[stormcrowsx]

It's terrible that we are doing this to someone who probably would have learned their lesson with only 5-10 years of prison and been able to return to society. He had the potential to return as a productive member of society and now instead he will be a lifelong debt all for assisting in the sale of drugs that people willingly purchased knowing the risk of death from those drugs. He's no saint but this punishment is unreasonable and it seems like the Judge was just out to get him.

[slg]

I think the judge addressed that issue.

>"No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court. It is a privileged argument, it is an argument from one of privilege. You are no better a person than any other drug dealer and your education does not give you a special place of privilege in our criminal justice system. It makes it less explicable why you did what you did."

You can argue that our drug laws are wrong or the punishments are too extreme, but singling out Ulbrich for the specifics ways in which he clearly and repeatedly violated those laws is showing favoritism. If his crimes didn't involve the Internet, there would be nothing newsworthy about his arrest and sentencing.

[superkuh]

Except he didn't sell drugs at all. He ran a marketplace.

[mikeyouse]

Untrue.. The first several pounds of shrooms on the Silk Road were grown and sold by Ulbricht. He claims credit for "Several Kilograms" in his diary.. Several kilos is well into the tens of thousands of dollars range..

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-the-fbi-found-on-r...

[emmab]

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...

[breakingcups]

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 of said drugs though. I think we should all remain honest and proportionate about them.

[emmab]

I did a quick search on google scholar. Don't see any articles linking psychedelic use to suicide and there is a study of 130,000 people failing to find a link:

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.

[dsfyu404ed]

>You can argue that our drug laws are wrong or the punishments are too extreme, but singling out Ulbrich for the specifics ways in which he clearly and repeatedly violated those laws is showing favoritism. If his crimes didn't involve the Internet, there would be nothing newsworthy about his arrest and sentencing.

Seriously?

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE SPECIFICS. Accidentally beat someone to death in a fight you started and you might serve a decade or two. Beat them to death for fun, eat their heart, feed the rest to a dog and light their house on fire while you're at it and you'll likely serve life. Both are 1st degree murder but that's about where the similarity ends.

[adrusi]

The first example is not first degree murder, it's second degree. First degree has to be premeditated and deliberate. You're right, context is important, it's why we have judges determine sentences and not the law, but that's a poor example.

[tptacek]

Well, that and attempting to have multiple people killed.

[clamprecht]

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 sentence people to life in prison every single week, and they are appointed for life - do the math. I wish there were a tally of stats of how many life sentences each judge has handed out to defendants.

In my case, I was convicted of a crime that was for the physical theft and sale of circuit boards, had nothing to do with the Internet or hacking, and yet I was banned from the Internet upon my release from prison. This part of the sentence was out of the blue, and we had no opportunity to even prepare a defense for it (and in 1995, no one in the court room really knew what the Internet was except me and a few of my friends who attended the hearing). It's really fucked but it's their modus operandi.

[tptacek]

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 sentencing is in general fair, or even that this particular sentence was fair. Certainly: sentencing for computer crimes is egregiously unfair.

But the Ulbricht trial gets past a lot of these issues. The judge notes:

* Ulbricht paid to have someone killed. He was told that person had a wife and child. Ulbricht paid anyways. The money was taken. There is no evidence he was role-playing.

* Later, Ulbricht paid to have someone else killed. The would-be assassins informed him that the target lived with 3 other people. Ulbricht paid extra to have those people killed too. The money was taken. There is no evidence he was role-playing.

At this point in the transcript, it's like: what do you think is going to happen?

[clamprecht]

Ok, then I was misinformed on Ross's case, if he was convicted for the murder conspiracy. I don't know first-hand what happened in his case. I do know first-hand what happened in my case (and in many of cases of friends) where the US Attorney (the prosecutor) misled the court or outright lied, or had a witness lie, to get the defendant a higher sentence. They do it so routinely that it casts doubt on all cases now (for me, at least).

[trhway]

>if he was convicted for the murder conspiracy

he wasn't. Alleged murders, without ever being tried before court, were used to cause sentence enhancement. All the "evidence" and "testimony" for the murder charges weren't even enough to sustain the charges, less bring them for trial. At the time of the conviction, it wasn't known that the agents were corrupt and thus, not surprisingly, the Judge gave their testimonies all the possible weight and came down that hard on the Ulbricht.

[trhway]

>At the time of the conviction, it wasn't known that the agents were corrupt and thus, not surprisingly, the Judge gave their testimonies all the possible weight and came down that hard on the Ulbricht.

stand corrected. Judge did know that the agent was corrupted. The murder-for-hire allegations used at the sentencing didn't even have as much as a testimony of corrupt agent behind them.

