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.
>"No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court. It is a privileged argument, it is an argument from one of privilege. You are no better a person than any other drug dealer and your education does not give you a special place of privilege in our criminal justice system. It makes it less explicable why you did what you did."
You can argue that our drug laws are wrong or the punishments are too extreme, but singling out Ulbrich for the specifics ways in which he clearly and repeatedly violated those laws is showing favoritism. If his crimes didn't involve the Internet, there would be nothing newsworthy about his arrest and sentencing.
Untrue.. The first several pounds of shrooms on the Silk Road were grown and sold by Ulbricht. He claims credit for "Several Kilograms" in his diary.. Several kilos is well into the tens of thousands of dollars range..
I can understand the harm of opiates and stimulants, but are psychedelics really that damaging to society? And if he grew them himself it wasn't contributing to harmful suppliers...
I personally know of two people in my social circles who committed suicides on psychedelics. You can definitely argue that such a thing might have happened even without the psychedelics but I'm convinced that being in that altered state of mind pushed these people over the edge (literally in one case).
I'm personally pro-legalization of a lot of drugs. I do not want to close myself off to the clear negative effects of said drugs though. I think we should all remain honest and proportionate about them.
I did a quick search on google scholar. Don't see any articles linking psychedelic use to suicide and there is a study of 130,000 people failing to find a link:
A study failing to find a link between psychedelic use and suicide doesn't mean that psychedelics never cause suicide, it means that on average they don't seem to.
Banning psychedelics will lead to at least some deaths. Not banning psychedelics will lead to at least some deaths. This is true of many many policies.
Ultimately the question is a cost-benefit analysis.
>You can argue that our drug laws are wrong or the punishments are too extreme, but singling out Ulbrich for the specifics ways in which he clearly and repeatedly violated those laws is showing favoritism. If his crimes didn't involve the Internet, there would be nothing newsworthy about his arrest and sentencing.
Seriously?
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE SPECIFICS. Accidentally beat someone to death in a fight you started and you might serve a decade or two. Beat them to death for fun, eat their heart, feed the rest to a dog and light their house on fire while you're at it and you'll likely serve life. Both are 1st degree murder but that's about where the similarity ends.
The first example is not first degree murder, it's second degree. First degree has to be premeditated and deliberate. You're right, context is important, it's why we have judges determine sentences and not the law, but that's a poor example.
The problem is they didn't have to prove anything here. It's very common in federal court to plead and be convicted of one thing, and then they bring in all this other shit at sentencing. The burden at trial is "beyond a reasonable doubt", but the bar at sentencing is "preponderance of the evidence" I believe. And I don't buy it for a second that the judge thought about this sentence for 100 hours. Federal judges sentence people to life in prison every single week, and they are appointed for life - do the math. I wish there were a tally of stats of how many life sentences each judge has handed out to defendants.
In my case, I was convicted of a crime that was for the physical theft and sale of circuit boards, had nothing to do with the Internet or hacking, and yet I was banned from the Internet upon my release from prison. This part of the sentence was out of the blue, and we had no opportunity to even prepare a defense for it (and in 1995, no one in the court room really knew what the Internet was except me and a few of my friends who attended the hearing). It's really fucked but it's their modus operandi.
That's not true. The murder-for-hire scheme wasn't simply "related conduct": it was also a predicate of the conspiracy charge, which had to sustain a "reasonable doubt" standard at trial, and a sentencing accelerator that met a "preponderance of evidence" standard during sentencing. Both are discussed in the transcript.
I do appreciate the color from your own experiences. It's certainly not my contention that sentencing is in general fair, or even that this particular sentence was fair. Certainly: sentencing for computer crimes is egregiously unfair.
But the Ulbricht trial gets past a lot of these issues. The judge notes:
* Ulbricht paid to have someone killed. He was told that person had a wife and child. Ulbricht paid anyways. The money was taken. There is no evidence he was role-playing.
* Later, Ulbricht paid to have someone else killed. The would-be assassins informed him that the target lived with 3 other people. Ulbricht paid extra to have those people killed too. The money was taken. There is no evidence he was role-playing.
At this point in the transcript, it's like: what do you think is going to happen?
