Tangentially related: I had the disconcerting experience of reading a Wired article about his arrest[1] while unknowingly sitting about six feet from the spot where he was apprehended. When I read that the FBI agents had stopped at Bello Coffee while preparing their stakeout, I thought, huh, interesting coincidence, I just had a coffee there.
Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
Having this tableau unexpectedly unfold right in front of my eyes was a fascinating experience, and it certainly made the article suddenly get a lot more immersive!
EDIT: to be clear, I was not present for the arrest. I was reading the magazine, some years after the arrest, but in the same place as the arrest. (I didn’t qualify the events with “I read that...” since I thought the narrative ellipsis would be obvious from context; evidently not.)
He was being arrested in the article, not IRL. When I say “Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me” I mean that I read
> He went... past the periodicals and reference desk, beyond the romance novels, and settled in at a circular table near science fiction, on the second floor... in a corner, with a view out the window and his back toward the wall.
and realized that I was in the Glen Park public library, at a circular table near science fiction on the second floor, in a corner with my back to the window, and facing directly towards where the article had just said he had sat.
I had the same confusion initially, interestingly chat GPT gets it:
So while wolfgang42 wasn't there when Ulbricht was actually arrested, their realization created a vivid mental image of the event unfolding in that space, which made the story feel more immersive.
In short: they were reading about an old event, but it happened to occur in the same spot they were sitting at that moment. Hope that clears it up!
Okay, that's actually pretty wild. I totally misunderstood too, but the response from the "AI" does indeed "clear it up" for me. A bit surprised actually, but then again, I suppose I shouldn't be, since language is what those "large language models" are all about after all... :)
Indeed. But their is something surprising here, however. people like chomsky would present examples like this for decades as untracktable by any algorithm, and as a proof that language is a uniquely human thing. they went as far as to claim that humans have a special language organ, somewhere in their brain perhaps. turns out, a formula exists, it is just very very large.
Just as an additional datapoint, since I’m confused by fellow commenters’ confusion—I thought your narrative was clear, colorful, and entertaining, and I hope you’ll keep things so literary and engaging in your future contributions too :)
As with so many matters of crime, punishment, and high dudgeon, the physical reality of the situation always feels so banal. Dread Pirate Roberts’ lawless dark kingdom, where he commissions trans-national assassinations… looks a lot like a nerdy dude’s laptop on a municipal library table.
I believe they are suggesting an experience of imaginatively visualising the events of the arrest linearly as they were narrated in their read-through of the article, serendipitously aided by being physically present at the same location, and are referencing the article's narration partially in the present tense to similarly immerse us in medias res as we follow their remark.
Alternatively, they are themselves Ross Ulbricht, describing an out-of-body fever dream or post-traumatic flashback. This seems ... somewhat less likely.
I thought that starting my story in media res would make for a better dramatic effect, but it seems I overestimated my audience and went a little too heavy on the narrative ellipsis.
> Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
Alternately:
> Ulbricht had walked into the public library
gives the game away.
If you still want to play around a bit:
> I could see where Ulbricht walked into the public library. The table he sat at. I looked up and saw where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
That way you are leaving some ambiguity, but are not directly lying with the tenses.
I think you could have told it as experiencing the events without making your post confusing, but you'd have to redo your first paragraph. Your first paragraph is external, meta, and places his arrest in your past, which throws off the effect when that suddenly changes in the next sentence. It's not the audience's fault that that is hard to parse.
I mean, it’s possible that the library had rearranged their chairs in the intervening years and that exact one was now at a different table, but it was certainly a chair in the same location.
You’re not going to hear from the people who thought it made perfect sense, so the replies are a pretty biased sample. (This is also true of the parent complaint about reading comprehension, tbh.) But I see three confused replies and three corrections (not counting my own), so it doesn’t seem to be every reply.
I think the problem is that I took an artistic style in an attempt to paint a picture for the reader, but I did it in a long thread on a technical forum where people are probably mostly skimming rather than engaging in literary criticism, so I should maybe have anticipated this would be a problem.
I thought it was fine, I wasn't confused for a moment. The only real problem here is that HN attracts a certain brand of nerds who are inclined to think it's hilarious when Maurice Moss says "Yes, it's one of those", many of whom are likely frothing right now because I just committed a comma splice in the previous sentence.
I (and others) have vouched a few of his comments back to life, he does write a good comment.
I don't know the original reasons for his apparent perma-dead'ing (users can option to "show dead" and see these comments) but I suspect it's due to going fully Australian wih swear words and invectives when he gets a bit passionate about something .. or even just adding colour for a lark, as we do.
I think his original sentence was absolutely deserved—even though the charge of hiring a contract killer to assassinate his business competition may have been dropped, I think it's clear he did many things in the same vein. Even if you support his original pursuit of a free and open online marketplace, I think most people would agree he took it a bridge too far in the end.
That said, I do think he absolutely deserved to be released, not because he didn't deserve to be locked up in the first place, but because he's clearly been rehabilitated and has done great work during his time in prison. All that considered, ten years seems like a not unreasonable prison sentence for what he did. I hope he'll continue to do good when he's released.
Good point, you are absolutely correct. Then I suppose life “with the possibility of parole” would have been a more appropriate sentence, though I don’t know if that’s typically given. In any case, I feel prisons ought to release prisoners if they demonstrate exceptional rehabilitation and remorse, as Ross has, though of course that’s a difficult line to draw in practice.
As an aside, in Canada, a sentence of life without parole is considered unlawful because it conflicts with Section 12 of the Charter guarantees that individuals have the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Courts have ruled that life without the possibility of parole deprives offenders of any hope of rehabilitation or reintegration into society, which could amount to cruel and unusual treatment.
A sentence must balance the gravity of the offense with the circumstances of the offender, while still allowing for hope and redemption. A life sentence without parole forecloses this balance.