[tptacek]

I can't possibly blame you. You were also sentenced during a period of hysteria about computer crime. It must have sucked a lot.

I might be biased, since ToneLoc is what got me started programming.

[trhway]

>But the Ulbricht trial gets past a lot of these issues. The judge notes:

>* Ulbricht paid to have someone killed. He was told that person had a wife and child. Ulbricht paid anyways. The money was taken. There is no evidence he was role-playing.

>* Later, Ulbricht paid to have someone else killed. The would-be assassins informed him that the target lived with 3 other people. Ulbricht paid extra to have those people killed too. The money was taken. There is no evidence he was role-playing.

if remember all these were based only on the testimonies of those couple of corrupt agents, and all these charges were quietly dropped. The charges were never tried before any court, including the court where drug related charges and conviction happened. The charges were only conveniently mentioned by the prosecution and judge took them account. Thus a cyberpunk became blood thirsty low-life drug dealer. Pretty dirty, though standard, trick one can say. It makes a joke out of "not guilty until proven".

[tptacek]

They're right there in the indictment! Also, this article summarizes a transcript of the sentencing hearing. The judge discusses this at length in the transcript. Read the indictment! Read the transcript! It's interesting stuff, and you don't have to get all your info second- and third-hand!

[trhway]

yes, like in the previously available court documents (like the Maryland indictment which was basis for the prosecutors to mention the charges) pretty much everything about the murders comes from those agents (actually mainly from the one of them). The transcript doesn't contain anything to add to the previously available documents, it just basically summarizes and mentions what has been already stated elsewhere.

[dragonwriter]

> 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

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.

[anonbanker]

for the record, this is what ulbricht was convicted of:

narcotics trafficking; distribution of narcotics by means of the Internet; narcotics trafficking conspiracy; continuing criminal enterprise; conspiracy to aid and abet computer hacking; conspiracy to traffic in fraudulent identity documents; and money laundering conspiracy.

notice that "attempting to have multiple people killed" is not something he was convicted of.

[mikeyouse]

From the linked documents, straight from the judge as sentencing adjustments:

    Ulbricht's directed violence here is and 
    relates to the murders for hire which he is alleged to 
    have commissioned and paid for. The Court must 
    determine whether these allegations have been
    demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence and I 
    find that there is ample and unambiguous evidence that
    Ulbricht commissioned five murders as part of his 
    efforts to protect his criminal enterprise and that he paid
    for these murders. There is no evidence that he was 
    role-playing.

    The Court finds that the evidence is clear and
    unambiguous and it far exceeds the necessary
    preponderance findings, that Ulbricht believed he was
    paying for murders of those he wanted eliminated, and 
    that he believed they had in fact been murdered.

Check out pages 18 - 19.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/283722300/Ross-Ulbricht-Sentencing

[anonbanker]

then why didn't they convict him of it? Or more importantly, why didn't the prosecution keep the charge?

[tptacek]

Notice indictment, first count, overt act B.

[clamprecht]

For the benefit of others, here is the indictment: http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao-sdny/legacy/...

The murder for hire thing is on page 5.

[anonbanker]

This is why I don't trust you, Tom. You know he wasn't convicted of it, and you agree through acquiescence. But knowing that, you pretend to conflate indictment and conviction, as if it justifies what I said being wrong.

That's lying, Tom, and it isn't right.

[Strom]

The assassination stuff is disturbing, but it's not what he was sentenced for.

[tptacek]

The sentencing transcript disagrees with you; the judge goes on for several pages about it.

There's a really virulent meme that Ulbricht was never tried for the assassination scheme. But he was: the murder-for-hire scheme was a predicate on his "criminal conspiracy" charge. Not only was it brought up in trial, but it was brought up in a way that put the onus on the prosecution to prove it.

[trhway]

>There's a really virulent meme that Ulbricht was never tried for the assassination scheme.

nice choice of words - "tried" instead of "convicted" :)

>But he was: the murder-for-hire scheme was a predicate on his "criminal conspiracy" charge. Not only was it brought up in trial, but it was brought up in a way that put the onus on the prosecution to prove it.

not true. The Judge clearly states that assassinations come through on "preponderance of evidence" which is a lower standard from "beyond reasonable doubt" the prosecution must prove for a trial and conviction. There is absolutely no surprise that a testimony from a [still unknown to be corrupt] federal agent met the "preponderance of evidence" threshold.

[mikeyouse]

There was absolutely no testimony from Carl Mark Force or Shawn Bridges during the trial... Everyone involved (Judge, Defense, Prosecution) knew that charges against the two corrupt agents were coming down the line but they were directed to not mention it since the judge deemed that DEA completed their investigation completely independently of evidence gathered by the two. This is one of the reasons Ulbricht's lawyer kept expressing his outrage and promising a retrial.

