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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.
...then he deserves his punishment.
I'm sure there will be hundreds of comments here about it, but since none of us were at the trial, well really never know.
http://www.dailydot.com/crime/...
they were dropped
lack of evidence?
i haven't been following closely, does anyone know why those charges went away?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was shocked at how bad Ulbricht's defense was. They threw out two theories, hoping to raise reasonable doubt, and both were trounced by the government's evidence. Even if Ulbricht had really sold the site shortly after creating it and then was invited back recently to be the fall guy- he's still guilty of the conspiracies he was charged with because he came back in an admin role.
I assume he picked his own lawyer and didn't have a public defender, but they were terrible. If you know you're going to court with a dog shit defense, just plead guilty and hope for leniency. Maybe the lawyer advised that and Ulbricht refused.
My understanding of the Continuing Criminal Enterprise conviction is that it means he will be spending life behind bars without the possibility of parole, with no discretion afforded in to the judge in sentencing.
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.
In the case where there's a state and a federal case, often the state will step aside and let the feds try theirs first and if they get the conviction, leave it with that. That is what happened with the loony who shot Gabby Giffords and others in Arizona. AZ had murder and attempted murder cases against him, but so did the federal government, since he killed a federal judge and tried to kill a congressman. AZ let the feds arrest and try him, so they incur the cost of imprisoning him in their facilities. He's away for life anyways, so it doesn't matter. In the event the federal case had failed, AZ could have then stepped in and moved forward on their charges.
Or you know, you could just hop on a plane to Colorado.
I've been following this trial for the last few weeks reading Ars, Wired, TechDirt and listening to Free Talk Live. The Judge basically hamstringed the defense ruling that they should only receive the prosecution's evidence against him...the weekend before the trial began. That right there is such a fundamental insult to the basic rights of any accused that should horrify and enrage anyone who believed in our justice system's impartiality. Add that to the fact that the judge allowed the the prosecution to use the accusations that Ulbricht hired assassins to be considered by the jury even though none of that has been proven or even competently investigated, that is a massive miscarriage of justice on stupendous levels that should frighten anyone living in the US. Evidence such as screenshots implicating his guilt that could have easily been forged were accepted without question....the list goes on. They also disallowed Andreas Antonopoulos, an expert witness on understanding how BitCoin and it's blockchain works to help the jury understand what they were hearing so to form a basis on how to poke holes in the Fed's story....this is almost a blatant showing of the corruption of our justice system and it's subservience to US intelligence services as the Snowden revelations. I'm not saying Ulbricht was innocent...I don't know that...but what happened in this trial was in no way anything but a kangaroo court on display in full form. Ulbricht's guilt is still up in the air, but our government was guilty of far worse crimes merely in that Manhattan courtroom the last 4 weeks.
The prosecutors objected to everything (and the judge allowed) because the defense wanted to cross-examine prosecution witnesses on topics the prosecution had not brought up on direct examination.
The proper thing to do when you want to bring up new topics with prosecution witnesses is to also list them as witnesses for the defense, not lay out your defense case before it's your turn to do so.
And the defense tried to insert their experts at the last minute without presenting sufficient evidence that they were experts. Again, this is not an obscure corner of trial procedure. If you want to introduce expert witnesses at the last minute (and it's certainly permissible to do so), you better make damn sure all your ducks are in a row on demonstrating their expertise.
The statute specifies a mandatory minimum of 20 years:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/usc...
Good time takes 13% off of that.
However, mandatory minimums aren't always so mandatory. Due to waiting until the last minute to handle some paperwork, I once went to jail for driving without a license. That had a mandatory minimum sentence of three days in jail. I was picked up Monday night and got out first thing Tuesday morning - so about 10 hours. Later, the prosecutor said to me "time served will work, right? Monday to Tuesday, that's three days isn't it?"
indeed, assuming he was guilty, and the jury thought so. Press accounts pretty damning and red handed in the arrest. then it seems like those charges omitted what Id consider the most heinous crime: soliciting the murder of 5 people.
