11 ms·

Unsealed Transcript Shows How a Judge Justified Ross Ulbricht's Life Sentence

65 points by oneJob 11y ago

kazinator 11y ago
Judge> It was a world of laws that you created, they were your laws. It is fictional to think of Silk Road as some place of freedom. Ouch, terrible strawman; freedom doesn't mean freedom from all laws. It does entail freedom from some unreasonable laws.
- xirdstl 11y ago
  Who defines 'unreasonable'?
  - kazinator 11y ago
    Hopefully not who, but what. Such as, for starters, the "doesn't affect anyone else" principle.
    - chrischen 11y ago
      Killing people affects people.
      - Synaesthesia 11y ago
        He was never charged with killing anyone, nor convicted of it. The charges were all dropped, probably all trumped up charges to smear Ross.
      - kazinator 11y ago
        I don't think that's what the judge is talking about in the remark about Silk Road having laws. I can't imagine that it is related to the topic of murder for hire.
    - xirdstl 11y ago
      I think it takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to apply that principle to this case.
    - FireBeyond 11y ago
      This is another one of these memes that has caught on, but has little hold on reality. Too many people say "but this is so much better than drug dealers on street corners. No-one gets harmed this way, and there's no violence". And that's absolutely incorrect. You might want to read "El Narco", or many other documentaries that talk about the pipeline from growing to cultivation, production. There's still huge amounts of violence in the system, that are in no way alleviated by having some magical fairy happy land online marketplace.
stormcrowsx 11y ago
It's terrible that we are doing this to someone who probably would have learned their lesson with only 5-10 years of prison and been able to return to society. He had the potential to return as a productive member of society and now instead he will be a lifelong debt all for assisting in the sale of drugs that people willingly purchased knowing the risk of death from those drugs. He's no saint but this punishment is unreasonable and it seems like the Judge was just out to get him.
- randyrand 11y ago
  I agree but if they also want to use the strict punishment to deter then it would probably have to be more than that.
  - clamprecht 11y ago
    What sentence would be sufficient, if 10 years isn't?
    - tptacek 11y ago
      Simply for running a drug market, with no additional criminal conduct? Just the nuts-and-bolts of running the site, setting up Tor, taking money, that kind of stuff? 1-2 years seems about right. You think about the very low barrier to starting a site like that up, and then you think about the kind of person likely to stumble into that scheme, and then what it would take to deter them and others from trying it, and it seems like you want enough of a sentence so that it's for real, but nothing more than that. But for paying to have people killed? Life seems appropriate. Maybe, if you want to take a more Scandinavian approach to sentencing, you'd say "10-15 years". Long enough that the convict comes out of prison effectively living a different life than they were before. Enough to completely disrupt their previous connections.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - 11y ago
kw71 11y ago
Wow. She is on a mission. I wonder what her medical qualifications are, and also what happened behind the scenes to persuade her.
stahlkopf 11y ago
Interesting how the judge is outraged by the recommendation of 'Doctor X' to the person to discontinue their antidepressants before taking MDMA. Surely she must know the highly elevated risk of mixing anti-depressants and a drug like MDMA can cause Serotonin Syndrome and lead to death....
- nness 11y ago
  I think the judges point was that someone responsible would not recommend MDMA in these circumstances, rather than tell the other party to try and juggle their prescription medication and drug usage.
- stevecalifornia 11y ago
  An actual doctor would say: "Dont do MDMA. Don't get off your anti-depressants."
  - stahlkopf 11y ago
    This is akin to abstinence-only sex education. It just doesn't work.
    - cwyers 11y ago
      No, it's like abstinence-only Russian roulette education.
    - task_queue 11y ago
      I'd agree if there weren't safe ways to have sex. Breaking a treatment regimen to use a drug that wreaks havoc on the specific neurotransmitter the antidepressant acts on doesn't work. There is no way to reliably control the outcome of stopping treatment and taking street drugs.
- scintill76 11y ago
  Dr. X doesn't think it's an issue: "Another asked about combining MDMA with an SSRI and Dr. X advises that there is a theoretical risk but, in his opinion, it is overestimated." I was wondering if the judge was considering increased risk of suicide due to withdrawal from the antidepressant. But in my quick layman's research that particular anti-depressant doesn't seem to have that issue.
hapless 11y ago
The prosecution was outstandingly successful in demonstrating that Ross Ulbricht is a violent, dangerous criminal. It is not surprising he was sentenced as such. This is what it looks like when the system works. Society is safer with Ross behind bars.
chimeracoder 11y ago