It's always struck me as odd that the United States - a nation that is packed with far more Christians than Canada - doesn't shape its system of incarceration to be more inline with Christian values and the teachings of Jesus.
Canada's explicit rejection of life sentences without parole (LWOP) through decisions like R v Bissonnette more closely aligns with Jesus's teachings about redemption and mercy. In Canada, even those convicted of the most serious crimes retain the possibility of parole - not a guarantee of release, but a recognition of the potential for rehabilitation that echoes Jesus's teachings about transformation and second chances.
This philosophical difference manifests in several ways:
- In Canada, the emphasis on rehabilitation over retribution is reflected in the term "correctional services" rather than "penitentiary system"
- Canadian prisons generally offer more rehabilitative programs and education opportunities
- The Canadian system places greater emphasis on Indigenous healing lodges and restorative justice practices that align with Jesus's focus on healing broken relationships
- Canadian courts have explicitly recognized that denying hope of release violates human dignity, which parallels Jesus's teachings about the inherent worth of every person
The contrast becomes particularly stark when considering multiple murders. While many US jurisdictions impose multiple life sentences to be served consecutively (effectively ensuring death in prison), the Canadian Supreme Court has ruled this practice unconstitutional, maintaining that even the worst offenders should retain the possibility - though not guarantee - of earning redemption through genuine rehabilitation.
This doesn't mean Canada is soft on crime - serious offenders still serve lengthy sentences, and parole is never guaranteed. But the maintenance of hope for eventual redemption, even in the worst cases, better reflects Jesus's teachings about grace, transformation, and the limitless possibility of spiritual renewal.
The irony is particularly pointed given that the US has a much higher proportion of self-identified Christians than Canada, yet has adopted a more retributive approach that seems less aligned with Jesus's teachings about mercy and redemption.
But hey, you just have to wait for the right president to be elected and you might get your chance. So I guess that's something.
Ross Ulbricht was not sentenced for murder-for-hire charges.
Those allegations were used to deny him bail and influenced public perception, they were not part of his formal conviction or sentencing.
He was convicted on non-violent charges related to operating the Silk Road website, including drug distribution, computer hacking, and money laundering.
Does this change your opinion of sentencing being well-deserved?
This opinion [1] from the judge in his case indicates that the murder-for-hire evidence was admitted during his trial. The document outlines the evidence for all 6 murder for hire allegations and explains why, although not charged, the evidence is relevant to his case.
He was found during sentencing to be guilty of hiring a hit on a competitor using a preponderance of evidence (lower then presumption of innocence). While this is a lower standard than a conviction, it is still a higher standard than most apply in public discourse.
That isn't fair, the point of the trial is to test whether something is to be acted on. To act on something that wasn't directly part of the trial is a bit off. I'm sure the judge is acting in the clear legally, but if someone is going to be sentenced for attempted murder then that should be after a trial that formally accuses them of the crime.
He wasn't sentenced for attempted murder, the sentence Ulbricht received was within the range provided by statute for the crimes he was convicted of. Judges have discretion in sentencing and they are allowed to consider the character of the defendant. The fact that Ulbricht attempted to murder people was demonstrated to the judges satisfaction during the trial and influenced her to sentence at the higher end of the range allowed for the crimes he was duly convicted.
The range allowed for those sentences is way too wide. Life without parole is nowhere near reasonable for hacking, money laundering, and drugs. Being within the sentencing range is meaningless when the range encompasses any possible sentence.
This cuts both ways as judges often adjust their sentencing downward based on mitigating evidence. For both aggravating and mitigating circumstances evidence does need to be submitted, and there are standards of proof to be applied. It's just that the procedural rules can be different and, depending on the context and jurisdiction, sufficiency can be decided by the judge alone. In some jurisdictions, for example, aggravating evidence may need to be put to the jury, while mitigating evidence need not be.
The U.S. is rather unique in providing a right to jury trials for most--in practice almost all, including misdemeanor--criminal cases. And this is a major factor for why sentencing is so harsh and prosecutions so slow in the U.S. In myriad ways the cost of criminal trials has induced the system to arrive at its current state favoring plea deals, with overlapping crimes and severe maximum penalties as cudgels. Be careful about what kind of "protections" you want to impose.
Sentencing is complicated in the US. Generally speaking, they have a huge range and a standard for computing where one falls in that range, but everything within that range is open to judge's discretion. Life without parole was within that range for the crimes that Ulbricht was convicted of.
This standard is an enormous document, https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines which lays out the rules for adjustments. Evidence is admissible (by both sides!) for sentencing, with a lower standard of evidence and burden of proof, to either raise or lower the sentence within the very wide numbers of what the conviction was for. So the Judge in this case found that the lower burden of proof was met for additional violent crimes being committed (with Ulbricht's legal team having an opportunity to rebut), and that impacts the sentencing calculations.
Not a lawyer, but I have listened to US lawyers on podcasts.
Other acts of those charged are routinely brought up in trials. Fir example, criminals being charged with crime A that already committed similar crimes in the past are used to show that the likelihood of crime A being committed this time is higher.
That's one way of phrasing it, and unfortunately some jurisdictions have adopted that phrase, but it is not correct.
A preponderance of the evidence is the greater weight of the evidence after all evidence is considered. Heuristics along the lines of "yeah that fits my priors"—which is what is actually meant by "more likely than not"—are explicitly disallowed.
If Joe Smith in Smalltown, Ohio was hit by a blue bus, and hammock owns 51 of the 100 blue busses in Smalltown whereas torstenvl owns 49 of the 100 blue busses, that is insufficient evidence by itself to prevail by a preponderance standard against hammock in a civil suit.
Yea, and most public discourse is at the level of "I saw a post online about it once". Most people aren't doing deep research before their opinions about things that aren't actually that relevant to their day to day lives. 95% of the world, at best, still has no idea who Ross Ulbricht is even today.
