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Silk Road Trial Defense: Mt. Gox CEO Was the Real Dread Pirate Roberts

Posted by timothy on from the rabbit-out-of-hat dept.

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.

4 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Grab the popcorn by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."
  2. Trolling by Forgefather · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's official. Ross Ulbricht is trolling the government.

    --
    "There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
  3. Re:100% Pure USDA-Disapporoved Bull by drerwk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:100% Pure USDA-Disapporoved Bull by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.