Free Ross Ulbricht
freeross.org
freeross.org
> At the sentencing hearing, the district court resolved several disputed issues of fact. For example, because Ulbricht contested his responsibility for the five commissioned murders for hire, the district court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Ulbricht did in fact commission the murders, believing that they would be carried out. The district court characterized the evidence of the murders for hire, which included Ulbricht's journal, chats with other Silk Road users, and the evidence showing that Ulbricht actually paid a total of $650,000 in Bitcoins for the killings, as “ample and unambiguous.” App'x 1465.
From https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-2nd-circuit/1862572.html
I don't think sentencing should be using information that wasn’t part of the charges or the conviction. I’ve seen prosecutors chose to be extremely strict about that, judges chose to be extremely about that, jurors say “we couldn't convict because we had to follow the prosecutor’s instructions”, and yet here the jury was swayed by actions unrelated to the charges in order to convict, and the judge applied sentencing standards based on those same actions, and the government completely dropped the other case that would have been based on those actions
If they want to add time, they could totally charge him while he was already in prison! Nobody is worried about “taxpayer resources” the government got way more money out of the seizures than nearly any of their criminal cases, in which they do redundant tacked on convictions all the time!
this is such an aberration
The judge addressed this:
> The record was more than sufficient to support the district court's reliance on those attempted murders in sentencing Ulbricht to life in prison. The attempted murders for hire separate this case from that of an ordinary drug dealer, regardless of the quantity of drugs involved in the offense, and lend further support to the district court's finding that Ulbricht's conduct and character were exceptionally destructive. That he was able to distance himself from the actual violence he paid for by using a computer to order the killings is not mitigating. Indeed, the cruelty that he displayed in his casual and confident negotiations for the hits is unnerving. We thus cannot say that a life sentence was outside the “range of permissible decisions” under the circumstances. Cavera, 550 F.3d at 189.
Thats the point? The ruling is resilient in that it survived appeals, we disagree on whether it should have gone down this path at all. Railroaded is the term.
Seriously if everyone concerned really wants to help this man then everyone needs to drop this misleading mythology built up around him and deal directly with the reality of what happened. For example, this statement from the site:
Ross Ulbricht is condemned to die in prison for creating an anonymous e-commerce website called Silk Road. An entrepreneur passionate about free markets and privacy, he was 26 when he made the site.
I'm sorry that is a gross misrepresentation of what he did and is in no way helping him. If people really want to help him get his sentenced reduced then they need to start by fully acknowledging the crimes Ross actually committed. Then a clear argument can be made that excessiveness of his sentence far outweighs those criminal acts. It's not a case of innocence vs. guilt and shouldn't be framed as such. It's a case of Ross being unduly punished for the crimes that he legitimately committed. Anything else is just muddying the waters and again is in no way helping him.
If the prosecutors thought they had a good case, why wouldn't they pursue this?
You can't have it both ways, is court the authority on guilt or not? If not, how can you trust his guilty verdict for the other crimes?
Keep Ross In
I'm all for him being imprisoned if guilty of attempted murder, but he absolutely should not still be in prison for the charges that he was found guilty of.
The messages he wrote soliciting the contract murder were submitted as evidence as facts in the case against him and weighed heavily in his sentencing.
I don't understand why people want this guy free besides early-crypto-nostalgia.
I don't want him free personally, I just want him freed on the drug charges and tried separately for the murder charges
The corrupt agents staged hits in a makeshift studio, just to extort money from Ross, use the money for personal gain such as landing a movie deal with Fox
Cases have been completely dropped for less
The prosecutor and judge found a strategy that is resilient, that doesn't make it correct
The prosecutors didn't charge him with hiring hitmen because they were uncertain that they could prove it beyond a resonable doubt, but the evidence they were able to present suggests he probably did it.
It is not a contradiction to say he could've been guilty by preponderance of evidence and innocent because of reasonable doubt.
You either trust the high standards of criminal culpability, or you don't -- in which case why do you believe his other guilty verdict can be trusted?