It does not change my opinion that the sentence was well deserved in the eyes of the law. Those are all things, that independently, can lead to serious jail time. The scale of his operation was also substantial.
I don't see how that should change anyone's opinion on whether the sentence was deserved. Whether it was legally/procedurally correct, sure. Whether he didn't get the day in court he should have had, sure. But given that no-one seems to seriously dispute that he did try to pay to have the guy killed, what he deserves is a long prison sentence, and whether that's imposed by a court doing things properly, a court doing things improperly, or a vigilante kidnapper isn't really here or there on that point.
(The rule of law is important, and we may let off people who deserve harsh sentences for the sake of preserving it, but it doesn't mean they deserve those sentences any less)
> But given that no-one seems to seriously dispute that he did try to pay to have the guy killed
If there was enough evidence to demonstrate that he attempted to murder someone, why wasn't he charged and convicted of it?
Also, 2 of the DEA agents involved in his investigation were convicted of fraud in relation to the case.
I do believe he probably did attempt to have someone killed, but I'm far from certain of it, and think it should have no bearing on the case if there's not enough evidence to convict him.
You say the rule of law is important, but also we should impose extra-legal long sentences even if the rule of law doesn't allow us to? How do you reconcile this perspective?
The rule of law says innocent until proven guilty.
The reason they didn't go after him for murder for hire allegations isn't because they felt bad for him or that they didn't want to waste tax payer's money.
The reason they didn't go after him for 'murder for hire' was that they knew there was no merit in it.
They did go after him for "murder for hire"; the murders were part of his conspiracy predicates, and evidence for them was introduced. This stuff about him not being taken all the way through a case charged on murder-for-hire, after receiving a life sentence in a case where those murders were part of the case, is just message board jazz hands.
>case where those murders were part of the case, is just message board jazz hands.
you're trying to look like you don't understand or aren't aware that jury didn't convict him of murder-for-hire.
He chose a trial by jury, not by a judge. Nevertheless the judge herself decided that he is guilty of the murder-for-hire, and additionally the judge used significantly lower standard than required for conviction.
Feel free to use the search bar to see what's been written (including by me) in the zillion discussions we've had on this case in the past. Again: primary source documentation of what happened in that trial is right there for you to read; you're just a Google search away from it.
> even though the charge of hiring a contract killer to assassinate his business competition may have been dropped
Just because the charge was dropped doesn't mean he's innocent of it. In fact, reading the chat logs makes his guilt pretty clear. Of course, because the whole operation was a scam, there's little he could have been convicted of. Yet just because the murder was never carried out doesn't mean he didn't intend to have someone assassinated. In my book, paying someone money to kill another person is definitely grounds for imprisonment.
That happens all the time, when people confess to a charge ahead of time, instead of proceeding to a trial. Remember that the purpose of the trial is to find out whether they are guilty when there is a factual dispute about that question. Here, I suppose the existence of a factual dispute is itself disputed: does that need to go to a jury, or is it enough that the trial judge and the appeal court looked at the record and decided there wasn't a dispute?
No. I'm talking more from an ethical standpoint. I think someone who hires contract killers deserves to go to prison. I also think people shouldn't be convicted for charges that were not proven in court. As I said before, in Ross' case, the charge was dropped.
Ah that's not strictly true. I believe Scotland is the only place in the world I am aware of where there is Innocent, unproven, and Guilty verdicts. I believe in reality a not guilty verdict is, we didn't have the evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt this person committed the crime. Finding someone not guilty is a legal term. Considering whether someone is innocent or not is more of a moral/factual term.
Honestly any time I read the procedural history of this stuff I get nerd sniped by the bizarre details and I lose track of the big picture. I feel like the whole thing could be three competing Dateline NBC style six-part crime specials and I still wouldn't get tired of it.
Ross heard that one of his Silk Roads moderators was arrested, and so he hired someone to kill the mod? The assassin sent a confirmation photo of his mod, asphyxiated and covered in Campbell's Chicken and Stars Soup?? The supposed assassin was actually a corrupt DEA agent who later served federal prison time for crimes so embarrassing that they were never fully disclosed?!?!
There is some kind of thorny moral question I cannot quite wrap my brain around.
Ross did not successfully have anyone killed, but it seems that he must have thought he was successful?
Ross (it is alleged, and chat logs seem to show) ordered someone's death and paid for it and got explicit confirmation that they were dead. [actually several someones.] Did he feel like a murderer at this point? What a fascinating, real life Raskolnikov style figure.
Later, perhaps much later, he gets strong evidence that the murder was fake. Nothing has changed in the outside world after he learns this -- the victim is no more alive before or after he learns this. Does this change his identity? Is he more or less of a murderer than before?
Do the people who kill with modified Xbox controllers from a warehouse in Las Vegas do the same kind of killing that Ross thought he did?
And then there is some kind of moral thought experiment happening at a Silicon Valley Rationalist, Effective Altruism kind of scale that I can't quite wrap my head around. Do people matter as much in person as if they're just blips on a screen you'll never meet? If Ross could have sent 1 BTC to prevent fatal malaria in a dozen young kids, thousands of miles away, but he didn't, should he feel responsible in some way for their death? Is he about equally responsible for them as for the online people he is pretty sure he ordered killed from afar, but never met?
It's just a lot. The whole story is supernaturally intense; it's hard to believe it was real. It will make for great TV.
What has always sat odd with me regarding this, is we don't truly know the extent of the fbi's corruption in this. They stole, so it's not hard to imagine they planted evidence too.
