81–90 of 94 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopefully not who, but what. Such as, for starters, the "doesn't affect anyone else" principle.
Killing people affects people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who defines 'unreasonable'?
Hopefully not who, but what. Such as, for starters, the "doesn't affect anyone else" principle.
Too many people say "but this is so much better than drug dealers on street corners. No-one gets harmed this way, and there's no violence".
And that's absolutely incorrect.
You might want to read "El Narco", or many other documentaries that talk about the pipeline from growing to cultivation, production. There's still huge amounts of violence in the system, that are in no way alleviated by having some magical fairy happy land online marketplace.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
Sorry. How do I delete my comment?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the 5 had only chat logs as "evidence". Chat logs and of course the payments, from wallets known to be controlled by Ross, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars that correspond precisely with the chat logs. From the judge again; He commissioned the hits, there is no discussion of hypotheticals, he paid actual funds. He paid hundreds of thousands of dollars which were, in fact, paid. He is told when the murders…
the similarity between Force's setup and these ones is just striking. That crap would never pass a jury and probably many of judges would kick it out too. No wonder that these cases don't even have a status of formal charges. The judge dealt Ulbricht additional punishment just on the base of preponderance of evidence as seen by the judge. Thus effectively punishing Ulbricht for the alleged crimes of murder-for-hire.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is they didn't have to prove anything here. It's very common in federal court to plead and be convicted of one thing, and then they bring in all this other shit at sentencing. The burden at trial is "beyond a reasonable doubt", but the bar at sentencing is "preponderance of the evidence" I believe. And I don't buy it for a second that the judge thought about this sentence for 100 hours. Federal judges sen…
That's not true. The murder-for-hire scheme wasn't simply "related conduct": it was also a predicate of the conspiracy charge, which had to sustain a "reasonable doubt" standard at trial, and a sentencing accelerator that met a "preponderance of evidence" standard during sentencing. Both are discussed in the transcript. I do appreciate the color from your own experiences. It's certainly not my contention that sentenc…
It was not a predicate, it was one of three different overt acts charged in furtherance of the conspiracy. At least one overt act must be found for a conspiracy charge, but the charge to the jury did not require separate factual findings on each charged overt act. While each juror must have found it true beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed some overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy, we don't know if all, some, or none of them found the murder for hire one to have been proven.
So, really, there was no meaningful finding relating to the murder for hire allegation at trial; in sentencing, yes, what you say about it as an accelerator is accurate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can understand the harm of opiates and stimulants, but are psychedelics really that damaging to society? And if he grew them himself it wasn't contributing to harmful suppliers...
I personally know of two people in my social circles who committed suicides on psychedelics. You can definitely argue that such a thing might have happened even without the psychedelics but I'm convinced that being in that altered state of mind pushed these people over the edge (literally in one case). I'm personally pro-legalization of a lot of drugs. I do not want to close myself off to the clear negative effects o…
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=psychedelics+suic... http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/02/25/026988111456...
A study failing to find a link between psychedelic use and suicide doesn't mean that psychedelics never cause suicide, it means that on average they don't seem to.
Banning psychedelics will lead to at least some deaths. Not banning psychedelics will lead to at least some deaths. This is true of many many policies.
Ultimately the question is a cost-benefit analysis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the similarity between Force's setup and these ones is just striking. That crap would never pass a jury and probably many of judges would kick it out too. No wonder that these cases don't even have a status of formal charges. The judge dealt Ulbricht additional punishment just on the base of preponderance of evidence as seen by the judge. Thus effectively punishing Ulbricht for the alleged crimes of murder-for-hire.…
He admitted in court that he made the payments (but said it was all just "role play"). So the judge's conclusion seems perfectly justified to me. If it was all a set up, he should have denied that he had the conversations and denied that he made the payments. As far as evidence is concerned, they had the logs recovered from Ross's laptop in addition to the FBI Agents' own logs of the conversations.
I'm not discussing whether he actually did it. I personally just don't know. The issue here is punishment without proper conviction. The judge's conclusion isn't sufficient to convict and punish. The charges should be brought and tried before a jury and the jury should conclude beyond reasonable doubt that it was a real thing, not just a role play or whatever. Only then he could be punished. Innocent until proven guilty. No murder for hire charges have so far been brought and tried before a jury. So he is innocent, according to the law, of the murders-for-hire. Yet he was punished for them. It is obvious violation of the basic principles of justice in US.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He admitted in court that he made the payments (but said it was all just "role play"). So the judge's conclusion seems perfectly justified to me. If it was all a set up, he should have denied that he had the conversations and denied that he made the payments. As far as evidence is concerned, they had the logs recovered from Ross's laptop in addition to the FBI Agents' own logs of the conversations.
>He admitted in court that he made the payments (but said it was all just "role play"). So the judge's conclusion seems perfectly justified to me. I'm not discussing whether he actually did it. I personally just don't know. The issue here is punishment without proper conviction. The judge's conclusion isn't sufficient to convict and punish. The charges should be brought and tried before a jury and the jury should con…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree but if they also want to use the strict punishment to deter then it would probably have to be more than that.
I don't have an opinion on this particular issue, but I do think it's kind of sad that people think it's ok to punish person A in order to influence the behavior of some other unknown group of people. It seems to me like your punishment should fit the crime under the sole consideration of those actually being punished. Otherwise, you're just making people pay for crimes they didn't commit.
People would have no reason not to commit crime if the stakes were "give back what you stole". "Fitting the crime" includes deterrence up to a sane amount. In general the punishment needs to be more than the crime. Say ~5x. Steal $1,000. Pay $5,000 "worth" of your time in jail.