So the question isn't free or don't free him. The question is "how long should he be in jail for?". There's a middle ground here.
Many people, including the OP website just say "free" him. I don't know. That is a binary option which implies total innocence. And I don't think total innocence is the case here.
So the question really needs to be: for how many years should this guy be in prison for. And the answer to me, primarily because he was planning on killing five people is quite a long time. Certainly longer than the ten years or so he's been in there.
[edited for some increased readability and formatting]
Would you agree that he shouldn't be in prison for the crimes he was convicted of at least? Because he wasn't tried or convicted of murder-for-hire (yet?)
The conviction and sentencing limits are of course there for anyone to see.
But we penalize, not rehabilitate, and some people are beyond rehabilitation.
- First-time offender
- All non-violent charges
- Two life sentences plus 40 years without parole
>Ross Ulbricht is condemned to die in prison for creating an anonymous e-commerce website called Silk Road. An entrepreneur passionate about free markets and privacy, he was 26 when he made the site. He was never prosecuted for causing harm or bodily injury and no victim was named at trial.
>Users of Silk Road chose to exchange a variety of goods, both legal and illegal, including drugs (most commonly small amounts of cannabis). Prohibited was anything involuntary that could harm a third party.
>Ross was not convicted of selling drugs or illegal items himself, but was held responsible for what others sold on the site.
> Federal prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people,[27] allegedly because they threatened to reveal Ulbricht's Silk Road enterprise.[36] Prosecutors believe no contracted killing actually occurred.[27] Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with any murder for hire,[27][37] but evidence was introduced at trial supporting the allegations.[27][38] The evidence that Ulbricht had commissioned murders was considered by the judge in sentencing Ulbricht to life, and was a factor in the Second Circuit's decision to affirm the life sentence.[38]
Isn't it illegal to hire people to kill people even if they aren't actually killed? Like when the police go undercover they don't wait for someone to be killed, they wait for definitive evidence that the hiring person seriously plans to follow through with it I thought.
"In R v Looseley; Attorney General's Reference (No 3 of 2000) [2002] 1 Cr. App. R. 29, the House of Lords held that although entrapment is not a substantive defence in English law, where an accused can show entrapment, the court may stay the proceedings as an abuse of the court's process or it may exclude evidence pursuant to Section 78 PACE 1984 ...
"Police conduct which brings about state-created crime is unacceptable and improper, and to prosecute in such circumstances would be an affront to the public conscience."
In this case, this guy went looking for a contract killer and the police answered his request.
Not anything damning either way, bit definitely food for thought.
That wording really goes out of it's way to sound like this might conceivably be legal, or at least not knowingly criminal.
How about Uber? In most cities they were by allowing airport pickups?
How about Amazon? Remember when they aided and abetted customers with sales tax evasion for years?
During discovery they found emails from Parker saying, "Of course it's illegal. We know it, they know it, we're going to be the biggest thing in the world anyways".
But I would not conflate sharing a music file with hiring a hit-man.
I'm pretty sure that running an illegal drug marketplace is also illegal.
I'd also say that there's a significant moral difference between a first time offender, and a 'first time caught offender'. Al Capone and Bernie Madoff were also 'first time offenders' when they went to prison.
You don't whoops one-time-bad-lapse-of-judgement stumble into running a gang, a decade-long fraud... Or the biggest drug marketplace in the world.
-HN
Edit: My personal opinion is that we should rid ourselves of the demand for dark web markets by regulating drugs. The regulations should focus on harm reduction, both for the users and society as a whole.
Yea, you seem confused, the funeral I went to was because my friends brother actually had really easy access to really great heroin. For a long time actually. Surprisingly easy to get delivered…
It was only after he was a full-on junkie estranged from his family after they’d basically given up any wealth they had for rehabs and his theft and violence that the “benefits,” as you call them, of the dark web markets might have mattered in the slightest.