Ok, then I was misinformed on Ross's case, if he was convicted for the murder conspiracy. I don't know first-hand what happened in his case. I do know first-hand what happened in my case (and in many of cases of friends) where the US Attorney (the prosecutor) misled the court or outright lied, or had a witness lie, to get the defendant a higher sentence. They do it so routinely that it casts doubt on all cases now (for me, at least).
he wasn't. Alleged murders, without ever being tried before court, were used to cause sentence enhancement. All the "evidence" and "testimony" for the murder charges weren't even enough to sustain the charges, less bring them for trial. At the time of the conviction, it wasn't known that the agents were corrupt and thus, not surprisingly, the Judge gave their testimonies all the possible weight and came down that hard on the Ulbricht.
>At the time of the conviction, it wasn't known that the agents were corrupt and thus, not surprisingly, the Judge gave their testimonies all the possible weight and came down that hard on the Ulbricht.
stand corrected. Judge did know that the agent was corrupted. The murder-for-hire allegations used at the sentencing didn't even have as much as a testimony of corrupt agent behind them.
>But the Ulbricht trial gets past a lot of these issues. The judge notes:
>* Ulbricht paid to have someone killed. He was told that person had a wife and child. Ulbricht paid anyways. The money was taken. There is no evidence he was role-playing.
>* Later, Ulbricht paid to have someone else killed. The would-be assassins informed him that the target lived with 3 other people. Ulbricht paid extra to have those people killed too. The money was taken. There is no evidence he was role-playing.
if remember all these were based only on the testimonies of those couple of corrupt agents, and all these charges were quietly dropped. The charges were never tried before any court, including the court where drug related charges and conviction happened. The charges were only conveniently mentioned by the prosecution and judge took them account. Thus a cyberpunk became blood thirsty low-life drug dealer. Pretty dirty, though standard, trick one can say. It makes a joke out of "not guilty until proven".
They're right there in the indictment! Also, this article summarizes a transcript of the sentencing hearing. The judge discusses this at length in the transcript. Read the indictment! Read the transcript! It's interesting stuff, and you don't have to get all your info second- and third-hand!
yes, like in the previously available court documents (like the Maryland indictment which was basis for the prosecutors to mention the charges) pretty much everything about the murders comes from those agents (actually mainly from the one of them). The transcript doesn't contain anything to add to the previously available documents, it just basically summarizes and mentions what has been already stated elsewhere.
>
That's not true. The murder-for-hire scheme wasn't simply "related conduct": it was also a predicate of the conspiracy charge, which had to sustain a "reasonable doubt" standard at trial
It was not a predicate, it was one of three different overt acts charged in furtherance of the conspiracy. At least one overt act must be found for a conspiracy charge, but the charge to the jury did not require separate factual findings on each charged overt act. While each juror must have found it true beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed some overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy, we don't know if all, some, or none of them found the murder for hire one to have been proven.
So, really, there was no meaningful finding relating to the murder for hire allegation at trial; in sentencing, yes, what you say about it as an accelerator is accurate.
The sentencing transcript disagrees with you; the judge goes on for several pages about it.
There's a really virulent meme that Ulbricht was never tried for the assassination scheme. But he was: the murder-for-hire scheme was a predicate on his "criminal conspiracy" charge. Not only was it brought up in trial, but it was brought up in a way that put the onus on the prosecution to prove it.
>There's a really virulent meme that Ulbricht was never tried for the assassination scheme.
nice choice of words - "tried" instead of "convicted" :)
>But he was: the murder-for-hire scheme was a predicate on his "criminal conspiracy" charge. Not only was it brought up in trial, but it was brought up in a way that put the onus on the prosecution to prove it.
not true. The Judge clearly states that assassinations come through on "preponderance of evidence" which is a lower standard from "beyond reasonable doubt" the prosecution must prove for a trial and conviction. There is absolutely no surprise that a testimony from a [still unknown to be corrupt] federal agent met the "preponderance of evidence" threshold.
There was absolutely no testimony from Carl Mark Force or Shawn Bridges during the trial... Everyone involved (Judge, Defense, Prosecution) knew that charges against the two corrupt agents were coming down the line but they were directed to not mention it since the judge deemed that DEA completed their investigation completely independently of evidence gathered by the two. This is one of the reasons Ulbricht's lawyer kept expressing his outrage and promising a retrial.
This is also why they only accused Ross of 5 hits instead of 6 (The 6th was the one setup by the corrupt agents).
