Ross got a raw deal. I think 15yrs would have been reasonable
He should have taken the plea.
So they made an example out of him.
If he was smart he should kept a lower profile and his first interaction with police (the multiple fake IDs) he should have shut it all down or pass the site to someone else.
But hey ego and hubris gets the best of us.
Undermining the authority in a public manner is a sure fire way to ensure that the legal system will use you to reassert it's own authority as an act of long term preservation of the system's status quo.
Lately with SCOTUS, I think we are seeing widespread dissent about the worth of the entire legal system. For many, the system was already unbelievably unjust simply for the logic of what you observe. That’s just how it is, but is that how it should be?
If you rob a bank, get caught, say sorry and work at restitution you’ll often be given a lighter sentence.
Rob a bank then brag that the cops will never catch you and you’re glad you got away with it? Yeah, you’ll get a more severe sentence.
The idea is that justice should take restitution and admission of guilt into account.
Doesn't that imply that not admitting guilt is a crime for which you get an extra penalty? Let's assume that is correct and ethical. The question then is how big should such an extra penalty be, for the crime of not agreeing you are guilty? Life in prison? Or perhaps capital punishment?
https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/coercive-plea-...
Then its good that we as a society have institutions that have a better judgement than you, random internet netizen.
There’s a reason people wear suits to court and we have all sorts of processes designed to venerate authority. Before modern times, power flowed from the Monarch. Now, we choose our representatives but the instruments by which power is administered still exists.
He got life in prison because the laws he broke called for it.
There are exceptions for psycho killers like Anders Breivik. Ulbrich would be unlikely to fall into the Breivik category. His prison conditions would not be so brutal either, see again Breivik for an example. If you believe he deserves life, do you believe he deserves brutality in prison?
He is by many international legal definitions a political prisoner found guilty of what appear as obviously relative political crimes and likely even absolute political crimes. His politics were core to his supposed criminal activities in the war on some drugs. His investigation and prosecution was tainted. Several of the involved officers committed blatant crimes for personal gain for which they were later arrested, charged, and convicted. Those same state agents appear to have alleged the murder for hire, which is somehow not entrapment and yet considered credible.
In 1769, William Blackstone said “the law holds that it is better that 10 guilty persons escape, than that 1 innocent suffer (innocent person be convicted).”
Morally and in principle, especially in a tainted investigation with misbehaving Government agents, the guilty should be let go. Perhaps you don’t agree - either way, there is an appearance of a two tier legal system.
The system that jails Ross but lets very wealthy pharmacy company owners off with thousands of confirmed deaths, people who produced, marketed, and sold similar and sometimes identical drugs exclusively for profit are punished with a fine.
No, this is bullshit. He committed several serious crimes and is now paying the price for that.
Yes, reform the legal system sensibly. No, we don't let drug kingpins who have built up a serious crime organisation walk.
He ran a website. I don't call that a kingpin
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.
Tell that last part to the families of people who have died in the opioid crisis. Drug kingpin is in the eye of the beholder, or prosecution team as we see. For example: Have you watched the CEOs of several major pharmaceutical companies walk with fines? Large fines, paid out of the very profits made from the sales of drugs that killed the customers. Too bad for Ross that he wasn’t smart enough to hire lawyers, and wear a suit, he might be as free as Zuckerberg or the CEO of any of the major Pharma companies making record settlements this year.
Rather than reforming the legal system alone, why not free those harmed by the system we agree is in need of reform? Start by freeing all political prisoners.
Yes, it does. Ross Ulbricht is not a political prisoner, he is a run of the mill criminal prisoner. Sorry if that offends you.
> Too bad for Ross that he wasn’t smart enough
Too bad for Ross that he laughed in the face of the authorities, deliberately built a criminal trafficking organisation and profited from the trade of known illegal substances, while attempting to order hits on people. He's a scumbag.
This equivocation about the pharma industry is utterly laughable, the situation isn't in the slightest bit comparable.
> Start by freeing all political prisoners.
Which would leave Ross Ulbricht still in jail because he's not one of those.
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.
Particularly that last part. Sorry if that offends you.
You can moralise and equivocate all you like, he is not being held for his views or his politics, he is not being held for political activity, but for his clear criminal actions, which include attempts to have people murdered. That's not 'political'.
There is when the state breaks its own principles and rules, that is the point. It is literally unjust, and the states behavior must be beyond reproach.
> Particularly that last part. Sorry if that offends you.
I am not offended, I asked my questions, which you dodged, in good faith.
