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Ross Ulbricht Found Guilty On All 7 Counts In Silk Road Trial
blottsie writes Ross Ulbricht was convicted on Wednesday of running Silk Road, a Dark Net black market that became over a $100 million Internet phenomenon before Ulbricht's 2013 arrest. Ulbricht was found guilty on all seven felony charges he faced, including drug trafficking, continuing a criminal enterprise, hacking, money laundering, and fraud with identification documents. He faces up to life in prison for these convictions.
i finally read TFA, you are correct:
they'll probably still try him
but indeed, it's rather pointless, with the other charges he's not getting out of prison regardless
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The idea that it should be illegal to knowingly profit from transactions of highly illegal products is not exactly an obscure or particularly controversial area of jurisprudence, nor it it an example of overly-broad vaguely-worded laws, like, say, CFAA prosecutions.
And jury nullification is supposed to be for juries to nullify illegal laws (i.e. unconstitutional ones), not laws they might have a personal disagreement with.
A defense lawyer has to expect the prosecution to object to everything.
"The judge sustained some, but overruled most of the objections."
So it doesn't sound like those objections had much of an impact, other than being obnoxious.
"In the following weeks, the defense would attempt to call Steven M. Bellovin, a professor at Columbia University’s computer science department, to testify on—among other things—Linux kernel versions.
The judge ruled that they had not complied with the appropriate disclosure requirements, and Bellovin was not allowed to testify."
I don't know what relevance the Linux kernel versions might have had on the case. Regardless, the defense lawyer seems to have screwed up badly.
calling Andreas would have been a defense tactic intended to confuse not inform the jury. It is a common tactic that by trying to explain concepts well beyond the understanding of the jury it can create confusion and hence doubt in there minds. There would have been no intention to help the understanding of the jury with such a move, nor would understanding bitcoin more deeply offer any benefit to the trial, the judge was very right to disallow it as it has no meaningful impact on the evidence for this trial. I have been on the receiving end of such tactics as a jury member, in our case by sheer coincidence we actually had technical experts in our jury to clear up the doubt and confusion that the defense were trying to engender.
I think the assertion is (and I'm not a lawyer, etc) that a defendant cannot suppress the evidence which was possibly obtained illegally if the defendant doesn't have standing to contest the search. If he says they're his servers, then he can contest how the servers were searched. If he says they are not his servers, then he has no standing and cannot prevent the evidence found on the servers from being used against him at trial.
Seems odd to me, though. I would think any improperly obtained evidence should be contestable. For instance, if his buddy's statement that he was behind Silk Road was coerced, that should be contestable. I'd like to hear a lawyer's opinion on the subject.
I'm sure there's plenty of loopholes for the prosecution with multiple 3 letter agencies involved as well as multiple nationalities. There's probably a clause that lets them do whatever they want if they suspect terrorist activity on/through Silk Road, too.