5 ms·

He tried to have people murdered. He ran an illicit marketplace for tons of illegal activity. He deserves life.

throwaway654329 4y ago
In a civilized country such as many developed countries in Europe a life sentence is roughly fifteen to twenty years. That is a remarkably long time. It is an extreme punishment. 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.
- Nursie 4y ago
  > He is by many international legal definitions a political prisoner 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.
  - ArrayBoundCheck 4y ago
    > 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
    - etchalon 4y ago
      The idea "it was just a website" is so absolutely weird.
      - throwaway654329 4y ago
        Indeed, it was the realization of his political ideals, no matter how wacky they may seem. 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.
  - throwaway654329 4y ago
    Your claim doesn’t invalidate my claim. It may be that you personally disagree and that’s your political right. Like the man said: you’re entitled to your opinion but not your own facts. Take a look at the definition of relative and absolute political offenses. It’s not what is popularly understood. One need not be Che to be a political prisoner. For example, a person may become one after suffering torture in interrogation by the state or a proxy of the state after a completely normal criminal activity. 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.
- pennaMan 4y ago
  >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. 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.
  - throwaway654329 4y ago
    I understand the why - the state felt challenged - ultimately when the state is the supposed victim, the crime is inherently political. It’s nice to see someone in this thread acknowledge the political nature of his situation and thus his status; elsewhere in the discussion there is some pushback. 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.
    - pawsforthought 4y ago
      Who even are the victims in the Ulbricht case?
      - throwaway654329 4y ago
        “The people” - of course. So you and me! Everyone we know! Society! 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!
baby 4y ago
He also probably changed a lot of people’s lives for the better by facilitating access to some drugs
- throwaway654329 4y ago
  This. He explicitly wanted to remove opportunity for violence of in-person transactions. This fact wasn’t even a meaningful mitigating factor in sentencing.
  - hluska 4y ago
    I’m confused. He explicitly wanted to remove the opportunity for violence, yet he tried to have multiple people killed? He was against violence yet was so unphased by his crimes that he kept a photo of a victim in a folder in his hard drive? 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.
    - throwaway654329 4y ago
      Yeah, it’s confusing, his stated political goals and the claims of the state with the clear goal to discredit him seem to clash. Perhaps we should doubt the state, presume innocence of the accused, and ensure he is given a separate trial on the murder for hire charges. They are accusations of a terrible crime. They remain accusations even though evidence about them was included in other (political) charges for which he was convicted. 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.
ddtaylor 4y ago
> He tried to have people murdered 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.
- tzs 4y ago
  The attempted murder for hire stuff was included as part of the conspiracy to commit narcotics trafficking charge, and the evidence for it was included in the case for proving that charge.

In a civilized country such as many developed countries in Europe a life sentence is roughly fifteen to twenty years. That is a remarkably long time. It is an extreme punishment. 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.

Nursie 4y ago
> He is by many international legal definitions a political prisoner 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.
- ArrayBoundCheck 4y ago
  > 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
  - etchalon 4y ago
    The idea "it was just a website" is so absolutely weird.
    - throwaway654329 4y ago
      Indeed, it was the realization of his political ideals, no matter how wacky they may seem. 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.
- throwaway654329 4y ago
  Your claim doesn’t invalidate my claim. It may be that you personally disagree and that’s your political right. Like the man said: you’re entitled to your opinion but not your own facts. Take a look at the definition of relative and absolute political offenses. It’s not what is popularly understood. One need not be Che to be a political prisoner. For example, a person may become one after suffering torture in interrogation by the state or a proxy of the state after a completely normal criminal activity. 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.
pennaMan 4y ago
>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. 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.
- throwaway654329 4y ago
  I understand the why - the state felt challenged - ultimately when the state is the supposed victim, the crime is inherently political. It’s nice to see someone in this thread acknowledge the political nature of his situation and thus his status; elsewhere in the discussion there is some pushback. 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.
  - pawsforthought 4y ago
    Who even are the victims in the Ulbricht case?
    - throwaway654329 4y ago
      “The people” - of course. So you and me! Everyone we know! Society! 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!

baby 4y ago

He also probably changed a lot of people’s lives for the better by facilitating access to some drugs

throwaway654329 4y ago
This. He explicitly wanted to remove opportunity for violence of in-person transactions. This fact wasn’t even a meaningful mitigating factor in sentencing.
- hluska 4y ago
  I’m confused. He explicitly wanted to remove the opportunity for violence, yet he tried to have multiple people killed? He was against violence yet was so unphased by his crimes that he kept a photo of a victim in a folder in his hard drive? 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.
  - throwaway654329 4y ago
    Yeah, it’s confusing, his stated political goals and the claims of the state with the clear goal to discredit him seem to clash. Perhaps we should doubt the state, presume innocence of the accused, and ensure he is given a separate trial on the murder for hire charges. They are accusations of a terrible crime. They remain accusations even though evidence about them was included in other (political) charges for which he was convicted. 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.

ddtaylor 4y ago

> He tried to have people murdered 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.

tzs 4y ago
The attempted murder for hire stuff was included as part of the conspiracy to commit narcotics trafficking charge, and the evidence for it was included in the case for proving that charge.