think there's a reasonable case for "no."

> 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. [...] The Court finds that the evidence is clear and unambiguous and it far exceeds the necessary preponderance findings

The judge weighed the evidence, weighed Ulbricht’s lawyers’ responses and found a preponderance of evidence that he did indeed order the hits which enhanced (extended) the sentence he was given.

It’s been awhile since I looked at the transcripts but at the time I couldn’t believe how bad his lawyers were. They offered almost no reply to damning accusation after damning accusation.