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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.
Seriously. RoknrolZombie makes a ridiculous point. If justice meant every citizen had to read every court transcript then justice would be impossible.
Instead, we hire professionals to do that work for us. We call them "judges". To be extra super careful, instead of just having one judge we have several layers of judges who can overrule findings. The system is open to critique on the details but I can't imagine a fundamentally different system that would be better.
No, but it's a reasonable prerequisite for those who are expressing strong opinions about the outcome.
Opinions about the outcome don't matter. Due process doesn't allow for crowd sourced judgments. The legal procedure is well established and time-tested.
The guy is guilty as charged. That's not open to opinion and not reversible by public vote.
There are appeal process, other until then, let be written, so let it be done.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Prohibition of (most) drugs: yes. Prohibition of crazy machine guns, child slavery (or any kind of slavery, really), murder-for-hire, etc... not so much. I'm all for a better, safer drug market, but the way to go is working to lift prohibitions on drugs that shouldn't be illegal, not this.
If he did it, he's a hero. He should be celebrated as the next Jeff Bezos for innovating a new way to do commerce online. Making the black market a safter place is a good thing, prohibition is what's wrong.
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Now you will just have to hire hit men on amazon prime. Dude, he tried to get 5 people killed. He's not a hero just because you think he stuck it to the man and sold you your drugs on line.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You allude to one of the most disgusting loopholes in the US justice system, which is that double jeopardy does not apply across the federal/state boundary. So, yes, the feds can try you, you can be found innocent, and then the state gets another bite at the apple.
This is VERY uncommon, though, because both federal and state prosecutors typically will, as agency policy, NOT exercise this right, because it's so unfair to do that and so out-of-keeping with the spirit of the constitution. But there have been instances where they have done this. And it's disgusting.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
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.
And who's to stop them? This is why the legal system hates jury nullification, you can rule not just on the facts and the law but on who the accused and the victim are. Slutty drunk girl? Rape charges dismissed. White guy on trial killing a black guy? Murder charges dismissed. You can find several people in this thread who'd give him a free pass to break any law he wants because he's some sort of "hero" to them.
If the legislative and/or judicial branch of the government is broken then trying to fix it with jury nullification is like putting a band aid on a man that has jumped on a grenade, the rules will keep changing until the rule of law is restored. It's random as one man is convicted today and another is let go tomorrow for the same crime depending on who's on jury duty. Take a look at your average jury, do you really think it would be used most for the right or wrong reasons? Even smart people here are more than willing to abuse it, now imagine the dumb ones.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Since the prosecution accused him of these "murders for hire" were paid for by his personal Bitcoins, citing his laptop contents as proof, I think understanding how a blockchain operates and how they did not enter into evidence matching transactions from the drive that corresponded to persistent and openly public blocks which Bitcoin, by it's very nature is available to every single person who has a Bitcoin wallet, would have been easy to establish extremely reasonable doubt of the veracity of the Fed's claims in that accusation. That doesn't mean he didn't do all that, but it would have at least shown that how they knew what they did submit as "evidence" could have been shown definitively and damningly yet was not. Add that to the refusal of a person who is very reputable in the banking and security fields and advises governments to testify on his behalf on how stuff works, which he does to laypeople as his job very effectively (many times as an expert witness like he would have here) it seems massively shady that such a person would be denied as a witness to state facts that would have possibly been beneficial to the defense.
We don't have a "justice system."
We have a "legal system." Just because the law was followed does not mean justice was done.