I assume that the feds corruption is as bad as it is in every other high profile case case involving fed informants and politically charged topics. Randy Weaver, all the muslims they radicalized and then goaded into doing terrorist things post 9/11, the Michigan Fednapping. It seems like every time these people have a chance to entrap someone they do, but they do it in a "haha, jokes on you we run the system so while this probably would be entrapment if some beat cops did it the court won't find it that way" sort of way. They just can't touch anything without getting it dirty this way and the fact that that is a 30yr pattern at this point depending on how you count speaks volumes IMO. While I'm sure they can solve an interstate murder or interstate fraud or whatever just fine I just don't trust them to handle these sorts of cases.
It seems like all of these people they wind up charging probably are questionable people who wanted to do the thing and probably did some other lesser things but they probably would have given up on the big thing if there wasn't a federal agency running around doing all the "the informant says the guy is lamenting not having explosives, quick someone get him some explosives" things in the background.
It took a bit of tracking down, but I finally found an apparently egregious example of this sort of thing I had vaguely remembered: Iraqi citizen and legal US resident Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab was sentenced last February to 14 years in prison for his role in an alleged plot to murder George W. Bush, and his involvement in smuggling terrorists into the United States. [1] But his sentencing (after his guilty plea) contains an interesting caveat: lifetime supervised release.
Why is a terrorist and would-be assassin of a former President getting lifetime supervised release? None of the media coverage of the case, going back years, makes that clear. However, a footnote in the original criminal complaint against[2] him offers a likely explanation:
"In or around the end of March 2022, United States immigration officials conducted an asylum interview with SHIHAB. After the interview was conducted United States immigration officials advised the FBI that SHIHAB may have information regarding an ISIS member that was recently smuggled into the United States."
With a little reading between the lines of the criminal complaint, a very different story emerges: Shihab never dealt with any terrorists. He was a paid middleman between two government informants or agents pretending to be terrorists. He took their money, played along, and ratted them out to INS during an asylum interview. After that, once they realized the jig was up, the FBI arrested and charged him at its earliest opportunity - for the plot they had created and paid him to participate in, and which he in turn had informed the government about.
Many people, including myself, do not believe that he really did any of the activity related to the assassination attempts. Demonstrably corrupt law enforcement agents had the opportunity to do it all themselves and it would be typical behaviour for those agencies. He is politically passionate about non-violence and it would go against everything he stood for. I cannot believe he would do it. What do you mean "openly"?
Agreed. He willingly engaged with the alleged hitman (which ended up being the FBI contact). He didn't need to do anything or not have the thought to murder others cross his mind.
Allegedly. The 2 rules of his Fight Club were no underage sex stuff and no physical harm. That hitman claim was not part of his charges or sentencing. The heavy sentencing was to like "send a message" the judge said.
They weren't part of his sentencing because a different court entirely was pursuing the hit for hire attempt charge, but because another court in NY got the book thrown at him for running the site, they decided to drop it because it didn't seem necessary anymore.
In hindsight, the prosecution probably wished they didn't do that, since they are said to have had overwhelming evidence and proof, and there is even a Wired article about chat logs pertaining to DPR seeking services, but those are the breaks! If you don't do your due diligence, criminals can be let off on a technicality too!
I haven't looked into the case(s) for years, but prosecutors don't often just drop charges because other charges were found guilty. People get charged even after life sentences have been handed down.
But the feds would never attempt shading means of solving a problem that they're being heavily pressured to solve in a timely manner! Don't be a hecking conspiracy theorist.
Unmitigated nonsense. The evidence that he was involved in this is somewhere between unreliable and nonexistent, and he (and the supposed victim) have disputed it since day one. WTF do you mean "openly"?
>we don't truly know the extent of the fbi's corruption in this
the corruption what we do know about already tainted the case to the point that it should have been thrown out.
I don't care about Ulbricht, and whether he is guilty of all or some of the charges or innocent. What bothers me in this case is that the government can get away and in particular can get its way in court even with such severe criminal behavior by the government.
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening."
Trump even personally called Ulbricht mother. I start to wonder whether i have been all that time in blind denial about Trump.
He organized and operated a global criminal drug ring and conspired to have people killed. The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar is that DPR was running his drug business in the 2010s instead of the 1980s.
> The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar is that DPR was running his drug business in the 2010s instead of the 1980s.
Asserting moral equivalence between someone who ordered dozens of innocent women and children not just killed but dismembered - solely as a lesson for others. Orders which were actually carried out multiple times and DPR who was never charged, tried or convicted of conspiring with a supposed online hitman to kill a competitor (who both were actually FBI informants - clearly making it entrapment). Yeah, that's quite a reach.
Sure, DPR was no saint but why push for the absolute maximally extreme interpretation? Even asserting he "organized and operated a global criminal drug ring" is a stretch. My understanding is he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers. I'm not aware that Ross ever bought or sold drugs as a business or hired others to do so. There is more than a little nuance between 1) buying drugs from distributors, delivering drugs to buyers and collecting the money, and 2) running online forums and messaging for people who do those things. At most, #2 is being an accessory to #1.
> My understanding is he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers. I'm not aware that Ross ever bought or sold drugs as a business or hired others to do so.
Ah yes, he accumulated over $5 billion in Bitcoins by entirely legal means. He didn't facilitate the wholesale distribution of illegal (and dangerous) drugs at all. He never contributed to the massive distribution of Fentanyle-laced dopes to the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. He was just the online guy!
> he accumulated over $5 billion in Bitcoins by entirely legal means.
I never claimed he didn't break the law. I said the opposite, that he's guilty of being an accessory to drug dealing.
> He didn't facilitate the wholesale distribution of illegal (and dangerous) drugs at all.
I said "he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers."
> He was just the online guy!
I said he's "no saint" and in an earlier post in this thread I also said he deserved a jail sentence and that "ten years was enough" for what he was charged with and convicted of as a first-time offender.