No, no, don’t let me rain on anyone’s parade. Whether it’s heroin, or meth, or who knows? Maybe even sex workers of dubious age and consent! The dark web is just connecting willing customers with quality products.
It's fine to say that someone shouldn't go to prison for life for running a business centered on selling drugs without violence (hitman non withstanding), and I think you could even argue that the drugs got more dangerous for kids once it went down (there was a decent time period when kids didn't have to worry if what they bought as cocaine, MDMA, or aderall was just meth). But trying to claim the Silk Road wasn't Amazon for drugs is just dishonest.
It does seem like bad form that the prosecutors didn't charge him with murder, it leaves open the question of whether the evidence was actually flimsy and Ulbricht's team didn't challenge it properly because they didn't think it was especially relevant. I assume the details of the opinion would reveal the thinking on that if I read it closely.
Alcohol is undeniably a hard drug. It:
1) is extremely physically addictive
2) causes many overdoses and deaths. More than opiates or cocaine.
At the same time, there is tons of compelling evidence that:
A) making alcohol illegal in the 20s/30s didn't decrease consumption at all and simply increased the danger of consuming tainted alcohol.
B) that prohibition fueled the rise of organized crime in the US
C) that countries with decriminalized drugs and harm reduction policies actually have reduced drug consumption, like Portugal.
Thus, your statement seems entirely incorrect. It actually seems that punishing those who sell hard drugs actually makes it worse for everyone.
Frankly though, even this straw man argument is moot because it is illegal to sell alcohol without a license too. So regardless of what substance was on sale, this market place was facilitating illegal transactions.
As for whether 40 years is a bit harsh, that’s a lot more subjective. But it doesn’t further the conversation to shift definitions of substances when they’re already legally defined.
The definition of a hard drug has nothing to do with whether it is legal or not. Alcohol is a hard drug by the definition of addictiveness and propensity for harm. When it was made illegal, it didn't reduce use and only increased harms. We learned our lesson and made that hard drug legal in order mitigate the harms of organized crime benefiting from selling it.
Similarly all other illegal drugs should be made legal to reduce the harms of them being illegal and facilitating organized crime that increases violence in communities.
In that regard, the silk road was actually a net good. It reduced gang violence by preventing gangs from competing for physical territory. The US postal service delivering the darknet drugs prevented the gangs from being able to enshrine their Monopoly through violence. This was unequivocally good. Similarly reviews by customers increased quality and purity and reduced tainted drugs, reducing harm to the users. Thus, the silk road was a net social good when measured from a social welfare costs and benefits.
I agree. But there is also a legal definition and we are taking about the law. You can bitch and moan about whether the law is just or not but that’s a different topic.
Which is why you’re missing the point and I wasn’t.
You can argue to you’re blue in the face about what the law should be, but that doesn’t make the law so.
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/4/e000774
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7649209/
I could go on and on but I think I gave you a good starting point for your own research
[1] https://www.anrows.org.au/publication/links-between-alcohol-...
That's because alcohol use has been normalized for a very long time.
There's no redefinition happening, you are just comparing a 'normalized' view of alcohol to one that is more realistic about it.
Alcohol positively destroys some people and most of them lost the ability to have any self control over it at some point.
It's created a perfect storm of death in destruction in the USA. The system needs to be reboot and built to protect citizens, not abusive / incompetent doctors, insurance companies.
Drug addicts are people that deserve to be respected, not spit on and turned away. Even if you aren't a drug addict, you can really quickly have your rights stripped away. Drug use, even repeated, isn't always addiction. Drugs are often a critical component of our health.
I've become increasingly aware of the role the medical industry is playing in exacerbating drug abuse and suicide. So many people are driven away from care and into a suicide/jail or other health problems like morbid obesity.
What does 'deserve' mean?
How do you distinguish it from vengeance?
If the idea is that it has deterrent value, how do we measure that?
Also why are we trying to deter? What's the social cost of the behavior his platform helped facilitate?
