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Per Wikipedia - "Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with any murder for hire". Wikipedia does say that there was evidence that was

Per Wikipedia - "Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with any murder for hire". Wikipedia does say that there was evidence that was shown at trial about the murder for hire thing and that it did weigh against him in sentencing - which seems odd to me that crimes you haven't been charged with or convicted of could impact your sentence. Wikipedia also says "Ulbricht was separately indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single murder-for-hire charge, alleging that he contracted to kill one of his employees (a former Silk Road moderator). Prosecutors moved to drop this indictment after his New York conviction and sentence became final" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Arrest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Arrest

tptacek 4y ago
That's right, he was charged with a "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy", with 4 overt acts, a, b, c, and d, and b and c were the murder-for-hire schemes. The overt acts of a conspiracy charge are the guts of the charge itself, and the prosecution has to prove them at trial. 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.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  I'm having a hard time squaring your comment with the wikipedia article that you seem to agree with. Ulbricht wasn't convicted on murder for hire charges and the time he was charged on a murder for hire thing that charge was dropped. You seem to be saying that the reason he wasn't charged/convicted is because nobody was actually murdered. That seems hard for me to believe because the state would have known nobody was actually murdered when they were writing the indictment (which alleges the murder for hire plot) or when they were bringing the original charges. It's also true that agents involved in the plot, the agent Ulbricht thought he was buying the hit from specifically, were arrested and convicted for stealing from the silk road. I think it's way more plausible that the government decided not to go in to the extent of the corruption of their officers at trial, because it would provide a good reason to think about what other government dishonesty their might be, rather than the government deciding that they can't charge attempted murder for hire because nobody died. https://www.wired.com/2015/03/dea-agent-charged-acting-paid-mole-silk-road/ https://www.wired.com/2015/03/dea-agent-charged-acting-paid-...
  - tptacek 4y ago
    51% of Wikipedians can believe whatever they'd like to, but the primary source documents are right there for you to read. Nobody was actually murdered because the murder-for-hire scheme was an FBI sting.
    - ALittleLight 4y ago
      But the primary source documents all agree that Ulbricht wasn't charged or convicted with murder-for-hire and that the agent Ulbricht contracted with was arrested and convicted for corruption-related crimes. It's also obviously not true that somebody has to be dead for the state to charge murder-for-hire related crimes. If that were the case, the state wouldn't have agents pretending to be hitmen to catch people trying to hire hitmen.
      - tptacek 4y ago
        I really don't know how to state this any more plainly: he was charged, in the same manner as other drug kingpins have been charged, with a narcotics conspiracy whose overt acts --- in the indictment, as charged behavior, which the jury had to find true beyond a reasonable doubt --- were comprised of two different murder-for-hire schemes. He was convicted of that charge. He appealed, and his appeal didn't contest that charge or any of the findings of fact (or, for that matter, testimony leading up to that finding of fact) for that charge. The second bit, about nobody needing to be dead for him to be charged, we agree on. One reason I think people are confused about this is that there was a second prosecution, by a different team of prosecutors in a different case (out of Baltimore?) that charged the murder-for-hire scheme more directly. That may be, but he was still charged for it in the SDNY case, which earned him a life sentence. SDNY was not evasive about this! They not only indicted for the murder-for-hire scheme, won a conviction on it, and had him sentenced based in large part on it, but also crowed about it in their press release. I'm sort of baffled by the extremely common belief that the DOJ "dropped the charges" about the murder-for-hire scheme. They did more or less the opposite thing.
        4y ago
- notahacker 4y ago
  > I've never read an exculpatory explanation of Ulbricht's payment to arrange murders that made any sense at all. This. The mental gymnastics involved in people pivoting from "the justice system is awful, especially the way they've treated poor little Ulbricht" to "the only possible standard for judging Ulbricht's character and intentions is the decisions the justice system made or didn't make" is Olympian.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    I'm just saying, they got black-and-white evidence that Ulbricht arranged to pay for a murder, and the Internet has weird stories about how the payment and later murder "confirmation" were some kind of communicative act between Ulbricht and other associates that didn't have anything to do with arranging an actual murder, and it all makes just literally no sense at all. I'm not making a normative claim about the fairness of the US justice system, I'm just saying that if you're trying to pay off a witness, the absolute last way you'd ever structure that payment is as a phony murder for hire scheme.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      I agree. My beef's entirely with the people simultaneously claiming we can't agree with the justice system's verdict, but also that we absolutely can't form our own negative judgements of Ulbricht's actions because apparently the only relevant standard for whether orders like “can you change the order to execute rather than torture” made Ulbricht a terribly unsympathetic character is a claim it wasn't the basis of the judicial verdict...
      - meowface 4y ago
        It's not about sympathy but justice. I disagree with tptacek's characterization of it as not being legal finagling. Burying murder-for-hire attempts under "narcotics trafficking conspiracy" is obtuse and opaque. He should be explicitly charged. And yes, perhaps this means the fault isn't with the prosecutors or judge but with the scope of the narcotics trafficking conspiracy laws themselves; it's still sketchy. I'm not sympathetic to him in the slightest. I believe he's almost certainly guilty of attempting to have those people murdered. I think his sentence should be overturned and I think he should be explicitly charged with attempted murder, and hopefully he will be convicted of those crimes and re-sentenced to life in prison. (Whether or not that's legally viable, I have no idea; I just think it's what ought to happen.)

tptacek 4y ago

That's right, he was charged with a "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy", with 4 overt acts, a, b, c, and d, and b and c were the murder-for-hire schemes. The overt acts of a conspiracy charge are the guts of the charge itself, and the prosecution has to prove them at trial. 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.

