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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.
All he did was facilitate transactions among consenting adults.
Something is wrong with our country.
I don't respond to or upvote ACs
Selling drugs and weapons are only serious crimes if you're not the government.
Oh? You forgot for a minute that the CIA's major money maker is dealing illegal drugs? You even forgot about them selling weapons to or otherwise directly arming dangerous criminals involved in the drug trade? I mean, it's not like Sinaloa, the largest and most powerful drug cartel in the US and Mexico, was put in power directly because of the Drug Enforcement Agencies support, right?
Lack of respect for legal and political authority is evidently a far worse crime than actual murder.
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
I aim to misbehave.
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.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.)
The Commerce Clause? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
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.
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.