This is also why they only accused Ross of 5 hits instead of 6 (The 6th was the one setup by the corrupt agents).

[trhway]

>This is why they only accused Ross of 5 hits instead of 6 (The 6th was the one setup by the corrupt agents).

man, we're in different Universes. They dropped 5 charges out of 6 and the 6th has made it only as far as an indictment (in Maryland) completely based on the Force's testimony. And that indictment was used as the reason to deny bail and poisoned the rest of the trial.

[rsacco]

this infuriates me whenever I see this "justification". Watch Deep Web Documentary (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3312868/) . The corrupt FBI agents were the ones responsible for the fake hits, not Ross.

I get that you're coming from ignorance and probably not malice, and I remember seeing the Article headlines too when it came out; but bro, it's Oct 2015 and we now know those charges are bullshit.

[FireBeyond]

Oh, come on. From Alex Winter:

"Silk Road Was Just Another Tech Company Outside of the tech press, Winter notes, a lot of the media coverage on the Silk Road has been “drugs and guns and hitmen—just wildly off-base.” Off-base, he says, because when he started interviewing the people who knew Silk Road he didn’t see an outfit that was all that different from those littering Silicon Valley. “I started to meet all these core architects within the Silk Road: vendors, engineers, sellers, administrators, people who were helping with scaling,” he says. “It’s obvious in retrospect but it was just like any large tech company. But it was just not represented that way in the media, so even I was caught off-guard.”"[(http://www.wired.com/2015/05/deep-web-silk-road-alex-winter/...]

That's so disingenuous it's condescending. What the hell were they scaling, exactly? That Silk Road was a scaling experiment, not really a mechanism to sell drugs? Seriously?

[ubernostrum]

Ross was a sweet innocent boy who'd never ever hurt anyone, and who only wanted to implement a golden age of Libertopia by freeing people from the oppressive yoke of laws. Y'know, like laws against having other people killed in exchange for money.

The more I read about the guy, the more the root of the word "privilege" seems appropriate (i.e., private law -- he wanted one generous and lax law for him, and another violent and harsh law for the people who got in his way).

[tptacek]

Can you explain more about how "the corrupt FBI agents" were solely responsible for the fake hits? If you're right, the judge (and the indictment!) are also wrong.

[vectorpush]

I'd consider the sentence excessive were it not for the multiple attempted murder-for-hires. If someone is intellectually and morally capable of directing a criminal enterprise that funds murder as a calculated business decision, and they try to do that, they've earned themselves a life sentence in my view.

[guelo]

I don't think the judge agrees with you since that wasn't mentioned in the sentencing. And he wasn't convicted of attempters murder.

[long]

It's true that he wasn't convicted for the murders but the judge did mention it in the sentencing... see page 82:

"So, we also have your own violence and there is no doubt -- really none -- that you wanted to and paid for the murders of five people to protect your drug enterprise. That is not the conduct of conviction but it is relevant conduct, so how is that consistent with harm reduction?"

[randyrand]

I agree but if they also want to use the strict punishment to deter then it would probably have to be more than that.

[Retra]

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.

[randyrand]

The threat of jailtime has always been used to deter crime. It's a large part of the reason people don't commit crime all the time.

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.

[clamprecht]

What sentence would be sufficient, if 10 years isn't?

[tptacek]

Simply for running a drug market, with no additional criminal conduct? Just the nuts-and-bolts of running the site, setting up Tor, taking money, that kind of stuff?

1-2 years seems about right.

You think about the very low barrier to starting a site like that up, and then you think about the kind of person likely to stumble into that scheme, and then what it would take to deter them and others from trying it, and it seems like you want enough of a sentence so that it's for real, but nothing more than that.

But for paying to have people killed? Life seems appropriate. Maybe, if you want to take a more Scandinavian approach to sentencing, you'd say "10-15 years". Long enough that the convict comes out of prison effectively living a different life than they were before. Enough to completely disrupt their previous connections.

[randyrand]

1-2 years? Heck, thats not much risk to start a hugely profitable drug market. I'd take that risk if you could ensure I only get up to 2 years.

[dreamfactory2]

hmm running a drugs market is a criminal conspiracy so I'd imagine a high number for that alone, quite apart from the deaths of users. not sure if his defence team were more inept or desperate from the article

[tptacek]

I understood the question to be "what's a sentence you can defend from first principles". In fact, the deaths of Silk Road drug users played a huge role in his sentence.

[omni_wisdumb]

He would've came out and just tried again. Pretty much every single case of white-collar crime or crimes like this have a repeat offense. Not to mention his site also gave a venue to hire hitmen. Also, the FBI is probably going to end up using him as a asset tbh.