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Silk Road Drug Dealer Pleads Guilty After Federal Sting
Ars Technica reports that
A 26-year-old Columbus, Ohio man has pleaded guilty to selling drugs through the Silk Road website. David Lawrence Handel apparently obtained methylone and other drugs from a supplier in China, which he then sold to buyers on the online black market. Among those buyers were Maryland federal agents, who were making undercover purchases. Handel shipped the drugs to them through the US Postal Service, according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland. ... Handel faces up to 20 years in prison for drug trafficking and up to life for using and possessing a firearm. His sentencing is scheduled for May 15.
Handel faces up to 20 years in prison for drug trafficking and up to life for using and possessing a firearm.
No. For using and possessing a firearm in the commission of a crime. Using and possessing a firearm is not itself a crime.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So... He gets 20 years for trafficking substances across international borders that will rot your brain out, but he can get life for possessing an item for personal protection? Which item was doing more damage to society? It wasn't the firearm.
I know, I know... People like to tack on + as if having one or not having one changes what was in the first place. Thing is, it doesn't.
Rob a convenience store without a gun and take all the money: Store has an empty drawer.
Rob a convenience store with a gun and take all the money: Store has an empty drawer.
The end result is the same. Saying that it is somehow worse is such a farce.
Love sees no species.
These LEOs can sit and pluck low hanging fruit all the livelong day, just like Stone Phillips & Crew..
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Why is this stuff turning up on here.
How dare he supply drugs to people how make a concious choice to buy and use them!
Free choice should not be permitted! The government must dictate to us what we can do with our own bodies and how we should live our lives! Furthermore, they should closely monitor us to make sure we are following their instructions.
It's for our own good!
He might have already been a convicted felon, and if he was then even possessing it could be a felony.
I wonder if the definition of use is a matter of carrying the firearm while engaging in an illegal activity (ie, drug trafficking and distribution) even if his intention in carrying the firearm was to prevent someone from mugging him and taking the cash he had on his person.
The Supreme Court actually reversed *all nine* of the Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal on the issue of whether simply carrying a firearm during the commission of a felony was enough to prosecute them for "using" the firearm. It was kind of a landmark case. That being said, Congress just amended the law to make carrying the firearm during the commission of a felony an additional offense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Get rich or die tryin
Stuff that matters.
My how I wish white-collar criminals would receive such harsh treatment. This might actually be a nice world if people didn't get away with ruining economies and hoarding all the resources by evading laws or having them otherwise bent to their will.
I am all for punishing hard people who use weapons during crimes. Using weapons during a crime increases the chances of people being hurt. It is so obvious that I wonder if you are trolling.
Apropos of nothing, how does possession of a firearm in an illegal mail order business increase the chances of people being hurt?
...if he was also caught with some illegally downloaded movies! Probably be hung drawn and quartered in the main square of some Texas town.
or they'll send the feds after you.
The charge with the lenghtiest sentence potential is, again, a charge of convenience. Can't have been self-defence or protection because carrying something of value, no, there's illegality going on and therefore things that are innocuous otherwise are suddenly subject of the gravest sentences.
I don't think society had much to do with it, just mere populism and careerism for a couple of people in power. And logic? Pfft.
The U.S. government has a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any country in the history of the world. (The rate of 707 prisoners per 100,000 population is artificially reduced because of all the exclusions.)
Part of the reason the prison rate is so high is that, in the U.S., prisons are a very profitable business, with little oversight and plenty of chances to be abusive. For some detail, see Matt Taibbi's book, The Divide.
Including you?
All this time I thought the FBI somehow got the operator's IP address from TOR. So the federal agents arrested the dealer at a U.S. post office?. Maybe I am thinking of something else.
I recently heard about a case called "Kids For Cash", where a judge was sending lots of juveniles to a privatized detention center and getting paid for each. There was eventually a lawsuit and those kids received payouts for the time they spent locked up.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
Honestly though, I suspect it rarely plays out quite that way.
What REALLY happens is a drug dealer (like everyone else) wants to hang out with a group of friends and have fun sometimes. Of course, being addicted to a substance means he/she only stands a chance of keeping friends around who partake in the same activity. So people who are already drawn to that lifestyle for whatever reason spend time with the dealer, getting some drugs free and other times probably being asked to "chip in" for their cost. Once they become addicted themselves -- then they've got to have the stuff often enough so they gotta start dealing themselves or doing illegal things to pay for the habit, so it's moved past the stage of just fun spare time activities for them.
The cliche of the sneaky drug dealer coming out from the shadows and giving out free drugs to young or naive people to trick them into becoming a new customer is kind of ridiculous.
Yeah, states with Republican governors have been going balls-out for privatized prisons. They're the worst idea yet in an economic system that's seen a century-long string of bad ideas. How anyone could think that it was smart to have private industry run prisons is just beyond me. And I'm not talking about some contractors brought in to provide food service, but that the entire prison would be a for-profit industry is just insane.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Remember: When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.
Sending anything via the US mai where the legality might even be questionable is opening yourself up to having postal regs heaped on top of everything else.
Screw them. Ship it UPS/FedEx. If the customer complains, its almost certainly a sting operation.
Have gnu, will travel.
I just read a bit about that. I'm glad to know the judge got sentenced to 28 years in federal prison, which actually means 28 years (unlike state time). He won't get out until he's 85, if he lives that long. Being a corrupt judge in federal prison, I suspect he'll be dead long before he gets out. Federal inmates tend to dislike corrupt judges, and federal inmates sometimes do bad things to people.
no of course not. self defense.