I challenged your assertion of "no difference" between DPR and Pablo Escobar as extreme and your response is to mischaracterize my position as DPR committing no crime instead of responding to my actual position that he's a criminal who is guilty and deserved ten years in jail but not two life sentences plus 40 years without parole. There is a middle ground between "completely innocent of anything" and "no different than Pablo Escobar." I don't understand why you can't acknowledge such a middle ground might exist - and that it is my position.
You appear to be confused about the difference between a pardon and parole (and even parole doesn't entail monitoring "for life").
Also, your response didn't respond to what I said (which was about previously only responding to a straw man I didn't say). I like to think we strive in good faith for a little higher level of discourse here on HN. Try to do better.
Tbh you probably don't know what your talking about. Silk road and fentanyl in drugs didn't over lap. Fent really showed up a couple years after the market was shut down.
I don't think anyone in here is making the case that Ulbricht is a "good person", but comparing Escobar to Ulbricht is next-level delusional.
One of these people attempted to place hits on 3-4 individuals, the other one planted a bomb on a passenger plane that resulted in the deaths of over a hundred people.
PE put bombed newspapers and killed hundreds, if not thousands of people unrelated to any criminal enterprise or to arresting him. I mean, actual innocent, minding their own business civilians. Over 4000 murders have been directly attributed to the actions and orders of Escobar. Estimates to the actual count range closer to 8000.
DPR went over to the dark side a bit in that entrapment racket, or at least it seems so.
Thinking that someone needs to be murdered isn’t necessarily a character flaw, imho.
It depends on what DPR was led to believe about this fictional person. It is reasonable to imagine that the FBI took every possible measure to make their fake victim seem as murder worthy as possible. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that the “victim” may have been painted as a purveyor of child trafficking, CSAM, or other things repugnant. My point is we don’t know. And if we don’t know, we should reserve judgment.
Because in my opinion the ethics of operating a drug ring is not as black as white as you state.
The existence of drug rings is an inevitable outcome from the war on drugs and I would argue the blame lands on the politicians who maintain the status quo that incentivises the creation of the black market for drugs.
He did order (and pay for) at least one murder. It just happens that both the victim and the would-be hit man were both informants so they staged the murder. Ross’ argument is that he knew it was fake, but that makes no sense in context.
It was right that they dropped the charge because it was quite obviously entrapment. But none of it reflects well on Ross Ulbricht’s character.
A 10 year prison sentence was apt. He did knowingly break the law (the marketplace defense doesn't really apply, since admins had to create the categories that were obviously illegal). A life sentence was ridiculous, and added punishment for unconvicted crimes, however likely, is a gross violation of constitutional protections.
Why this person specifically? And why at this time? Perhaps the discussion shouldn't be about the actual subject of the pardon, and perhaps more about the motives of the pardoner...
Trump came to the Libertarian Party convention and specifically promised to free Ross if he got their support. He actually promised a commutation; I wonder why he upgraded to pardon. He also promised a libertarian in his cabinet; oh well.
The LP chairwoman has made very interesting political moves this election.
Yeah, I'm pleased that Ross is out after serving over 10 years, but I wish it had been a commutation. He was guilty. The problem is the judge wildly over sentencing. Ten years served is about right for what he was convicted of.
These two thoughts are incompatible though, aren't they? Politics and shenanigans around the case aside, the original sentence should have taken into account the possibility of rehabilitation. But he got life without parole.
That said, it was entrapment and everyone involved should be deeply ashamed and prosecuted. At least those two agents did get some wire fraud charges [0], but the entrapment angle got explored because the charges were dropped.
Ross Ulbricht was widely regarded by friends and family as a fundamentally decent and idealistic person—if admittedly naïve about the implications of his actions. Those who knew him personally describe him as thoughtful, intelligent, and motivated by a vision of a freer and more equitable society. His philosophical motivations were rooted in libertarian ideals, particularly the belief that consenting adults should have the right to make decisions about their own lives, including the substances they consume.
I just learned that he was an Eagle Scout.
Not exactly the résumé of someone getting locked up and the key thrown away.
This argument is problematic because it implies that a person from a different background who committed the same crimes (e.g., a poor, black, uneducated person without any fancy philosophical ideals) /should/ be locked up and the key thrown away. It doesn’t work that way. The law applies the same to all, and that’s the way I like it.
Seriously, that was pretty blatant "he was one of the good guys like me and so the law shouldn't really punish him, not like one of those other people with different value that should be punished to the full extent."
According to Reuters he was found guilty of "charges including distributing drugs through the Internet and conspiring to commit computer hacking and money laundering." In addition to running an illegal market bazaar for 4 years.
- sackler family engineered opioid crisis and went unscathed
- hacking is a bogus charge applied to everything touching PCs
- money laundering is another victimless crime that very few actual money launderers gets charged with, for some reason
Case law obsessively cites other case law. So yeah, that's how it works. His trial was a farce and was meant to send a message to others to not, um, do drugs online or something.
The presumption of innocence is a legal principle that every person accused of any crime is considered innocent until proven guilty.
Under the presumption of innocence, the legal burden of proof is thus on the prosecution, which must present compelling evidence to the trier of fact (a judge or a jury). If the prosecution does not prove the charges true, then the person is acquitted of the charges.
> The presumption of innocence is a legal principle that every person accused of any crime is considered innocent until proven guilty.
That should be "considered innocent by the legal system". People are still free to come to their own conclusions--and act on them--even without a jury rendering a verdict.
Rather famously, for example, OJ Simpson was acquitted by a jury of murdering his wife. But most people these days would agree with the statement that he murdered his wife.
It is also the case that prosecutors need to decide both the probability of conviction, the effort needed to do so and whether likely conviction on other serious charges are sufficient for the people to feel that justice has been done.
My understanding is they never brought the charges in the first place. The supposed online hitman and the victim were both FBI informants. They never filed any charges because it was clearly entrapment and no one was ever in any danger.
