Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

The court docs were taken down since Ulbricht's attorney messed up and uploaded unredacted versions, but if that's the guy I think it is;

His son had started abusing benzos but wanted to try heroin -- he bought some H on the Silk Road and then ODed after trying it once. When they found his body, the computer was literally open to the Silk Road page..

(There were 6 deaths detailed in the sentencing guidelines, so my recounting may be slightly off, but feel free to exchange this one for the 16-year old kid who bought LSD on the SR, had a terrible trip, then jumped to his death off of a balcony)

Making dangerous drugs vastly easier to purchase by those who had no previous source for them isn't harmless.

I'm not sure I really follow because the comics didn't describe anything that presumably would be entrapment.

Is anyone here a lawyer in this area of law? I don't really trust webcomics....

But let's talk about this alleged hitman situation. Didn't the police come up with the idea and create the situation where a third of a million dollars appeared to have been stolen and a volunteer appeared to defect with information and a threat to bring down the organization?

What exactly does count as coercion? If the police were to make your incentives work out a certain way - let's say they were aware that a non-call-girl was in dire straights was potentially willing to accept money for a personal night, they freeze her bank account and provide a good looking and safe opportunity with a load of cash to do it - would that count as compulsion?

Or is it just by appeal to words that counts as compulsion?

How can a court decide what you would have done otherwise?

It seems like a pretty difficult area of law - and one that the defendant could argue?

For the record I do not support trafficking of drugs and illegal materials, nor calling of hit men: but I do want to make sure that the tools to get a conviction do not further enshrine precedents that have fascistic qualities to them - e.g. parallel construction, entrapment, others.

So in this case wasn't a crisis situation (there being a defector with SR secrets) fabricated by the police and a third of a million dollars disappeared? Would this sort of thing count as doing something to overcome resistance? It's not likely that an anonymous person offering to 'help take care of the situation' would have enticed him - he needed a scenario that compelled him and this scenario was fabricated.

Here is exactly what you said, kicking off this long and unproductive subthread:

There was no such thing introduced for the trial. It was in the original press release, then it was withdrawn. Maybe it was because of Mark Force's transgressions, or maybe it was just for effect. Regardless, he never got the chance to defend himself against those particular allegations.

By "no such thing", you were referring to the words > in the preceding comment.

Let's pick it apart:

1. There was no such thing introduced for the trial. Not only was it introduced for the trial, it was an explicit part of what Ulbricht was indicted for.

2. It was in the original press release, then it was withdrawn. It was never withdrawn; he was indicted based on (among other things) the explicitly asserted "overt act" of commissioning a murder. The murder-for-hire scheme wasn't innuendo, but a rebuttable fact introduced not just as evidence but as one of the legs of the case.

3. Maybe it was because of Mark Force's transgressions, or maybe it was just for effect. It may have been either of those things, but if so, it was also actually one of the predicates of the conspiracy charge he was convicted of.

4. Regardless, he never got the chance to defend himself against those particular allegations. Yes, he did; his legal team mounted multiple arguments against the allegation, and did not prevail at trial. Ulbricht's team had not only the opportunity to defend him against the allegation, but the obligation to. Conclusively refuting that allegation would have significantly harmed the prosecution's case, knocking out one of the predicates for the conspiracy charge.

From what I can tell, you made a fairly complicated series of assertions, none of which turned out to be true.