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Comment by neotek | Hacker News Reader

I know he's fighting for his freedom and you can't begrudge a man for doing whatever it takes to beat a charge, but I really think this is such a cop-out defense and I wish he had the balls to act like the same person he pretended to be when he was writing his grand manifestos about freedom of choice and individual rights.

Whatever Ulbricht himself may be, whether or not the murder for hire allegations are true, however he might have gone about running Silk Road, the libertarian ideals that justify the existence of Silk Road should have their day in court. But that won't happen here, because his defense relies on Silk Road being a terrible thing that somebody else did.

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>the libertarian ideals that justify the existence of Silk Road should have their day in court

Real trials don't play out like they do in hollywood. You don't get to spend your time in court talking about your ideology and lobbying for better laws. The entire trial will be about whether or not he's guilty of breaking the laws that already exist.

The defense can object to letting him explain his libertarian viewpoints if they can convince the judge it is not relevant to the case or charges. Which the prosecutor in this case directly attempted during pretrial last month:

> Prosecutors in the case against alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht want the court to prohibit Ulbricht from saying almost anything political at all, according to a motion filed last week by the government.

> They’re worried that the jury might end up sympathizing with Ulbricht’s politics.

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/silk-road-jury-nullificatio...

If he were being tried by a jury of his peers, it would not need explaining.

That's not what a "jury of one's peers" is.

'peer group' != legal 'peers'. http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/what-is-a-jur...

And this is why I hope I never end up on trial for anything. Some types of people are more easy to dislike than others. For example, I have asperger's. I'm pretty certain that if I ever went on trial for anything, my personality would increase the chances that I get convicted.

Criminal lawyers don't let defendants talk for a reason, that is their job.

I'll never understand this - the ability to petition for the judge to disallow a valid defense, because they're scared it might work. That's the entire point of a defense.

To me, this goes against every freedom of speech. To not be allowed to defend yourself in any and every way possible is to not be free.

Edit: "in any and every truthful way possible" - obviously perjury is perjury.

He shouldn't be allowed to express political views during the trial. It isn't a valid defense because his political views are completely unrelated to the matters at hand. The only purpose of the trial is to determine whether or not he did the things the government says he did. If he did them, then he broke existing laws.

If that were true, there would be no such thing as Jury Nullification. As long as the concept both exists and is valid, a defense that argues the law itself is in fact a completely valid defense.

You're missing my point: I don't want him to stand up in court and lecture on the nature of freedom and personal responsibility like something out of Inherit The Wind, I would just like to see him take the rap for what he (probably) did without this silly "it was the one armed man" defense.

It's not about the trial, because the trial is lost no matter what he does (regardless of whether or not he's innocent, he's going to jail, guaranteed), it's about nailing your colours to the wall and showing the rest of the world that you're willing to go to jail to stand up for the freedoms you ostensibly believe in.

Ulbricht won't be doing any of that, instead he's going to mount a defense that effectively says that his manifesto, his politics, his core beliefs, are all just something to be discarded when it's convenient.

So you want him to be a martyr? With the murder for hire accusations I doubt it...

Ahh OK. It appears I did misunderstand you. Well, if he actually did do the things that the government is claiming, I still wouldn't look at him like he's a champion for libertarian ideals. The person who took the actions of which he is accused is interested in only one thing: money.

People espouse libertarian ideals because they are terrified of the power of the state and do not trust it. To go with this kind of defense, especially when you don't have many options, is not hypocritical. It's easy to say 'have some balls' from the safety of your keyboard.

I didn't suggest it was hypocritical, and nor did I suggest Ulbricht should feel compelled to defend the principles he wrote about. I'm saying that I wish he (or anyone in his position) would fight for those ideals, which are entirely justified in a world where NSA spying is treated as the punchline to a late night show monologue joke.

Someone always has the de facto authority to wield violence.

In modern society, this authority is the state.

In Dread Pirate Robert's universe, no authority should wield violence... except Dread Pirate and his associates if it suites them.

Libertarian and anarchistic ideologies start from the wish that no-one would wield violence and all would be equal.

Unfortunately, how real world scenarios evolve is that existing system is replaced by chaos, from which a few entities reach political authority, at which point they take the authority to wield violence and make the decisions for everyone else they want to make.

Anarchy and the like work only in smaller social groups such as a family or a commune where everyone can rationally assume everyone can be trusted and to act fairly within the context of an uncodified behavioral standard - to stay within the groups culture.

At larger scales these types of population dynamics just don't work, and the stuff rises up which require the equivalent of the functions of modern state to function properly as a whole.

The point is, if there is no central auhtority, someone will become that authority (picture somalian warlords, russia after 1917 revolution and so on).

So replacing current state with an entity on 'non-violence' and non-coercion does not work - these are sociological oxymorons that do not exist.

Well stated, and I completely agree. I think there's a balance to be struck between personal liberty and social responsibility and DPR's writings don't address that balance at all, not to mention his alleged actions.

But there are some core arguments about freedom of choice that Silk Road addressed in some ways, and DPR was a figurehead for those arguments, and to see him ignore those ideals in exchange for a half-hearted defense like this is disappointing, that's all. Whether or not he's guilty, DPR is dead and Silk Road achieved nothing.

<IANAL> His trial probably wouldn't be a proper venue for that. Those principles are that the laws he's accused of breaking shouldn't exist. This would be a very difficult defense to make in a criminal court, which both presupposes the credibility of the laws on the books and its own legitimate capacity to adjudicate them.

The court of popular opinion seems to be edging ever so slightly in Ulbricht's favor. Morally and politically, arguments for minimal government and drug legalization might have some merit. But no one is ever going to convince a judge that, while, the defendant might be guilty, the real crime is that there are even laws against everything he's accused of.

Although I suppose he could use the opportunity to make a statement anyway, regardless of how well it works as a legal defense. I wouldn't blame him either way, really. </IANAL>

Haven't you ever seen the Fountainhead? :-)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041386/

(or read it...)

> The court of popular opinion seems to be edging ever so slightly in Ulbricht's favor.

On what planet? Public opinion just shifted in favor of legalizing marijuana in 2013, but support for keeping everything else illegal is overwhelming: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/drug-legalization-p.... Around 10% of people support legalizing cocaine, crack, heroin, meth, or LSD. 80-85% oppose legalizing those drugs.

The transition in political thought doesn't seem to have been toward "people should be able to freely trade in whatever they want." It seems to have been a change in attitude towards the harmfulness of marijuana specifically.

Methamphetamine is legal so long as you have a permission slip to buy it from an approved dealer (ask for your doctor for desoxyn).

Legalizing marijuana alone is a shift, if not a huge one.

How about we wait for his defence to be tested in court before we pre-judge it as "doing whatever it takes to beat a charge"? Did you stop to think it might possibly be true before complaining that your own interests - having the trial be a showcase for libertarian ideals - may not end up being served by this particular man's prosecution?

>Did you stop to think it might possibly be true before complaining that your own interests - having the trial be a showcase for libertarian ideals - may not end up being served by this particular man's prosecution?

Nope. My opinion is that it's a desperate ploy from a guilty man who knows that the strength of the evidence against him is so great that he's resorting to a defense they wouldn't use in a movie plot because it's so unbelievable. I'm entirely unapologetic about my opinion, because that's what it is, an opinion. Fortunately I'm neither judge nor jury in this case.

Also, don't put words in my mouth and don't ascribe motives to me that I don't have. The very first sentence of my comment says explicitly that I understand he's free to mount whatever defense he likes - it's his freedom to lose.

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