[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.