>This is why they only accused Ross of 5 hits instead of 6 (The 6th was the one setup by the corrupt agents).
man, we're in different Universes. They dropped 5 charges out of 6 and the 6th has made it only as far as an indictment (in Maryland) completely based on the Force's testimony. And that indictment was used as the reason to deny bail and poisoned the rest of the trial.
Again, from the judge in very article that's linked above, straight from his guilty conviction and subsequent sentencing:
I find that there is ample and unambiguous evidence that
Ulbricht commissioned five murders as part of his
efforts to protect his criminal enterprise and that he paid
for these murders. There is no evidence that he was
role-playing.
He wasn't charged and convicted of 5 attempted murders, his guilty sentence for running a continuing criminal enterprise was modified based on the preponderance of evidence that he attempted to have 5 people killed. It's 5, not 6 due to the corrupt FBI / SS agents.
>He wasn't charged and convicted of 5 attempted murders, his guilty sentence for running a continuing criminal enterprise was modified based on the preponderance of evidence that he attempted to have 5 people killed. It's 5, not 6 due to the corrupt FBI / SS agents.
the 5 had only chat logs as "evidence". The 6th had chat logs and the Force's testimony. This is why the 5 have never made it anywhere in the proper court procedure - they even didn't made it as far as formal charge, and the 6th stuck at the indictment once the Force's corruption became known. The 5, ie. the chat logs, chronoligacally appeared after the Force's one.
Chat logs and of course the payments, from wallets known to be controlled by Ross, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars that correspond precisely with the chat logs.
From the judge again;
He commissioned the hits, there is no discussion of
hypotheticals, he paid actual funds. He paid hundreds
of thousands of dollars which were, in fact, paid. He is
told when the murders are completed, he was provided
with a photo of the murder scene with random numbers
that he had provided to the would-be assassins. That
there had been no confirmation of any of the deaths
does not eliminate the fact that he directed violence
and directed the use of violence.
the similarity between Force's setup and these ones is just striking. That crap would never pass a jury and probably many of judges would kick it out too. No wonder that these cases don't even have a status of formal charges.
The judge dealt Ulbricht additional punishment just on the base of preponderance of evidence as seen by the judge. Thus effectively punishing Ulbricht for the alleged crimes of murder-for-hire. Such loophole is a clear violation of :
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury,..."
and
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury ..."
Ulbricht wasn't indicted, nor prosecuted, nor convicted by a jury for these 5 alleged murder-for-hires. Thus he can't be punished for them. Whether he actually did it or not, what happened in those proceedings isn't a justice.
He admitted in court that he made the payments (but said it was all just "role play"). So the judge's conclusion seems perfectly justified to me. If it was all a set up, he should have denied that he had the conversations and denied that he made the payments. As far as evidence is concerned, they had the logs recovered from Ross's laptop in addition to the FBI Agents' own logs of the conversations.
>He admitted in court that he made the payments (but said it was all just "role play"). So the judge's conclusion seems perfectly justified to me.
I'm not discussing whether he actually did it. I personally just don't know. The issue here is punishment without proper conviction. The judge's conclusion isn't sufficient to convict and punish. The charges should be brought and tried before a jury and the jury should conclude beyond reasonable doubt that it was a real thing, not just a role play or whatever. Only then he could be punished. Innocent until proven guilty. No murder for hire charges have so far been brought and tried before a jury. So he is innocent, according to the law, of the murders-for-hire. Yet he was punished for them. It is obvious violation of the basic principles of justice in US.
That's just false legally. Since the attempted hits were formed part of the criminal conspiracy, the judge was allowed to consider them in sentencing. He was not sentenced FOR attempted murder, but the judge took the attempts to hire hitmen into account when sentencing him on the criminal conspiracy charges. In other words, she was trying to assess "how bad" of a criminal conspiracy he was involved in, and the fact that he attempted to have people killed shows that it was pretty damn bad. Like it or not, that is ok, legally speaking.
Err, I'm kind of new to this and don't know anything about this discussion, but... the transcripts linked in the article do talk quite a bit about the assassination attempts.