Okay, so I'm not going to criticize Ulbricht's sentencing, because (a) it's hard to make a case to go easy on him, and (b) I don't really care enough about Ulbricht in particular. But from a drug policy perspective, this language jumps out at me: > Ulbricht’s defense had argued the site reduced harm because it kept drug deals off the streets and allowed users to share information about drug safety. The transcript from the final day of court proceedings shows how Forrest categorically rejected that claim, outlining the social costs of drug use from an individual level to mass scale. “The social costs of drugs are manifest,” she said. “The user is only one part of the equation, that is where much of this harm reduction argument comes from and it is focused on the user. The user is one part of a massive, massive worldwide scheme of drug trafficking and if you sat where I sat you would see that the user is not the end… So, harm reduction focused on the user is missing the point.” First, let's make the assumption that all those users would have obtained the drugs some other way without the Silk Road. In that case, all that trafficking cost that happens before the seller lists the drug on the marketstill would have occurred. Silk Road was just as responsible for that cost as the end user[0]. Now, let's make the assumption that all those users would not have obtained the drugs some other way. That's basically saying that trafficking - which is an avoidable cost - is what makes the Silk Road so egregious. In that case, the right action is to address the drug trafficking trade itself. Again, Silk Road had only a small role in that. If we fixed the issues with drug trafficking, perhaps we would have a very different kind of marketplace than what Silk Road was (with a very different kind of person running it). In case it's not obvious by this point, I think the drug war is pretty backwards. I don't really have any sympathy for Ulbricht or the Silk Road, but I'm also not impressed by the judge's arguments in this sentencing. [0] this is not counting, of course, Ulbricht's own actions (e.g. attempting to hire an assassin).
smoyer 11y ago
"Forrest said because the case was so widely publicized, a more severe sentence could deter similar crimes in the future." As others have noted, I doubt the judge spent 100 hours making this decision (that's two and a half person-weeks full-time). I don't condone what Ulbricht did but I don't think his sentencing was rational.
- qq66 11y ago
  If you want examples of irrational sentences they are sadly not hard to find: http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/107830/ http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/107830/
Sleaker 11y ago
I wonder how Germany would have sentenced him? Anybody else read that article about the german prison system and rehabilitation?
joesmo 11y ago
Judge: "So, harm reduction focused on the user is missing the point." I think the judge is missing the point here, the point being an understanding of harm reduction and apparently, surprisingly the effects of drugs on society. No wonder she gave him life. She doesn't even understand what "harm reduction" is. The rest was just nonsense.
superplussed 11y ago
This quote of the judge as he delivering his verdict is so crazy (he is reading from Ulbricht's journal): Two days later on April 8 you write: "Sent payments to angel for hit on Tony76 and his three associates. Began setting up hecho as standby" -- I have no idea what that is -- "refactored main and category pages to be more efficient."
- xirdstl 11y ago
  That is pretty chilling... Why did it take so long to refactor the main pages if they were so inefficient?
- nness 11y ago
  Not to nitpick, but the judge was female :)
  - discodave 11y ago
    How is that comment relevant?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- dang 11y ago
  Please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
  - littletimmy 11y ago
    Sorry. How do I delete my comment?
    - dang 11y ago
      After the edit window expires, you have to ask us to do it for you. In general it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com. But I'll delete this one on the assumption that your question means you want us to.
      - littletimmy 11y ago
        Thanks!
kenesom1 11y ago
Forrest was horribly biased against the defense. The prosecution's case was extremely problematic - resting on a chain of flimsy evidentiary and legal assumptions that would never have survived proper judicial scrutiny. The appeal will expose serious irregularities and hopefully overturn the decision. Forrest spent a year at the Department of Justice before being confirmed as a federal judge in 2011. Her handling of the case was pay back to her sponsors at the DOJ. From the transcript: "No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court". Her comments smack of racism and classism. She reveals her implicit belief that since illicit drugs are associated in the media with oppressed minorities or less affluent communities, Ulbricht isn't entitled to such an "uppity" defense. She clearly can't fathom any possible reason why anyone might be opposed to prohibition and mass incarceration. The transcript: "What Silk Road really was was a social market expander of a socially harmful drug that we have deemed in our democratic process to be unacceptable" Except polls show that most Americans are opposed to US drug policies, even for "hard" substances like heroin [1]. Any discussion about drug laws that doesn't acknowledge its racist roots or the commercial interests involved is missing the point. [1] http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2014/04/new-pew-poll-confirms-americans-ready-end-war-drugs http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2014/04/new-pew-poll-confirms...
- x5n1 11y ago
  Ultimately, judges are God when you are in the court room, or treated as if they were. In reality judges are human beings with human problems. We should replaces judges with AI. AI is much better at acting like God than fallible human beings with their biases and their legal systems which are basically like religions. Ultimately though the guy was guilty and should have spent 5-10 years in prison.