I agree with you that murder for hire must be treated seriously. Part of why I find this unjust is that he should have been tried on that charge first and foremost. Yet it looks like it was primarily used to harm his character, and it was not formally brought and successfully won by the state. If the guy did, he should not escape trial for an explicit charge, do you disagree?
> You can moralise and equivocate all you like, he is not being held for his views or his politics, he is not being held for political activity, but for his clear criminal actions, which include attempts to have people murdered. That's not 'political'.
Are you asserting that the drug war, isn’t political?
Are you furthermore asserting that assassinations aren’t inherently political in that context?
Political isn’t a get out of jail free card, and I am not equivocating. I firmly believe he still should stand trial for the murder for hire charges, don’t you?
Yep, because pharma companies all respect the monopoly of the state. The state can ban any molecule they please and pharma companies will comply. The state could not do anything whatsoever to silkroad so it unleashed its full wrath on a website administrator.
My primary point is that the Sackler’s company actions have a body count that is sky high, and they will walk with a monetary fine. This is because they accept the primacy of the state, and the victims are not as important and it may be dealt with as a financial compensation issue. That result is as much about the primacy of the state as it is about the standing of the Sackler’s in American high society. In other words it looks like two justice systems: one for the rich, and one for the proles.
In Ulbricht’s case, the hypothetical dead in the murder for hire allegation are known to not exist - the state admits to fabricating all of it. Well not all of it, they claim he was aware, and that he believed their lies. I wouldn’t be surprised if that part was a lie too, since they are admitted liars to achieve their stated goals.
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!
This is not about victims in the population AT ALL. The state could care less about people beeing murdered if it dosen't affect it's power over said people. It was always just about the state's totalitarian power over trading and Ross' complete subjucation of that power.
I think there’s an easier explanation. He may have started the Silk Road with high hopes but things went haywire around the time he started making millions…
Ulbricht should have taken the plea. It was his only chance of breathing free air again. As it stands now, he doesn’t have a hope. It would be very hard for a judge to sentence based on a dream to remove violence when presented with evidence that the accused was actively trying to have people killed. The plea was his last chance and he didn’t take advantage of it.
The state tried to bring separate charges and the case was closed without a conviction. It’s probably fair to say that the convicted corrupt cops planted everything and made it up, if we are just accepting base accusations at face value. I am sure you won’t agree, but my response is also for all the other people who see the injustice of the drug war, who have had enough of corrupt cops, and judges only sympathetic to the harshest of laws handing out sentences that are literally not possible to carry out. A double life sentence, if only he had two lives to give for his country, eh?
If the other charges were sufficient to say he did this horrible crime, why wasn’t double jeopardy invoked for the other case? Perhaps someone who followed the case closely can speak to this as from outside it looks extremely suspect. Since it wasn’t, we can assume it isn’t as settled as some would like except in relation to a conspiracy charge for a drug related crime. Those two things seem awfully political to me, and so I remain unconvinced.
Here’s one theory: people such as yourself were already convinced. He was given a double life sentence. Who on the prosecution side cares to allow a person to confront their accusers who were later jailed for corruption directly related to him and these charges? Nearly no one apparently: it’s fine to not convict him as the allegation served to discredit him for his extremely blatant political criticism and actions against the war on some drugs.
There is probably some truth in what you say about the fact that his best chances were with a plea deal. That is probably one of the saddest facts in the American justice system. It’s a concept that doesn’t really exist in many European legal systems, the right to bargain about justice. So his best bet to be free was to skip exercising his right to a trial… nothing problematic here, just another day in an American court.
Another option for him would have been to have never resisted the drug war. To never have attempted to build a market where people have nearly zero chance to physically harm each other in a transaction. Yes they can harm by consuming the substances, but that is again a clear political action in his written philosophy: people should be free to chose to take that risk. He was clearly a fool for believing he could change any of these matters and he should have known his place, right?
Some of us who watch and have watched our friends and family and other people suffer through the drug war where the police regularly kill or cause immense suffering with impunity are less sanguine than you. A market where people cannot be harmed in a transaction was a remarkable thing at the time, and it has now become a norm. As usual the rich get it with things like a coke taxi dispatched by signal, and the poor continue to buy drugs on the street and suffer violence which is all but intended by the state with it’s structures. We should be doing harm reduction and people who try this, however misguided should not be handled as if they are the same as the Zeta cartel.
Those charges were dropped and there was never a trial related to them let alone the evidence to actually convict on it. Anyone can be accused of crimes and later have the charges dropped.