The prosecutors later used that evidence as support for their sentencing request after Ross was convicted of only non-violent offenses, which has a much lower standard of evidence. The allegations of murder-for-hire were never tested at trial. They may have evaporated under cross-examination by a competent defense. Our system of justice holds that Ross is innocent of those allegations unless convicted at trial.
He should be considered innocent by the courts - and he was (innocent of the murder for hire charges, I mean). In the public we aren't obligated to follow the same standards of evidence as the courts. I think he almost certainly did pay to have those people killed, and that can shape my opinion of him.
That's perfectly reasonable - but I don't think it should really have a bearing on whether he should be pardoned. That is not exactly a matter of the courts (by definition), but I think as an official public act it should be subject to the presumption of innocence as well.
What makes you think I support those people being locked up either? Also, afaik Ulbricht didn't sell drugs himself, he simply provided an unmoderated marketplace.
If the law is unethical then you may be pushed to do "bad" things. For example if you are a Jew living with family in a Nazi Germany and someone know your secret and he feels he need to disclose it to the authorities then you may consider... murdering him. Would you really be a bad guy?
The hypothetical is simply a bob and weave. Hiring a contract killer to execute a business rival is clear and unequivocal — no distractions, no gymnastics. Saying otherwise is frankly shameful.
> I think it's clear he did many things in the same vein
It is clear as mud. We now know:
* At least four other people had access to the DPR account, by design.
* One of those people (the person whose murder was supposedly ordered, who has vehemently defended Ross!) asserts that he knew that Nob (who we know who was a DEA agent) was one of those four people.
* Nob is a serial liar, and is now in prison for having stole some of the bitcoin from this operation.
...what about that make clear that Ross was within a mile of this supposed 'murder for hire' business?
Trump clearly values favoritism to a high degree. He is doing exactly as he has promised, running the country like a businessman. If you scratch his back, he will scratch yours. Principles take a back seat to "getting the job done". For other examples, see his changed stances on TikTok, various foreign interests, cryptocurrencies, EVs post Elon support, etc. And in the opposite vein, he abandons support for anyone who challenges his authority on principles.
Pardoning Ulbricht was a campaign promise he made at the Libertarian National Convention in response to it being a popular demand among the libertarians.
And more importantly, among the crypto crowd that dumped millions into his campaign. Libertarians have essentially no clout or money on their own. This was a pardon bought by Coinbase and Gemini and A16z.
Why would Coinbase and Gemini and A16z care about an obviously shady person who reportedly tried to hire a person to kill someone? surely they could find a more legitimate hero to advance the legal crypto case? i mean, it's kind of like them - companies trying to do legit crypto - rallying today around SBF when they already have image problems from other exchanges?
There is no "legit crypto" - it's a myth. Every single exchange that swaps spit with the Bitcoin ledger is laundering money made by criminal (often violent or fraudulent) means. Many if not most altcoins are equally as fraudulent, or used to launder ("tumble") other suspicious coins.
Let's be honest anyways, the cryptocurrency "industry" as we know it is less than 4 years old, and in 4 years it may be gone. Exchanges like coinbase and so-called defi innovators like A16Z need this legally-dubious signalling or they'll risk never having another leader corrupt enough to sanction their behavior.
I got cash out of an airport currency exchange ATM the other week, and when I tried to use it to by groceries yesterday, the cashier tested it for cocaine and it came back positive. There is no "legit cash".
they represent the crypto gentry quite well, nut the supposition is flawed, they werent the only ones donating and the freeross campaign is a thing too
No no no, my friend. Ulbricht was not a lowly drug trafficker (also, incidentally, not black or latino). He was an _entrepreneur_ who built a _marketplace_ that would bring together buyers and sellers, cutting out the middleman, and driving _efficiency_! Basically trustedhousesitters.com, just for illegal drugs instead of pets ;)
what's it like to be poor in a rich country? the libertarian party supported his reelection bid and by support Ross he garnered more of their votes. this couldn't be more obvious. he did the same for crypto.
according to Trump: "A promise made is a promise kept", he is keeping his promise to his constituents.
I make and sell soap. The soap contains an ingredient that anyone can use to make bombs. Some people buy my soap only for that purpose. I know because they literally tell me how they use my soap. I can remove that ingredient but I would loose a lot of sales.
The police finds my soap in the lab of someone who blew up a building. Some people died. Was it my fault, knowing how it was being used? Did I do anything illegal? Unethical? Immoral?
Interesting thought experiment, but no, I don't think it's llegal/unethical/immoral to sell that soap. But in practice this sort of business will change their formula to avoid bad press and regulation.
I think the attacks on some of these black and gray markets has increased violent crime in the real world. I wish the federal government would stop shutting them down and instead use them as tools to build cases against people breaking the law.
For example, for a while most prostitution and sex work seemed to be online, on places like Craigslist right next to ads for used furniture and jobs. And it seemed to be really effective in getting prostitutes off the streets.
Now that those markets were shut down, I'm seeing here in Seattle we're having pimp shootouts on Aurora and the prostitutes are more brazen than ever. Going after Craigslist has had a negative effect on our cities and has increased crime, and I suspect going after SilkRoad has had a similar impact.
I don't think much changed, really. The contraband and services offered on these marketplaces has always been backed by criminal enterprises. Mostly the markets provided level of indirection that made purchasing palatable and gave a false sense of safety.
Online markets for sex work allowed women to operate far more safely than "the street" allow. I had friends who were affected by the crackdown on craigslist etc.
Sure, but the point is about secondary effects. If pimps are "competing" online then they need to compete on, well, marketing and UX. If they compete in real life then it is about who controls physical territory.
There are lots of studies about the unintended consequences of prohibition.