I loved his lawyers theory that the Mt Gox mogul was really the mastermind. That would have been such a wickedly cool story. Since the FBI seized the assets of Silk Road about the same time Mt Gox had some liquidity problems it even seemed failntly plausible. I'd love to hear what the jury made of that piece of spaghetti on the wall.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
As a defense lawyer you have to work with what you have, and sometimes you have jack and shit. My friend is a lawyer that worked for the public defender's office and of all his clients, there was only one who he wasn't sure of their guilt. So all he could do is see if the state made any procedural mistakes which could get the case dismissed (which they did sometimes) or try to talk the client in to taking a plea. If they wouldn't he'd have to go to trial with an already-lost case. He'd try his best, as both the law and his personal ethics required, but the defenses were usually pretty damn weak ass and far fetched. I mean what else can you do?
Private defense attorneys can fire their client, but PDs have to work with what they have. Also private attorneys will usually work with a client, unless they are really problematic. If they say "Look you have no hope, take the plea, you are going to jail," and the client says "fuck no I want a trial," they'll still do it rather than dump the client. They'll just warn them up front about what is going to happen.
The guy was a scum bag. I don't care about the drug-trade facilitation, but willingly and purposely moving things like cyanide, and trying to get 5 people (plus any bystanders) killed? Human garbage.
I can respect good people, and I can respect smart competent people. Ross has shown to be neither.
If ever there was a case that cried out for JURY NULLIFICATION this is it.
Too bad the jury did not agree with you.
I know it might suck that drugs can't be easily bought online now, but you can't take the good (recreational drugs) without the bad (CP, hiring a hitman, illegal weapons, slavery). You don't get to have a version of silk road on a darknet where you pick and choose the services; it's all or nothing. In my opinion, the world is much better off without an outlet for illegal transactions; because most of the transactions contribute to a massive net loss for humanity.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
These are separate charges. In the case I'm talking about the whacko killed a number of people, and injured more. Some of them were just ordinary civilians, and so it would be Arizona law that would cover it. However some of them were federal employees and federal law would cover it. So he could be tried for some of the crimes under state law, some of them under federal. No jeopardy problems with that.
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
Attributed (questionably) to Edmund Burke.
-kgj
Maybe I'm late to the party here, but I only just now realized that Dread Pirate Roberts' actual legal defense was that he'd left the ship to his cabin boy, and has been retired for the past 15 years and living like a king in Patagonia.
How could they be expected to? They were not informed. The whole legal process from summons to instruction is designed to weed out independent thinkers from juries and intimidate those who are seated. This undermines an important protection.
If Fred credibly threatens to kill Bob's Family in the future, and the only way to prevent that is for Dave to kill Fred, then Dave is justified in killing Fred.
According to what system of ethics? Certainly not according to US or British legal tradition. Threats must be more than credible, they must be imminent before you can respond with force of any kind, much less deadly force.
If on Monday a man credibly threatens to kill your family on Friday and you hunt him down and kill him on Wednesday, you're going away for murder 1.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Oh, you are right, jury nullification is no more or less than the statement that a jury can acquit a defendant for any reason they damn well please and there's nothing to stop them; this is obvious to anybody that ever paid a lick of attention in 8th-grade civics class. I would hope it would only be used to refuse to convict under illegal laws, because otherwise it turns the concept of us being a nation of laws, and not men, on it's head. If a prosecution produces an unpleasant result under the law, but the prosecution is still legal, there are means (however imperfect) for the law to be changed. The jury deciding on their own that they like the defendant too much for his/her sentence is not how the law is supposed to work.
And not that your other points have anything to do with nullification, but...
The "see no evil" defense is pretty weak sauce against these money-laundering related charges. (And certainly they will get you civilly fined to kingdom come.) The idea that DPR/Ulbricht did NOT know the primary use of his market was the illegal drug trade is ludicrous in the extreme; it does not take any great leap of logic to discard such an assertion utterly.
And no, pre-paid providers do NOT benefit from burner phones. Such phones are usually subsidized at retail (plus there are real costs involved with activation) and when they are quickly discarded after a short period of time, so the provider takes it in the proverbial shorts. (But what do cell phone providers have to do with the proverbial price of tea in China? Not sure what you are getting at there.)
And, given that the police don't even need to file charges to perform civil forfeiture (I certainly usually don't agree with that practice), arguing that that was their motive for prosecuting him is also pretty silly. (However, in this case, civil forfeiture actually makes sense since nobody ever laid official claim to Silk Road's Bitcoins.)