It is actually perfectly rational: You just need to have a high-level of greed, sadism and no human compassion whatsoever. Then you can see parts of the population as worse than slaves, to be exploited in any fashion possible. That this also destroys cohesion of society and makes everybody a lot poorer, less secure and more afraid is something these people either do not understand or do not care about. Yes, you will find these people in the "dangerously insane" section of catalogs of psychic disorders.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
i m looking forward to the movie, would be something quite epic
I always figured Silk Road style drugs were sold from overseas sellers, since it seems pretty obvious the government is really good at tracking internal citizens...
Really not a good idea to sell drugs illegally these days in the U.S., especially as new legal drug channels are opening up across the U.S.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This attitude is part of everything that's wrong with the prison system. The idea that prisoners should be relied upon and expected to met out additional extrajudicial punishment to other prisoners. The idea that prison rape is "ok" because it's happening to other prisoners.
"I recently heard about a case called "Kids For Cash", where a judge was sending lots of juveniles to a privatized detention center and getting paid for each."
Actually, two judges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Quote: For example, Ciavarella adjudicated children to extended stays in youth centers for offenses as minimal as mocking a principal on Myspace, trespassing in a vacant building, or shoplifting DVDs from Wal-mart.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
How anyone could think that it was smart to have private industry run prisons is just beyond me. And I'm not talking about some contractors brought in to provide food service, but that the entire prison would be a for-profit industry is just insane.
Well, it worked so well for health care.
I was in federal prison in Texas when that case broke 5 or six years ago. We were all looking forward to meeting him. I had the news paper articles posted in my locker so I would remember his face if her ever hit the yard. However, the reality is, the federal BOP has specific yards for high risk inmates like known snitches and other unpopular cases. Let me look.... http://www.bop.gov/inmateloc/ nope Williamsburg FCI and Coleman Low FCI. Both of which are not seg yards. Williamsburg is a medium too, which in federal terms is relatively wild... Very odd. I have no idea how they are surviving there to be honest. Re: the gun, in federal cases a gun in the home of a person convicted of a crime that is owned by another person, say a room mate, is enough to add 1-5 years without trying. I had a good friend who got a 5 added because his visiting friend had a single shot bolt action .22 I have no interest in what the laws say, just what actually happens.
Look at Colorado. Legalized marijuana and the Mexican gangs are moving in to supply cheaper product.
I've heard the prices at Colorado pot stores are high (or maybe less cheap than some predicted), but they also (at least according to the media) are doing great business.
I don't doubt that Mexican gangs could smuggle in field-grown average quality pot, but who would bother with street dealers when you could walk into a retail store and buy much better product without any risk?
I don't see the retail operators risking their livelihoods supplying themselves this way, and at least the way it's portrayed in the media many of them have their own grow operations so they can offer their own varieties, ensure a stable supply, etc.
No, no, no! You're only supposed to mention their middle names if they are SOUTH of the Mason-Dixon line! It's right there in the AP Style Handbook!
The U.S. government has a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any country in the history of the world. (The rate of 707 prisoners per 100,000 population is artificially reduced because of all the exclusions.)
I was actually surprised to discover that all the countries fall below 1% incarceration. I would guess that if you asked a
random person on the street what percentage of the population are in prison most people would give you a number greater than
1%.
if you have to facilitate either side of a crime, you're just as bad, and it should be just as illegal. bad policing ftl.
> The idea that prisoners should be relied upon and expected to met out additional extrajudicial punishment to other prisoners.
The fact is that a corrupt judge spending 28 years in prison probably WILL have some hard times. That doesn't say what SHOULD happen. It's a statement of what DOES happen. No "should" or "should not" about it, it's simply fact.
I've noticed this type of confusion also comes up every single time I post what the law is on a subject. I post "the maximum sentence under section 215.13 is 5 years" and I get a couple of people replying saying "you're wrong, that's not right, it shouldn't be a crime at all". Well, whether it SHOULD be a crime or not, it IS a crime, and the maximum sentence IS 5 years. Barak Obama IS president, whether he should be or not, and felons tend to hurt people, whether they should or not.
> The idea that prison rape is "ok" because it's happening to other prisoners.
Pretty sure I didn't say anything about rape. I said he may not live to the age of 85.
When did mocking your principle (in public) become a crime?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Strawman argument. This doesn't really happen, it's all the fault of that "Office Space" movie with the line about "pound-me-in-the-ass federal prison". Federal prisons are nice facilities and there's no screwing around in there. State prisons are the hellholes, but then really only at the harder levels. And even then, it's not like prison rape is something that happens to everyone, usually you get involved in shenanigans and it happens in retaliation.
You know how I know prison rape isn't important? None, and I mean zero, of the national "rape conversation" that's happening in our media right now is directed to the topic. It's all about women, therefore it's not a problem nor does any solution need to take place.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Prison rape is only "ok" if it is happening to male prisoners.
Who's mocking someone's beliefs?
Remember, it's "principal", because he's your pal!
Even if the persecutor's allegations are to be believed, this young man has done no harm to anyone. He deserves no punishment at all. To threaten an ethically innocent man with decades or life in the hellish sensory deprivation torture chambers of the Gulag is itself a criminal act.
The federal agents involved should be fired and possibly jailed. (Nuremberg defense may apply to lower level goons.) The budget of their agency should be slashed, as they clearly have more agents than valid uses for them.
I agree with you in principle, but the only way it's going to get fixed is if judges and prosecutors specifically have to suffer the consequences of the legal system they have created. If they know it can happen to them, then they won't be so trigger-happy with the punishments.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"