Slashdot Mirror
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."
You see, *this* would have been the Ripped from the Headlines story of the century.
I love, love, love this story. Murder for hire, drugs, computers, cryptocurrency, false identities, frame-ups, parallel construction. Oh man, I can't wait for the miniseries.
It's official. Ross Ulbricht is trolling the government.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
"I am not left-handed."
Karpeles: "I'm not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund, and he's been living like a king in Patagonia for 20 years."
Hans Reiser tried the "somebody else did it" defense. He suggested it was somebody else, but presented no more than vague hints in that general direction suggesting that somebody else had motive. (And, of course, it was all silly hand-waving, since he later confessed and led police to the body.) For Ulbrict's sake, let's hope he has something more substantive.
The police have no obligation to investigate alternate suspects once they've decided on one to charge. If you, defendant, want to blame the crime on somebody else, you need to perform your own investigation rather than merely pointing out the police didn't chase after whomever the defendant thinks would be a more worthy suspect.
I don't know if Ulbrict has some real evidence; if he did, you'd think he would have released it by now.
And now he's gonna piss off the jury,because they're going to smell it for what it is - an attempt to fool the jury.
unfortunately, i think you are overestimating most juries
their affinity/ understanding of soap opera level drama is way more than their understanding of basic tor networking or how bitcoin works
get into the technical facts that prove ulbricht is guilty, and their eyes will glaze over and they will fall asleep
start tossing random unfounded accusation smoke screens, the prosecution shouting "objection," the judge growling "sustained"... and they'll perk right up and start writing notes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
At the same time get into the technical facts that prove someone is innocent and they will zone out until something loud and shiny happens.
OMG facts!
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.
Do you also support contract killings? Because he ordered hits on a few people.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Jurors have a good bs detector. They don't need to understand the technical details to know when someone's blowing smoke up their skirts.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
I think you overlook the obvious fact that DerYeghiayan's actions suggest a "throw some shit on the wall and see what sticks" approach to his investigation.
So what? When you're starting from scratch, you have to start somewhere, and your first theory will most likely be wrong; let's see the FACTS of the case, not theories on either side.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
He didn't.
Do you say this because the jurors are your peers?
I've been on juries where the people with BS detectors were a vocal minority. It made me think: "What if I was on a jury where the guy with the BS detector wasn't so vocal?"
The worst part is that on one of these, we found the guy not guilty even though he had obviously done it -- because the prosecution failed to prove their case but attempted to lean on BS to prop things up instead of evidence, leaving reasonable doubt.
See, the prosecution thought they'd done enough because most of the jury was nodding and obviously agreeing with their argument. That one guy pointed out the fact that no actual evidence had been presented, just circumstantial evidence.
Unfortunately, that one guy wasn't even me :) The prosecutors did a really good job until you broke everything down and tossed out what wasn't fact -- which on this case took days of being sequestered to fully untangle. Many others were really annoyed that the one guy wouldn't just shut up and let everyone go home on a guilty verdict.
Juries want a "story of the crime" they can believe. Prosecution and defense each tell such a story, and juries go with the more compelling tale. The job of the defense is to invent a story that includes all the facts and still explains why the defendant didn't do it.
That's why we have this somewhat goofy story of the bitcoin CEO - the defense does far better when they present a specific alternative killer (that's a better story than "some unknown guy"), and any suggestions that put the alternative in the scene makes the story more credible.
So the agent's theories are quite useful to the defense in knocking down the credibility of the prosecution's story by attacking the credibility of the agent: "see, he got it wrong before, so don't take anything he touched too seriously" - it's a good emotional argument. If there's some fact that doesn't fit into the defense's story (but the rest works), then they need to start attacking the credibility or relevance of that inconvenient fact from the start of the trial. If there are several, they're pretty screwed, but if there's a common source for them all then they're going to at least try to knock down the source, in hopes the jury isn't paying attention to the details.
All of which is likely why the judge was so insistent into explaining all the details to the jury - to limit such defense shenanigans.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
I would like to take the time to point out to anyone thinking of doing this: Anyone claiming to be a hit man is actually a cop. That probably goes for anyone claiming to be a teenage girl who is interested in your online sexual advances, as well. Hope I've saved you some trouble.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped