[fogof]

> If there was enough evidence to demonstrate that he attempted to murder someone, why wasn't he charged and convicted of it?

Wikipedia suggests this was because he was already sentenced to double life imprisonment. Clearly prosecutors should not waste time pursuing charges that won't really impact a criminal's status, do you disagree?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Trial

[AnthonyMouse]

If they don't "waste time pursuing charges that won't really impact" the sentence then the unproven allegations should not be allowed to impact the sentence. You can't have it both ways.

[tzs]

What a lot of people are overlooking is that there were two separate indictments in two separate courts with two separate prosecution teams.

In one indictment, in a New York federal court, he was charged with several crimes, but not murder-for-hire. In the other indictment, in a Maryland federal court, he was charged just with murder-for-hire.

The case in New York went to trial first. The murder-for-hire evidence was introduced in that court as part of trying to prove some of the elements of the other charges.

For example to prove a charge of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise one of the elements is that the person occupied "a position of organizer, a supervisory position, or any other position of management". Evidence that a person is trying to hire hitmen to protect the enterprise is evidence that they occupy such a role.

After the convictions and sentencing in the New York trial were upheld on appeal, the prosecutors in Maryland dropped their case because he was then in jail, for life, with no possibility of parole. They said it was a better use of resources to focus on cases where justice had not yet been served.

[AnthonyMouse]

> What a lot of people are overlooking is that there were two separate indictments in two separate courts with two separate prosecution teams.

They're not overlooking this, they're criticizing it.

Suppose you have to prove that someone occupied "a position of organizer, a supervisory position, or any other position of management" so you introduce several pieces of evidence to try to prove it, one of them is some sketchy murder for hire allegations from a low-credibility source. The jury then convicts on the conspiracy charge without indicating whether they believed the murder for hire claim was proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Should you now use the murder for hire claim to determine sentencing for the conspiracy charge? No, that's crazy, it's a much more serious crime and they should have to charge and prove that as a separate count if they want it to affect the penalty.

[tzs]

> one of them is some sketchy murder for hire allegations from a low-credibility source

The source is a bunch of chat records from Ulbricht's seized laptop. There's a fairly detailed description of the evidence here [1].

[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1391...

[AnthonyMouse]

The issue is that the law enforcement agent investigating the allegation had serious credibility issues, but the same agent had access to the laptop, so now you have a chain of custody problem. How much of the chat logs are real and how much of them are made up by this guy who was convicted for extorting Ulbricht?

In particular, the chat logs allegedly contain multiple separate instances of murder for hire, but then the claim that Ulbricht had already been sentenced to life without parole as the reason these claims were never prosecuted doesn't make sense, because a conspiracy to commit murder has multiple parties, so where are the murder prosecutions of these alleged contract killers and co-conspirators?

[formerly_proven]

You keep claiming these are unproven allegations despite this being demonstrably untrue and others repeatedly pointing that out all over this thread.

[AnthonyMouse]

They're unproven allegations because "proven allegations" mean something specific, i.e. that it was charged as a count and the jury rendered a verdict of guilty. This is especially important when it's not at all clear they could have proven it as a separate count, because those allegations were tainted by significant law enforcement credibility issues.