How much did his being a party to that behavior contribute to its prevalence? Is there any evidence suggesting the behavior wouldn't have been enacted through alternative intermediaries?
Most importantly: Is there any unintended secondary cost to society, as a result of bringing punitive repercussions on intermediaries that are incidentally party to an undesired behavior?
In Policy Analysis one often sees a pattern where punitive policies exacerbate either the undesired behavior or associated antisocial behaviors
It's counter-intuitive but the correlation between criminalization and increased antisocial activity — and indeed net social cost — is quite strong.
In my view the only sensible approach to criminology is "consequentialism" with all punishments being informed by therapeutic approaches to reduce future harm — or "Harm Reduction"
When we allow ourselves to be guided by "scale balancing" rationales, it's just too easy for that to turn into sadism and worse "mob" sadism — where any view of proportionality (vague and aspirational to begin with) is abandoned until some "Lord of the Flies" moment of cruelty provokes social reflection.
Anyway thanks for considering my perspective.
I'd argue Instagram has done more damage to human relationships and communities than MDMA, despite the former being around for much longer.
Really, when we look at the forces "destroying our communities", it's not so much the drugs as the the reasons people take them - alienation caused by post-modern industrial capitalism, face-to-face interaction replaced by screen time, a society that values "success" over happiness, health and connection... the drugs are a symptom.
If you take morphine because you have a broken bone, the issue is the broken bone.
If people drink themselves to death because they are lonely, the issue is the loneliness.
to add, how many of the domestic terrorists killing children in schools with guns did buy them legally? vs illegally? and how many homicides were done with legal guns? vs illegal guns? and suicides?
> myself: cyanide has a bad reputation
> myself: there are plenty of legitimate uses
> inigo: so we're going to allow it?
> myself: its bad for image/PR
> myself: i think we're going to allow it
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/01/silk-road-trial-...
You can't represent this guy as just selling some drugs, maybe. He knew what he was doing, and documented all of it.
Prison is the right place for Ross Ulbricht.
Just because he committed all his crimes using a computer doesn't mean he should be let off for these crimes.
[0] - https://apnews.com/article/16c1186f8839c814b84a614542c8486e
But the American economy depends on prison slavery, and they need the drug war to continue creating slaves.
And oh hey, he's a model prisoner
...none of this is utilizing actual facts, it's just assertions and emotive wording.
>none of this is utilizing actual facts,
"The allegations were never charged at trial, never proven, never submitted to, or ruled on by, a jury, and eventually dismissed with prejudice" are the actual facts.
Seems pretty clear cut. I would like to take this moment to remind you that Ghislane Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years.
But it's also how the system is explicitly supposed to work; it doesn't make for a strong "facts-based" argument for clemency.
There's two angles to justice. The legal, and the moral.
What was done to him was legal, and nobody's denying that.
Given the scope of the crimes he was convicted for, I don't think it was immortal to throw the entire book at him, to the maximum possible legal extent.
I'm not saying he didn't do it, but had that been known at the time, I think it would have been less decided that his sentencing should take the alleged murders for hire into account.
He should be tried for that separately at this point
No one is arguing about how it works, they're arguing how they think it should work. Otherwise there would be no discussion here at all.
The article pretends this exonerated Ross when it reality the government didn't see a reason to go through another trial when he was already serving multiple life sentences.
The article also does the hand-waivey "it was never shown the messages were authored by Ross."
Those messages were presented into evidence, during the trial. Ross lawyers had no explanation for them.
I think the sentence was excessive, but then again I didn’t run a website for years for the expressed purpose of facilitating and profiting from the illegal international drug trade.
The idea that he would just be released and not then immediately charged by another nation is naive.
I’m genuinely shocked that this is getting attention from anyone but libertarian ideologues.
Edit: I’m fine with your downvotes. Nobody wants to discuss the level of taboo breaking the Silk Road caused simply because it’s actually not entirely difficult to operate. People get made examples of.
That's the kind o freedom that heroes like Ross are protecting!