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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."
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."
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.
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
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 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.
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.