I wish instead of criminalizing addiction we'd fund harm reduction centers and rehabilitation services.
I would much rather the police be focused on stopping violent crime rather than these victimless crimes.
Legitimizing drugs/prostitution makes is easier to regulate and ultimately make safer. Shoving this stuff into a black/gray market is what ultimately creates violent crime.
> I wish instead of criminalizing addiction we'd fund harm reduction centers and rehabilitation services.
We tried that in SF, I was a supporter. Seeing it first hand with a with a family member in public school flipped me. Dumping money into people who aren't ready to convert back into tax payers (even in the most basic sense) while schools got the back burner was enough. Not to mention the tents.
> Seeing it first hand with a with a family member in public school flipped me.
Why is this an either or?
SF spends about $1 billion dollars on schools [1] and while the program ran it had around a $40 million dollar budget [2]. For an area that houses huge tech companies, this doesn't seem like an extreme budget to be working with.
> Not to mention the tents.
Ok? And what options would you give these people, just be homeless somewhere else where you can't see them?
While I think anecdotes are valuable and should not be easily dismissed, we have decades of research and evidence supporting the benefit of harm reduction centers. They reduce risk of overdose morbidity and mortality while not increasing crime or public nuisance to the surrounding community.
It's just really hard to swallow the findings in this paper (all non-US cities) when you can see such a visible change on the streets in SF since the pandemic.
By all official accounts crime is down in SF, but many agree something has changed in the way homeless carry. I would dare to use the word "entitled" to describe the cavalier way large encampments and bicycle chop shops are set up.
no victim means no crime. victimless "crimes" are just 'arbitrary rule' violations (like going 56mph in a 55mph zone) or infractions. the twisting and distortion of language by the state is counterproductive to society.
The inflow/manufacture of narcotics won't be affected at all. You'll still have a constant new influx of junkies, and it you'll essentially by funding this widescale and expensive solution forever.
Much better to simple make drug trafficing and manufacture a capital offense. It's been extremely effective in a lot of jurisdictions. Even if you're squeamish about the death penalty, a back of the envelope calculations will tell you you're saving a lot more lives than you spend due to decreased overdoses, drug wars etc,
The main reason all the subs made this change today is because of the elon nazi salute, not the fact that twitter is hostile to unauthenticated user agents.
Am I remembering correctly that when Elon first took over, he took that gate down because of his whole free speech thing. I'm guessing they re-instated it as soon as it hit the bottom line. Makes me wonder if government should still rely on it for comms.
One of the first things Twitter did post Elon was remove sign in gating then I guess the bankers pressed Elon and it went back up. Can't always do everything you want in business, I guess. Bills come first.
Well, I think that justice has been served. The feds' prosecution of Ulbricht was the epitome of throwing the book at someone to make an example, when the government's case was pretty flawed, in my opinion. 10 years is enough time to pay the debt of running the silk road.
I am glad that Ulbricht has been pardoned and I feel like a small iota of justice has been returned to the world with this action.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading the comments on this thread. Multiple teenagers (one in Australia) died from the drugs distributed on Silk Road. Ross was ok with selling grenades, body parts, etc on there. But everyone is saying he served his time ???
The comment you replied to referenced "multiple teenagers" - the very people that liquor stores cannot sell alcohol to since they're not recognized as mature enough to be freely allowed to drink.
SR allowed children to buy addictive poison without any regulation whatsoever, and Ross profited off of those transactions.
People die when they take drugs all the time, whether brought online or not.
But the war on some drugs are a failure, but also impossible to change due to stupid people, so Silk Road and crypto was a means to work around this, while lowering crime and turning it into an iterated prisoners dilemma so that quality etc could stay high.
It's ridiculous. I think a lot of the people here have a chip on their shoulder because they suspect they bought their ketamine from the same guy Elon did.
What Ross did was not a demonstration of showing restraint. You cannot defend a mafia boss for killing people by saying "at least he didn't rape the dozen bystanders that were watching" and you can't defend Ulbricht's actions, or the consequences of them, simply by saying he reduced harm. He spread harm - he ran a craigslist for drugs that ran off ad-hoc rules that could not promise safety for it's customers. It was illegal and rightfully so.
The precedent this sets is that you can live as a respected American drug lord if your skin is white. If it is not, the United States will use it's military power to prosecute you with absolute impunity.
He wasn't dealing them. He's not exactly culpable for the effects of his platform any more than Zuckerberg is responsible for mass hate speech coordinated by third-world dictators or Evan Spiegel for facilitating millions of nude images of children and teenagers.
The hitman was a conman for a murder on a fictitious person. While he fully believed he was committing a real assassination, you can't convict people for killing imaginary people.
That's why commutation is a thing. The courts have ruled this as within the pardon powers. His sentence could be changed to reflect something much more aligned with other convictions for the same crimes.
Commutation is not considered during sentencing or mandatory minimums or anything like that. It's only an option for very popular cases and even then it's rare.
This is wonderful. I've never argued that Ross shouldn't have served time but it's always been clear his prosecution and sentencing were excessive and unjust. The prosecutors asked for a 20 year sentence, which seemed disproportionate given the sentencing guidelines for a first-time offender and the non-violent charges he was convicted of. But the judge sentenced Ross to TWO life sentences plus 40 years - without the possibility of parole. There's no doubt Ross made a series of unwise and reckless decisions but serving over ten years of hard time in a FedMax prison is more than enough given the charges and his history.
It's just unfortunate that Trump, and now, excessive pardons are politically polarized, which could cloud the fact that justice was done today. I don't credit Trump in any way for doing "the right thing" or even having a principled position regarding Ross' case. Clearly, others with influence on Trump convinced him to sign it. It doesn't matter how the pardon happened. Biden should have already pardoned Ross because that crazy sentence shouldn't have happened in the first place.
