Silk Road Founder Ross Ulbricht Sentenced To Life In Prison

An anonymous reader sends an update on the trial of Ross Ulbricht, the man behind the Silk Road online black market. Sentencing is now complete, and Ulbricht has been given life in prison. He had been facing a 20-year minimum because of the charge of being a "drug kingpin," and prosecutors were asking for a sentence substantially higher than the minimum. Prior to the sentence being handed down today, Ulbricht spoke before the court for 20 minutes, asking for leniency and for the judge to leave him a "light at the end of the tunnel." The judge was unswayed, giving Ulbricht the most severe sentence possible. She said, "The stated purpose [of the silk road] was to be beyond the law. ... Silk Road's birth and presence asserted that its creator was better than the laws of this country. This is deeply troubling, terribly misguided, and very dangerous." Ulbricht's family plans to appeal.

Comments

Re: outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no more "consenting adults", only peons who must beg their masters for permission to do anything.

Re:outrageous

[EmeraldBot]

I don't know of any country on earth where heroin, methamphetamine etc. can be bought and sold freely among consenting adults. So you probably should say something is wrong with human society.

I do. Portugal.

Re:outrageous

[tool462]

If he wanted to do that, he should have started a bank. Those guys are too big to jail.

Re:outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

That was a last resort to curb the fact that otherwise, AK47's were being trafficked right along side the illegal drugs. So they made the drugs legal and came down hard on the organizations responsible. In no way does that imply that unrestricted free trade of all objects and substances is a good idea, or beneficial to anyone.

As a Portuguese citizen, I call bullshit. The reason why personal consumption was decriminalised was due to physicians seeing that the war on drugs was causing drug use and HIV (due to contaminated syringes) to rise instead of lowering it.

Since the decriminalisation in 2001 drug usage has actually dropped in Portugal.

Harsh

[Andy Smith]

I'm not at all supportive of what he did (you won't find a more anti-drugs person than me) but this seems particularly harsh.

If this sentence is to "set an example" then it must be overturned. The keystone of justice is fairness and setting an example with a harsh punishment is by definition unfair.

Re:Where does the Fed claim to get power to ban th

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Yes it can. [Gonzales v. Raich]

The issue was not in dispute in that case:

Respondents in this case do not dispute that passage of the CSA, as part of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, was well within Congress' commerce power

In my opinion, by the way, Wickard v. Filburn, the New Deal era decision that says making something for yourself (i.e. growing wheat to feed your own chickens, or growing marijuana to use yourself) affects interstate commerce (because you otherwise might have bought it instead, affecting the price) and can thus be regulated, is a travesty that is long overdue for the Supremes to revisit and reverse, as they sometimes do when a previous court broke something substantial.

But even if you agree that feeding your own wheat to your own chickens is a suitable subject for federal regulation under the commerce clause, don't you think it's a stretch to say that affecting the price of a banned substance by NOT buying it on the illegal market is a legitimate reason for the Federal Government to ban your growing and consuming your own plants? Either way you don't buy in interstate commerce, so how can the difference in your behavior affect it? (Or was it Congress' intent for you to buy illegal drugs?)

Sometimes more than half the Supreme Court justices follow some argument to a point beyond sanity.

Re:Where does the Fed claim to get power to ban th

[catmistake]

The Second Amendment clearly (to anyone who understands how English was used at the time) forbids the Federal Government from interfering, in any way, with obtaining and carrying weapons. (infringe ~ "even meddle with the fringes of")

Your interpretation is quaint, and incorrect, at least it didn't mean that until 2008, Columbia v. Heller

there is not a single word about an individual right to a gun for self-defense in the notes from the Constitutional Convention

Nor in the Constitution!

The public's understanding of the 2nd Amendment started to be distorted by the NRA early in the last century. The NRA has been filling the minds of gun owners with an interpretation that was never intended by the Founders for some time, so no one can blame you for your incorrect interpretation when a propaganda machine like the NRA has been bombarding you with selective truths and out-right lies.

Four times between 1876 and 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule that the Second Amendment protected individual gun ownership outside the context of a militia.

That includes gun trafficing, because stopping gun sales makes it harder to exercise the right.

Wow... THAT is OUT THERE. Of course, you are completely mistaken, and this bold statement of yours is wildly, dangerously inaccurate. Gun regulation is legal, and necessary.

Sentencing matched the guidelines

[pavon]

Here's my point. When I read about the Ross Ulbricbht court, what comes across to me is that the judge is saying "blah blah yadda yadda legal stuff and now here is MY OPINION" which will vary from judge to judge. But surely justice must be consistent? You shouldn't have one judge convicting a person for making an urgent phone call, but a different judge effectively exonerating a policeman for not driving with the care required by his job. And you shouldn't have a judge handing down an entire life sentence when another judge would most likely have given a sentence of 10-20 years.

I am undoing moderation to post this, because I have seen similar comments everywhere covering the story, all moderated up, and it simply isn't true.

Yes sentencing should be consistent which is why we have sentencing guidelines, and this judge followed them. He was convicted of running a continuing criminal enterprise which has a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years. And it gets worse when you add up the offense levels in the guidelines for his crimes: It was demonstrated that people who took drugs purchased on Silk Road have died from that drug use, which give him a base offense level of 38. The continuing criminal enterprise offense adds 4 points, and since he played an Aggravated Role as the ring leader that adds another 4 points, bringing him to 46 points. The sentencing table for someone with no prior convictions and an offense level of 43 or more is a life sentence, period, and that is before talking about the other five charges he was convicted of! As a judge you would have to present a very strong argument as to why someone with that high of an offense level should get less than life.

The reason he got such a harsh sentence is because our drug laws are so harsh, not because the judge was harsh. Prosecutors have huge flexibility in what they charge people with, and in this case they threw the book at him.

Re:outrageous

[Jeeeb]

You're wrong on two points.

One, he was given the maximum sentence available for the crimes he was charged with. In his sentencing hearing murder for hire was brought up by the prosecution, just as his supposedly good character was brought up by his parents. Both parties can say whatever they want in a sentencing hearing, as long as the judge sentences within the guidelines for the crime the criminal has been found guilty it is not an issue.

Two, he has been charged, separately with murder for hire. The case is in progress. If found guilty, he will be sentenced separately within the guidelines for that crime.

Re:outrageous

[ShakaUVM]

>Since the decriminalisation in 2001 drug usage has actually dropped in Portugal.

For some values of "dropped".

From Wikipedia, since decriminalization: "Reported lifetime use of "all illicit drugs" increased from 7.8% to 12%, lifetime use of cannabis increased from 7.6% to 11.7%, cocaine use more than doubled, from 0.9% to 1.9%, ecstasy nearly doubled from 0.7% to 1.3%, and heroin increased from 0.7% to 1.1%"

Re:outrageous

[SpaghettiPattern]

Go back say 100 years. Then you could occasionally go to a chemist and buy a set containing heroin and syringes. See for yourself: From 1898 through to 1910, diacetylmorphine was marketed under the trademark name Heroin as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough suppressant. And here someone even has a site on hystoric syringes.

I don't say that using heroin makes sense. For me it doesn't. But who are we to meddle with people that want to intravenously inject that stuff? Just because someone proclaimed a war on drugs doesn't mean that such a war makes any sense.