I remember reading a thread on netnews back around 1983 where an 'old-timer' observed, "This discussion has reached the FIJA stage. Time to log off".
Good to see some things never change.
sPh
As with most glibertarian arguments, there is a hidden clause that does a lot of heavy lifting.
sPh
There wasn't anything else you could have done? Call police? Leave town? That's the whole reason the threat has to be imminent. If it isn't you've got time to find another way, and society demands that you do. Killing in defense is a last resort.
So, yeah, you're going away for murder, and if you'd maybe had a couple of extra brain cells you could have found a way to stop the threat without committing premeditated murder, so you'd be free to enjoy your family.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Here is how governments can "win" their failed war on drugs:
Legalise and regulate both the use and sale of all currently illigal drugs right now.
Yea, not so well for this guy.
It might be harder for the government to track you down by dumping subpoenas on banks like they are accustomed to, but you got to understand, BitCoin is just as traceable (if not more). All the data they need to trace every transaction a Coin has bee though is in the block chain for that coin, and every transaction gets published to the mining community for verification of the block chain. Once they figure out which is your wallet, all they need to do is search the records and find every transaction it's been involved in.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Jury Nullification is how many of the founding fathers got away with violating various tax rules and stuff the Great Britain was trying to enforce ....
That said, JN comes up in just about every time slashdot covers a trial. The chance that any person will be blessed with JN is probably less than winning the Powerball lottery twice in a row. It just doesn't happen.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Anyone looking at life in prison for a non-violent drug crime is living under an unjust system.
Why is all the good stuff already modded 5, when I have mod points?
JN is a progression of Clause 61 Magna Carta. This says, basically, that a quarter of Barons may petition the King (who wrote the Law) and if they don't get satisfaction, bring him to public trial. Juries at that time (from the time of King alfred The Great) consisted of 25 men of virtue (soldiers, elders or knights), 25 because there could not be a hung vote, it was always a majority, which was reduced to 12 (majority was therefore 7) only in the latter part of the 19th Century. However you count a jury, a not guilty verdict was usually a blow for the lawmakers because juries were only called for capital crimes. When Parliament gained absolute sovereignty in 1911, they placed themselves above the Law of the Land, above Magna Carta, committed high treason against the King who could then do nothing about it because he'd just signed the country and his authority over it (via the Veto) to a gang of charlatans. As a result, no number of not guilty verdicts in jury trials is enough to get the law changed. Only direct action by the public gets the Law changed. Ref: the 1990 Poll Tax Riots.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
That's fine, anyone is free to leave at any time. The oblique reference to Godwin doesn't work, this is just the same sort of ad-hominem that Godwin rejects.
I'm not sure FIJA is the only or main problem in US criminal justice, but _something_is_: why can US DAs routinely get 90+% convictions whilst UK Crown Prosecutors struggle to get 70%? US with substantially higher incarceration rates, no less! UK cops or barristers sloppyier? UK crooks cagier? Absent some other explanation, I put it down to cowed US juries.
That's interesting history. In the American Colonies prior to the revolution, juries would often find defendants not guilty of unpopular laws, but you are correct, the verdicts had no effect on the law, which remained the same.
I feel I should be more clear about the point I was trying to make above -- jury nullification in the United States falls largely into two categories, a pre-revolutionary predisposition to stick it to King George, and something I didn't mention but happened plenty in the South, a hesitance to convict whites of violence against blacks.
In either case, jury nullification is likely only when a populace is on the verge of rebellion and the crimes are seen more as political issues rather than real crimes (pre-revolution example), or when the law runs up against deep seated widely accepted cultural prejudices (civil rights example).
For geeks though, to think that JN would apply in a file sharing case, or one in which a reporter uses the <a> tag to link to private materials other people hacked, or any of the many computer or data related litigation topics we see here, is pure fantasy because 1) we are nowhere close to any sort of open rebellion and if we were, it probably wouldn't have much to do with the digital world; and 2) geeks are far from being wholly accepted as part of the cultural norm, and as much as we've taken ownership of the terms "geek" and "nerd", most non-geek people don't, deep in their heart, see those labels as a badge of honor.
