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

outrageous

[MrNJ]

All he did was facilitate transactions among consenting adults.
Something is wrong with our country.

Re:outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting Anon because I am Moding

The fact that a child molester in Texas would get less time should say we have our priorities wrong.

Re:outrageous

[Beerdood]

Yeah, what's wrong with transactions among consenting adults!?!

- I mean, if some corrupt African dictator wants to buy some weapons to wipe out the rioters, that's not my fault - all I did was facilitate the chemical weapons transaction.
- If someone wanted to buy some slaves, and all I did was facilitate the transaction; not my fault.
- CP getting bought and sold on my trading network? Whoa, not my fault, all i did was provide a medium for two consenting adults to make a transaction (involving non-consenting children).
- Someone hired a hitman to kill a journalist that exposed your corruption using my transaction network? Look pal, it's not like I pulled the trigger. All I did was provide a medium/platform that made it much easier for you to complete your transaction. I'm sure that even without my transaction network around, the hitman would have been hired in the black market yellow pages.

Ah, the old 'turn a blind eye' argument. Libertarianism at it's finest. Now it might be nice to be able to buy some drugs that the government says I shouldn't have. But I'd also like to not get murdered by posting dissenting opinions or becoming a whistleblower. And since you can't really have one without the other (don't get to choose what goes on your black market if you turn a blind eye), then I think I'll stick with not having this transaction platform exist at all for the betterment of humanity.

of course!

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Lack of respect for legal and political authority is evidently a far worse crime than actual murder.

Re:Good

[LoyalOpposition]

Selling drugs and weapons are serious crimes and should be justly punished.

Unless it's Caspar Weinberger or Eric Holder. Then it's totally legit.

~Loyal

Where does the Fed claim to get power to ban that?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Selling drugs and weapons are serious crimes and should be justly punished. Propz to GNAA

Let's devil's advocate a bit...

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

The Tenth Amendment explicitly, and the Ninth Amendment implicitly, ban the Federal Government from use of any power not explicitly specified in the Constitution as amended. I don't see anything in there that explicitly gives the Federal Government to ban any drugs or traffic in them, or in any way regulate such traffic (beyond forbidding false advertising claims, setting standards for labeling, and the like). (Do YOU find any such power in there? If so, please point it out to us.)

So it could be argued that, by the Federal Government's own basic laws, these were NOT crimes and the "Dread Pirate" was a freedom fighter.

(I won't even get into the issue of the Anarchist claims that ANY government is necessarily illegitimate, coercively imposing its will on people who did not pre-approve this and are not attempting, themselves, to coerce others. The people who promulgated the Constitution were doing their best to get governments off people's backs.)

Re:Hard Appeal to Counter

[ShanghaiBill]

I really fail to see what makes Ross Ulbricht any different from a regular drug dealer on the street

The difference is that he stood up to the man, and challenged the system. It is the same reason that in Russia or China, dissidents are punished more harshly than murderers. They are a threat to the system.

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

[ScentCone]

Since you're apparently an expert in the colloquial interpretation of 18th century American English, could you please explain what this part of the 2nd amendment means?

You're looking at the language and purpose of the amendment incorrectly. To translate its essence into more modern parlance, if would go something like: "Because it's always going to be necessary to have a trained and equipped military organization ready to defend the country, the government - in the interests of not allowing the government to have a monopoly on the tools of defense - shall not prevent citizens who are not in the military from having arms."

The people who wrote that amendment still had a very bad taste in their mouths from living under a monarchy that DID reserve the power to capriciously allow only the military to keep and bear arms. Knowing that a military/militia is necessary, they used the second amendment to be VERY clear that they considered the fundamental right to keep and bear arms to be NOT exclusive to the military. Just like the considered the freedom to speak to be not under the control of the government.