Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

The quote( not your comment ) is a logical fallacy. Even if was not accepted as hard evidence in the court, it was spoken, and has influenced the jury.

I knew Ross for a few years in college. I find it almost inconceivable to believe that he tried to have people killed. I also find the sentence completely disproportionate to the 7 charges he was tried and convicted of. This is a sad day.

edit: I also understand the point that his hiring the hitman was an overt act under one of the other charges, but, speaking as someone who is not a lawyer, it seems to me that such a weighty punishment should have to be based on a much more explicit charge than this. I sincerely doubt that they would have been able to make the case for life in prison if not for the murder-for-hire angle, and as such i think it should have been charged. This seems like a dishonest and sneaky way to prosecute someone. Of course, i have my biases.

Please read the parent I responded to. Especially the closing statement.

>If drugs were legal and treatment of abuse the focus instead of punishment Silk Road wouldn't have existed in the first place.

I cited Portgual, a country where drugs are legal and the focus is on treatment of users. Giving an example of where such a system exists and works. The "war on drugs" is the wrong approach. I implied, rather indirectly, that prison quotas have a lot to do with keeping drug use illegal. It makes it easier to fill quotas.

Now then - the parent and my focus were both more on the users and the wrong approach for the "war on drugs". A response to me focused more on distribution and extrapolating the legal stance of Portugal. So I cited a Wikipedia page that was more specific and re-iterated that my focus (and the parent I responded to, by extention) were more focused on drug users and treatment doing more good than going on witch hunts for distributors.

Congratulations, you caught Ulbricht. Now what about all the other dealers that people will turn to? Especially local dealers who might lace their drugs or have improperly manufactured drugs (ie. containing arsenic) that may lead to more deaths of users?

I have no idea how the Silk Road worked, but I imagine dealers had accounts and received feedback. This meant there was some level of Social Quality Control over the drugs. Anyone selling faulty/laced drugs would be quickly rooted from the market. Providing a 'safer' place to buy, even if still illegal, does more good for the users than having to trust shady dealers.

This is very, very related to the war on drugs. It's a criticism of the policy of it all.

I'll quote myself from another post I made:

"Mistaking some delusional world of zero crime doesn't do any good for people living in reality."

His convictions were for hacking (and I'd love to know the details on that... who exactly did Ross hack?) criminal enterprise conspiracy, and narcotics trafficking. The closing is in a pdf somewhere up the thread.

No attempted murder charges though.

This man is literally going to jail forever on the charge of proividing people a place to buy opium. Maybe he tried to hire hits, but that didn't make the final conviction list, though some in this thread are trying to say that "narcotics conspiracy" is a broader charge that somehow? includes murder for hire charges.

> Ok, he wasn't sentenced for murder but it was "factored in" in another sentence

Its not "murder", its "soliciting murder in the furtherance of a conspiracy". Which is not a separate crime, but manner in which the crime of conspiracy is achieved.

(Soliciting murder itself can be charged as a crime, and Ulbricht is charged with that, too, though those charges were not tried with these charges.)