Yes, there are jocks who call themselves "football geeks" but it's all sort of tongue in cheek and they've certainly never experienced the derision most people hold for us just barely bubbling under the surface. And even if it isn't derision, just try talking about something interesting or exciting to a geek, to anyone else, and you get at best a sort of forbearance, like they'll accept your annoying characteristics so they can get help with their computers. In most localities, geeks aren't going to get the whole-hearted undying support of the wider community. We can get toleration, and perhaps be thanked at times (though I think people forget just how much technology does for them), but that's it, and what that means is, jury nullification on geek issues will not happen.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
As far as i understand it, the appeals are for figuring out whether your trial was fair or not. If you plead guilty, there is no trial, hence you have nothing to appeal against. So pleading guilty indeed limits your options. In USA You can appeal up to the supreme court, in Europe even up to the European court of Human Rights. If you plead guilty, you accept your sentence and that's it.
I'm not really here, it's just more probable that i'm here, than anywhere else.
What about the "standing the ground" laws?
I'm not really here, it's just more probable that i'm here, than anywhere else.
I say make all drugs legal, let the problem sort itself out. Might be a bit chaotic until the gene pool clears though.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
As much as I agree that this case seems to have lots of holes in it, running a marketplace is not 'common carrier'. The important distinction is that a common carrier is paid to provide a 'connection' service, after which you can do anything you like with it. A marketplace connects a buyer to a seller, handles the money, and takes a fee for that introduction. Thus, the marketplace has to know what is being sold and whom the buyer and seller are, and further more collects the money from the buyer and gives it to the seller.
Had the Silk Road been more like a chat room, then there'd be many more parallels with the 'common carrier'. If Silk Road had provided the place to advertise goods and to connect buyers to the sellers, but otherwise kept out of any transactions, it's possible the 'common carrier' thing might work. However, as soon as SR started handling the money, it became part of the transaction, and so became implicated. As I understand it, the goods and services didn't have 'code names', so there's no way DPR could claim he thought he'd just brokered a 'cleaning' service for someone's apartment - so no 'reasonable doubt' there either.
No he was an active facilitator for _every_ transaction. Claiming that to be the equivalent to an ISP is just showing ignorance in both the silk road and ISP responsibilities.
Those just mean you don't have to try to run in the face of an imminent threat. If you're running at me with a knife, I don't have to try to run first, and then if running fails, shoot you. I can stand my ground and shoot you. But again, that's in imminent threat, which is the only time you're allowed to use force against somebody else. Also, "stand your ground" only exists in some states. In others, you have a "duty to retreat" if you have a perfectly safe means of doing so. If you're running at me with a knife (imminent threat!) but I'm in my car and can just drive off and call the cops, no, I can't shoot you. I had a perfectly safe means of retreat.
OP said "credibly threatens to kill Bob's family in the future." "The future" does not mean "any second now." Certainly not if there's time for Bob to arrange a murder-for-hire against Fred (the perpetrator). Or, in point 5, for Fred to arrange to hire Gino to do the deed. When you go looking for the guy who threatens harm to your family at some indeterminate time in the future, you're not "standing your ground." You're actively chasing the guy.
And stand your ground or not, you had a perfectly safe means of escape. There's nobody there trying to stop you! Pack up your family and drive away. Call the cops. Hire somebody not to hunt down and murder the bad guy, but to defend you. There are always other options. Use deadly force without an imminent threat for which there is no safe retreat is murder. There is no "but he deserved it!" defense. Fred's a bad guy, no doubt. But you do not get to be Judge Judy and executioner.
OP is wrong on point 5, too. "If Fred's credible threat is to hire Gino to do the kidnapping, then Dave is still justified in killing Fred." Nope. This is even less imminent! Fred's got to contact Gino, negotiate fees and methods, etc. Tons of time to flee or get help!
Law Comic explains it better than I. That section is justified self-defense, then defense of others, and then use of deadly force against a very real but non-imminent threat (i.e., premeditated murder).
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Silk Road act as a escrow for transaction. Thus it's NOT an common carrier but a market place. Apples to Oranges.
They could explain it well enough to show the evidence. I think I could explain with a few power point slides how this all works to a Jury, then demonstrate a few transactions and show them how that gets recorded. All that would be left is to put the publicly obtained block chains into evidence, show the transactions that involved the wallet in question and tie that wallet to the individual through inference if they destroyed the evidence or though tracing actual bank transactions where the BitCoin gets converted into cash.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101