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Silk Road Trial Defense: Mt. Gox CEO Was the Real Dread Pirate Roberts
rossgneumann writes The defense team for Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old man accused of running the online black market Silk Road under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, just dropped an unexpected new theory: Mark Karpeles, the CEO of failed Bitcoin company Mt. Gox, is the real Dread Pirate Roberts. "We have the name of the real mastermind and it's not Ulbricht," Joshua Dratel, Ulbricht's lawyer, said in court today. He plans to argue that Karpeles framed Ulbricht.
At this point, I don't care who the real 'dread pirate Roberts' is. I'm here for the show, and the show just got good.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's official. Ross Ulbricht is trolling the government.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
I don't think the soundness of the theory is so important to the jury as is the fact that the agent was sure this other guy was the DPR, and now the agent is sure the defendant is the DPR - the agent has to admit to being wrong before and can be asked why in 6 months he would not have a new theory about who really is the DPR. I think it leaves a lot of doubt about the certainty the agent ought to feel about his theory.
Why wait until now?
Now, they've got a Federal agent on the witness stand, they've gotten his files through discovery, and they're asking him to read from those files.
Money quotes like "I have a wealth of evidence to prove that [Karpeles] is Dread Pirate Roberts"
Did the Fed have a fully consistent theory of how and why Karpeles was interested in keeping a lot of bitcoin on the move?
Who cares - the discovery produced excellent reasonable doubt from a prosecution expert witness.
If they'd introduced this argument ahead of this agent's testimony, the DoJ would have made him temporarily unavailable until they reclassified his work on national security grounds. The prosecution's already halted the trial to have a meltdown at the notion that the defendant is entitled to a vigorous defense.
The juror is there to determine the facts of the case. The prosecution and defense are both giving their sides. The jury may decide that there's reasonable doubt, doubt but it's not reasonable, or no doubt one way or another. It's their call. They really don't care about the agent's theories, because they are not FACTS.
You can present 1,000 theories about why there should be some doubt about you being the killer, including the police originally thinking it was someone else - but if facts, such as a video surfaces of you doing the deed, and they find the weapon with your dna and fingerprints on it, you're most likely toast. The facts trump any amount of theories.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Do you also support contract killings? Because he ordered hits on a few people.
The U.S. government that is prosecuting Ross pays for killings every day. Why should they have a monopoly?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.