So what exactly are you saying, that it wasn't talked about?
for the record, this is what ulbricht was convicted of:
narcotics trafficking; distribution of narcotics by means of the Internet; narcotics trafficking conspiracy; continuing criminal enterprise; conspiracy to aid and abet computer hacking; conspiracy to traffic in fraudulent identity documents; and money laundering conspiracy.
notice that "attempting to have multiple people killed" is not something he was convicted of.
From the linked documents, straight from the judge as sentencing adjustments:
Ulbricht's directed violence here is and
relates to the murders for hire which he is alleged to
have commissioned and paid for. The Court must
determine whether these allegations have been
demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence and I
find that there is ample and unambiguous evidence that
Ulbricht commissioned five murders as part of his
efforts to protect his criminal enterprise and that he paid
for these murders. There is no evidence that he was
role-playing.
The Court finds that the evidence is clear and
unambiguous and it far exceeds the necessary
preponderance findings, that Ulbricht believed he was
paying for murders of those he wanted eliminated, and
that he believed they had in fact been murdered.
this infuriates me whenever I see this "justification". Watch Deep Web Documentary (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3312868/) . The corrupt FBI agents were the ones responsible for the fake hits, not Ross.
I get that you're coming from ignorance and probably not malice, and I remember seeing the Article headlines too when it came out; but bro, it's Oct 2015 and we now know those charges are bullshit.
"Silk Road Was Just Another Tech Company
Outside of the tech press, Winter notes, a lot of the media coverage on the Silk Road has been “drugs and guns and hitmen—just wildly off-base.” Off-base, he says, because when he started interviewing the people who knew Silk Road he didn’t see an outfit that was all that different from those littering Silicon Valley. “I started to meet all these core architects within the Silk Road: vendors, engineers, sellers, administrators, people who were helping with scaling,” he says. “It’s obvious in retrospect but it was just like any large tech company. But it was just not represented that way in the media, so even I was caught off-guard.”"[(http://www.wired.com/2015/05/deep-web-silk-road-alex-winter/...]
That's so disingenuous it's condescending. What the hell were they scaling, exactly? That Silk Road was a scaling experiment, not really a mechanism to sell drugs? Seriously?
Ross was a sweet innocent boy who'd never ever hurt anyone, and who only wanted to implement a golden age of Libertopia by freeing people from the oppressive yoke of laws. Y'know, like laws against having other people killed in exchange for money.
The more I read about the guy, the more the root of the word "privilege" seems appropriate (i.e., private law -- he wanted one generous and lax law for him, and another violent and harsh law for the people who got in his way).
Can you explain more about how "the corrupt FBI agents" were solely responsible for the fake hits? If you're right, the judge (and the indictment!) are also wrong.
I'd consider the sentence excessive were it not for the multiple attempted murder-for-hires. If someone is intellectually and morally capable of directing a criminal enterprise that funds murder as a calculated business decision, and they try to do that, they've earned themselves a life sentence in my view.
It's true that he wasn't convicted for the murders but the judge did mention it in the sentencing... see page 82:
"So, we also have your own violence and there is no doubt -- really none -- that you wanted to and paid for the murders of five people to protect your drug enterprise. That is not the conduct of conviction but it is relevant conduct, so how is that consistent with harm reduction?"
I don't have an opinion on this particular issue, but I do think it's kind of sad that people think it's ok to punish person A in order to influence the behavior of some other unknown group of people. It seems to me like your punishment should fit the crime under the sole consideration of those actually being punished. Otherwise, you're just making people pay for crimes they didn't commit.
The threat of jailtime has always been used to deter crime. It's a large part of the reason people don't commit crime all the time.
People would have no reason not to commit crime if the stakes were "give back what you stole". "Fitting the crime" includes deterrence up to a sane amount. In general the punishment needs to be more than the crime. Say ~5x. Steal $1,000. Pay $5,000 "worth" of your time in jail.
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.
hmm running a drugs market is a criminal conspiracy so I'd imagine a high number for that alone, quite apart from the deaths of users. not sure if his defence team were more inept or desperate from the article
I understood the question to be "what's a sentence you can defend from first principles". In fact, the deaths of Silk Road drug users played a huge role in his sentence.
He would've came out and just tried again. Pretty much every single case of white-collar crime or crimes like this have a repeat offense. Not to mention his site also gave a venue to hire hitmen. Also, the FBI is probably going to end up using him as a asset tbh.
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).
"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.
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....
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.