ALittleLight 4y ago
I'm having a hard time squaring your comment with the wikipedia article that you seem to agree with. Ulbricht wasn't convicted on murder for hire charges and the time he was charged on a murder for hire thing that charge was dropped. You seem to be saying that the reason he wasn't charged/convicted is because nobody was actually murdered. That seems hard for me to believe because the state would have known nobody was actually murdered when they were writing the indictment (which alleges the murder for hire plot) or when they were bringing the original charges. It's also true that agents involved in the plot, the agent Ulbricht thought he was buying the hit from specifically, were arrested and convicted for stealing from the silk road. I think it's way more plausible that the government decided not to go in to the extent of the corruption of their officers at trial, because it would provide a good reason to think about what other government dishonesty their might be, rather than the government deciding that they can't charge attempted murder for hire because nobody died. https://www.wired.com/2015/03/dea-agent-charged-acting-paid-mole-silk-road/ https://www.wired.com/2015/03/dea-agent-charged-acting-paid-...
- tptacek 4y ago
  51% of Wikipedians can believe whatever they'd like to, but the primary source documents are right there for you to read. Nobody was actually murdered because the murder-for-hire scheme was an FBI sting.
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    But the primary source documents all agree that Ulbricht wasn't charged or convicted with murder-for-hire and that the agent Ulbricht contracted with was arrested and convicted for corruption-related crimes. It's also obviously not true that somebody has to be dead for the state to charge murder-for-hire related crimes. If that were the case, the state wouldn't have agents pretending to be hitmen to catch people trying to hire hitmen.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      I really don't know how to state this any more plainly: he was charged, in the same manner as other drug kingpins have been charged, with a narcotics conspiracy whose overt acts --- in the indictment, as charged behavior, which the jury had to find true beyond a reasonable doubt --- were comprised of two different murder-for-hire schemes. He was convicted of that charge. He appealed, and his appeal didn't contest that charge or any of the findings of fact (or, for that matter, testimony leading up to that finding of fact) for that charge. The second bit, about nobody needing to be dead for him to be charged, we agree on. One reason I think people are confused about this is that there was a second prosecution, by a different team of prosecutors in a different case (out of Baltimore?) that charged the murder-for-hire scheme more directly. That may be, but he was still charged for it in the SDNY case, which earned him a life sentence. SDNY was not evasive about this! They not only indicted for the murder-for-hire scheme, won a conviction on it, and had him sentenced based in large part on it, but also crowed about it in their press release. I'm sort of baffled by the extremely common belief that the DOJ "dropped the charges" about the murder-for-hire scheme. They did more or less the opposite thing.
      - 4y ago
notahacker 4y ago
> I've never read an exculpatory explanation of Ulbricht's payment to arrange murders that made any sense at all. This. The mental gymnastics involved in people pivoting from "the justice system is awful, especially the way they've treated poor little Ulbricht" to "the only possible standard for judging Ulbricht's character and intentions is the decisions the justice system made or didn't make" is Olympian.
- tptacek 4y ago
  I'm just saying, they got black-and-white evidence that Ulbricht arranged to pay for a murder, and the Internet has weird stories about how the payment and later murder "confirmation" were some kind of communicative act between Ulbricht and other associates that didn't have anything to do with arranging an actual murder, and it all makes just literally no sense at all. I'm not making a normative claim about the fairness of the US justice system, I'm just saying that if you're trying to pay off a witness, the absolute last way you'd ever structure that payment is as a phony murder for hire scheme.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    I agree. My beef's entirely with the people simultaneously claiming we can't agree with the justice system's verdict, but also that we absolutely can't form our own negative judgements of Ulbricht's actions because apparently the only relevant standard for whether orders like “can you change the order to execute rather than torture” made Ulbricht a terribly unsympathetic character is a claim it wasn't the basis of the judicial verdict...
    - meowface 4y ago
      It's not about sympathy but justice. I disagree with tptacek's characterization of it as not being legal finagling. Burying murder-for-hire attempts under "narcotics trafficking conspiracy" is obtuse and opaque. He should be explicitly charged. And yes, perhaps this means the fault isn't with the prosecutors or judge but with the scope of the narcotics trafficking conspiracy laws themselves; it's still sketchy. I'm not sympathetic to him in the slightest. I believe he's almost certainly guilty of attempting to have those people murdered. I think his sentence should be overturned and I think he should be explicitly charged with attempted murder, and hopefully he will be convicted of those crimes and re-sentenced to life in prison. (Whether or not that's legally viable, I have no idea; I just think it's what ought to happen.)