65 points by oneJob 11y ago

Judge> It was a world of laws that you created, they were your laws. It is fictional to think of Silk Road as some place of freedom. Ouch, terrible strawman; freedom doesn't mean freedom from all laws. It does entail freedom from some unreasonable laws.

xirdstl 11y ago
Who defines 'unreasonable'?
- kazinator 11y ago
  Hopefully not who, but what. Such as, for starters, the "doesn't affect anyone else" principle.
  - chrischen 11y ago
    Killing people affects people.
    - Synaesthesia 11y ago
      He was never charged with killing anyone, nor convicted of it. The charges were all dropped, probably all trumped up charges to smear Ross.
    - kazinator 11y ago
      I don't think that's what the judge is talking about in the remark about Silk Road having laws. I can't imagine that it is related to the topic of murder for hire.
  - xirdstl 11y ago
    I think it takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to apply that principle to this case.
  - FireBeyond 11y ago
    This is another one of these memes that has caught on, but has little hold on reality. Too many people say "but this is so much better than drug dealers on street corners. No-one gets harmed this way, and there's no violence". And that's absolutely incorrect. You might want to read "El Narco", or many other documentaries that talk about the pipeline from growing to cultivation, production. There's still huge amounts of violence in the system, that are in no way alleviated by having some magical fairy happy land online marketplace.

stormcrowsx 11y ago

It's terrible that we are doing this to someone who probably would have learned their lesson with only 5-10 years of prison and been able to return to society. He had the potential to return as a productive member of society and now instead he will be a lifelong debt all for assisting in the sale of drugs that people willingly purchased knowing the risk of death from those drugs. He's no saint but this punishment is unreasonable and it seems like the Judge was just out to get him.

randyrand 11y ago
I agree but if they also want to use the strict punishment to deter then it would probably have to be more than that.
- clamprecht 11y ago
  What sentence would be sufficient, if 10 years isn't?
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Simply for running a drug market, with no additional criminal conduct? Just the nuts-and-bolts of running the site, setting up Tor, taking money, that kind of stuff? 1-2 years seems about right. You think about the very low barrier to starting a site like that up, and then you think about the kind of person likely to stumble into that scheme, and then what it would take to deter them and others from trying it, and it seems like you want enough of a sentence so that it's for real, but nothing more than that. But for paying to have people killed? Life seems appropriate. Maybe, if you want to take a more Scandinavian approach to sentencing, you'd say "10-15 years". Long enough that the convict comes out of prison effectively living a different life than they were before. Enough to completely disrupt their previous connections.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - 11y ago

kw71 11y ago

Wow. She is on a mission. I wonder what her medical qualifications are, and also what happened behind the scenes to persuade her.

stahlkopf 11y ago

Interesting how the judge is outraged by the recommendation of 'Doctor X' to the person to discontinue their antidepressants before taking MDMA. Surely she must know the highly elevated risk of mixing anti-depressants and a drug like MDMA can cause Serotonin Syndrome and lead to death....

nness 11y ago
I think the judges point was that someone responsible would not recommend MDMA in these circumstances, rather than tell the other party to try and juggle their prescription medication and drug usage.
stevecalifornia 11y ago
An actual doctor would say: "Dont do MDMA. Don't get off your anti-depressants."
- stahlkopf 11y ago
  This is akin to abstinence-only sex education. It just doesn't work.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    No, it's like abstinence-only Russian roulette education.
  - task_queue 11y ago
    I'd agree if there weren't safe ways to have sex. Breaking a treatment regimen to use a drug that wreaks havoc on the specific neurotransmitter the antidepressant acts on doesn't work. There is no way to reliably control the outcome of stopping treatment and taking street drugs.
scintill76 11y ago
Dr. X doesn't think it's an issue: "Another asked about combining MDMA with an SSRI and Dr. X advises that there is a theoretical risk but, in his opinion, it is overestimated." I was wondering if the judge was considering increased risk of suicide due to withdrawal from the antidepressant. But in my quick layman's research that particular anti-depressant doesn't seem to have that issue.

hapless 11y ago

The prosecution was outstandingly successful in demonstrating that Ross Ulbricht is a violent, dangerous criminal. It is not surprising he was sentenced as such. This is what it looks like when the system works. Society is safer with Ross behind bars.

