Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

He was not charged for murder itself. During the trial testimony, they were very clear about this (regardless of whatever tptacek may say based on a few random pretrial documents); they worded it so the plots entered in as SR related activity and Bitcoin transactions but that was not part of the charges. From the trial itself: https://www.capa.net/case/2014-cr-00068/page/2159

> Here is the text where he says after redandwhite said I prefer to kill all four, DPR: Hmm, okay, I'll defer to your better judgment. 500,000 has been sent to bitcoin address, transaction number. You look it up on the block chain. There is the payment. The payment was made. How do we know that the payments were made by the defendant? Because they were sent directly from the defendant's bitcoin wallet. That's what Special Agent Yum testified to. Those payments came from addresses that were found on the defendant's laptop, the same wallet we were just discussing earlier, the wallet that was moved to the defendant's local machine right around the same time; in fact, it was moved to the defendant's laptop on April 7 and then on April 8th, he's making the payments. So it was the defendant who made these payments. It was the defendant who was trying to murder five people. Now, to be clear, the defendant has not been charged for these attempted murders here. You're not required to make any findings about them. And the government does not contend that those murders actually occurred. The defendant may have fallen for a big con job, which would only go to show that the Dread Pirate Roberts is not a criminal super-genius that the defendant wants to make him out to be, but what the murder-for-hire exchanges do show is how far the defendant was willing to go to protect his criminal enterprise if users got the idea that their anonymity wasn't safe on Silk Road, that their identities could be leaked en masse, they weren't going to use the site, and the defendant was going to lose business, and he was willing to use violence to stop that from happening.

The Green hits did not come up at all, as far as I know, but I don't think we have all the transcripts yet (the last of them seem to be locked until tomorrow) so maybe the prosecutors managed to work them in tangentially.

However, the hit allegations certainly did affect Forrest in sentencing: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-29/silk-road-...

> Prosecutors said he was more like a drug kingpin, profiting from cyberspace sales of illegal wares, and that he allegedly tried to arrange at least five murders to protect his business. The government said it didn’t believe any were carried out. Forrest said there was “ample and unambiguous evidence” of the plots.

By that logic relatives of deceased drunk-driving victims should be testifying against bars and liquor store proprietors as well.

I think while most expected this kind of outcome, the comments coming out in support are really a round-about kind of way of expressing various posters underlying opinion about U.S. drug laws and policies as ridiculous, draconian, counter-productive and harmful.

The following applies only to the US. Since 1968 you need a license granted by the federal government to sell guns (https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/who-can-obtain-federal-firea...). The law allowing you to carry a firearm was passed in 1791. Driver's licenses have been around since 1899. You can't sell a car to someone without one.

When thinking about this issue, I've found the following thought experiments useful:

(1) Should someone who ran a multi-million dollar illegal gun operation get life in prison, even though unlike drugs, the right to own firearms is explicitly protected by the Constitution?

(2) Should someone who ran a multi-million dollar website selling only weed in legal venues (Colorado, etc) be convicted of any crime, never-mind sentenced to life in prison, even though it is against federal law?

Personally I answer (1) as YES and (2) as NO, and place Ulbricht's conduct significantly closer to (1) than to (2).