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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 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.
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
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.
If they really want to make sure he stays in forever, they'll try him on this too. Only finding him guilty of the DPR charges means that they're the only thing keeping him in - an appeal might fix that. If he is found guilty of the murder-for-hire charge as well, his chances of successfully appealing them both and getting out are likely poor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.