chimeracoder 11y ago

Okay, so I'm not going to criticize Ulbricht's sentencing, because (a) it's hard to make a case to go easy on him, and (b) I don't really care enough about Ulbricht in particular. But from a drug policy perspective, this language jumps out at me: > Ulbricht’s defense had argued the site reduced harm because it kept drug deals off the streets and allowed users to share information about drug safety. The transcript from the final day of court proceedings shows how Forrest categorically rejected that claim, outlining the social costs of drug use from an individual level to mass scale. “The social costs of drugs are manifest,” she said. “The user is only one part of the equation, that is where much of this harm reduction argument comes from and it is focused on the user. The user is one part of a massive, massive worldwide scheme of drug trafficking and if you sat where I sat you would see that the user is not the end… So, harm reduction focused on the user is missing the point.” First, let's make the assumption that all those users would have obtained the drugs some other way without the Silk Road. In that case, all that trafficking cost that happens before the seller lists the drug on the marketstill would have occurred. Silk Road was just as responsible for that cost as the end user[0]. Now, let's make the assumption that all those users would not have obtained the drugs some other way. That's basically saying that trafficking - which is an avoidable cost - is what makes the Silk Road so egregious. In that case, the right action is to address the drug trafficking trade itself. Again, Silk Road had only a small role in that. If we fixed the issues with drug trafficking, perhaps we would have a very different kind of marketplace than what Silk Road was (with a very different kind of person running it). In case it's not obvious by this point, I think the drug war is pretty backwards. I don't really have any sympathy for Ulbricht or the Silk Road, but I'm also not impressed by the judge's arguments in this sentencing. [0] this is not counting, of course, Ulbricht's own actions (e.g. attempting to hire an assassin).

smoyer 11y ago

"Forrest said because the case was so widely publicized, a more severe sentence could deter similar crimes in the future." As others have noted, I doubt the judge spent 100 hours making this decision (that's two and a half person-weeks full-time). I don't condone what Ulbricht did but I don't think his sentencing was rational.

qq66 11y ago
If you want examples of irrational sentences they are sadly not hard to find: http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/107830/ http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/107830/

Sleaker 11y ago

I wonder how Germany would have sentenced him? Anybody else read that article about the german prison system and rehabilitation?

joesmo 11y ago

Judge: "So, harm reduction focused on the user is missing the point." I think the judge is missing the point here, the point being an understanding of harm reduction and apparently, surprisingly the effects of drugs on society. No wonder she gave him life. She doesn't even understand what "harm reduction" is. The rest was just nonsense.

superplussed 11y ago

This quote of the judge as he delivering his verdict is so crazy (he is reading from Ulbricht's journal): Two days later on April 8 you write: "Sent payments to angel for hit on Tony76 and his three associates. Began setting up hecho as standby" -- I have no idea what that is -- "refactored main and category pages to be more efficient."

xirdstl 11y ago
That is pretty chilling... Why did it take so long to refactor the main pages if they were so inefficient?
nness 11y ago
Not to nitpick, but the judge was female :)
- discodave 11y ago
  How is that comment relevant?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

dang 11y ago
Please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
- littletimmy 11y ago
  Sorry. How do I delete my comment?
  - dang 11y ago
    After the edit window expires, you have to ask us to do it for you. In general it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com. But I'll delete this one on the assumption that your question means you want us to.
    - littletimmy 11y ago
      Thanks!

kenesom1 11y ago

Forrest was horribly biased against the defense. The prosecution's case was extremely problematic - resting on a chain of flimsy evidentiary and legal assumptions that would never have survived proper judicial scrutiny. The appeal will expose serious irregularities and hopefully overturn the decision. Forrest spent a year at the Department of Justice before being confirmed as a federal judge in 2011. Her handling of the case was pay back to her sponsors at the DOJ. From the transcript: "No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court". Her comments smack of racism and classism. She reveals her implicit belief that since illicit drugs are associated in the media with oppressed minorities or less affluent communities, Ulbricht isn't entitled to such an "uppity" defense. She clearly can't fathom any possible reason why anyone might be opposed to prohibition and mass incarceration. The transcript: "What Silk Road really was was a social market expander of a socially harmful drug that we have deemed in our democratic process to be unacceptable" Except polls show that most Americans are opposed to US drug policies, even for "hard" substances like heroin [1]. Any discussion about drug laws that doesn't acknowledge its racist roots or the commercial interests involved is missing the point. [1] http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2014/04/new-pew-poll-confirms-americans-ready-end-war-drugs http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2014/04/new-pew-poll-confirms...

x5n1 11y ago
Ultimately, judges are God when you are in the court room, or treated as if they were. In reality judges are human beings with human problems. We should replaces judges with AI. AI is much better at acting like God than fallible human beings with their biases and their legal systems which are basically like religions. Ultimately though the guy was guilty and should have spent 5-10 years in prison.