It is wildly harmful and an escalation of monstrous practices to look at one or several unjust actions and/or sentences and declare that those who do worse than the person who was dealt out such a retribution should receive an even longer sentence.
If someone gets 10 years for smoking weed, the solution is not to put someone in prison for 20 years for punching someone.
Madoff stole $20-35B, but by some measures a human life is only worth $10M. I am not really asserting those figures are comparable, just that Madoff stole a lot of money.
Nah, it's more that you do not fuck with the money system. SBF is learning that same lesson.
Jeff Skilling (Enron) served 12 years in jail for insider trading and securities.
Not saying that Skilling, Maddoff or SBF shouldn't have gone to jail. They deserved it. But I do find it interesting that financial crimes can tend to be the most harshly judged, likely because of who they impact (the people with money) and because they cause distrust of the financial system as a whole.
> Madoff stole $20-35B
Not to defend Madoff, but it's not like he made off with that money himself, so I'm not sure "stole" is the correct term. Most of that money went to investors -- it just went to a different set of investors than the ones who had put that money in (the nature of a Ponzi scheme).
> Biden should have already pardoned Ross because that crazy sentence shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Biden did commute the sentence of several other non-violent cases just last week or thereabouts, and Trump has been talking about Ulbricht for quite some time so it's not a complete surprise.
I guess the whole "murder for hire" thing excluded him from the "non-violent" category. But how that got tacked on seems very odd; the judge basically said "we didn't really handle it in the court case and it wasn't a charge, but it was mentioned a few times and it seemed basically true, so I included it in the sentencing". Like, ehh, okay?
To be honest, I don't really understand much of the logic ("logic") of the US justice system....
Judges are allowed to consider some evidence during sentencing which was not presented at trial. The standard for this evidence is lower than the "beyond a shadow of doubt" standard required for a criminal conviction. This is allowed because during sentencing the judge is considering information related to the history and character of the defendant. The 'hiring an online hitman' (who was an FBI informant) allegation was never charged or tried. Even if it hadn't been obvious entrapment, it might well have evaporated under discovery and cross-examination by a competent defense.
Including such evidence in sentencing consideration is not uncontroversial in the U.S. However, it can cut both ways, in that a judge can consider extenuating circumstances in a defendant's life to reduce sentencing. We want judges to evaluate cases and make sentencing adjustments where appropriate. So, I don't think I'd do away with the practice. The real issue is that this specific judge went absolutely bonkers far beyond the 20 years the prosecution asked for during sentencing (which was already very high) and sentenced Ross to two life sentences plus 40 years without parole.
Most of us who are happy that Ross was pardoned agree that he was guilty and deserved a jail sentence for the crimes he was convicted of. The only problem is the sentence was so wildly excessive for a non-violent, first-time offender. Compared to guidelines and other sentences it was just crazy and wrong. Ross has served over ten years. Now he's free. That's probably about right.
I’m all for the freeing him of his crimes when it comes to his crypto anarchic philosophy. But I find it hard to pardon someone for contract killing essentially. Also I’m not an apologist for the FBIs handling of this case either.
The charge was dropped, but the court did hold a hearing on it when deciding on sentencing. They heard the evidence for and against and ruled by a preponderance of the evidence that he did in fact do it.
Separate courts. He was indicted and tried for all the non-murder stuff in a New York federal court. He was indicted separately in a Maryland federal court on a murder-for-hire charge.
The New York court convicted him, and then considered the murder-for-hire allegations when determining his sentence. They found them true by a preponderance of the evidence and and that was a factor in his sentence to life without parole. He appealed, and the Second Circuit upheld the sentence.
The prosecutors in Maryland then dropped the murder-for-hire charge because there was no point. They said this would allow them to direct their resources to other other cases where justice had not yet been served.
Ironically, he was only pardoned for drug related crimes, so he could still be charged with murder related ones if they were not dropped with prejudice (i didn't look)
This is all AFAIK, they haven't released the text broadly yet, but his lawyers/etc say he was pardoned for crimes related to drugs.
Even what people call a 'full and unconditional' pardon is usually targeted at something specific, not like "a pardon for anything you may have ever done, anywhere, anytime' which people seem to think it means sometimes.
It's more of a legal term of art to describe pardons that erase convictions, restore rights, etc.
Rather than clemency which, say, commutes your sentence but leaves your conviction intact.
Most recent pardons have been announced in documents labeled "Executive Grant of Clemency", so I don't think "clemency" and "pardons" are as distinct as you're saying.
And while I know you said "usually", I can't help but note that Hunter Biden was pardoned for any federal thing he may have done, anywhere, anytime in the last 10 years. Some of the last-minute pardons were pretty broad as well.
The judge wrote at sentencing the murder for hire 'counted' as an element of the criminal enterprise. So if he was pardoned for his crimes that includes the murder for hire per the judgement of his case.
So depending on the pardon text and interpretation, he may or may not be chargeable with this statute still federally.
I agree this has zero effect on charging him at the state level, and most states do not have statute of limitations on these types of crimes (or they are very long)
One issue with any potential trial for murder-for-hire is that the allegation as presented in the Maryland indictment has two problematic witnesses: DEA agent Carl Force who acted as the hitman, now in prison for embezzling cryptocurrency from the Silk Road case, and Curtis Green, the would-be victim in this case, who has previously insisted that Ulbricht was innocent of plotting his murder (and was also recently imprisoned for cocaine distribution last year, although I don't think that would be too relevant). Maybe the other allegations might have more meat on the bone, but they didn't make it on to any indictment.
Fascinating. It is news to me that a federal court can consider the evidence for crimes not proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal sentencing. Learn something new every day.
Since he was sentenced federally, he'd be under the federal sentencing guidelines, but I imagine those are pretty harsh around the money laundering and drug trafficking (since they're tuned to provide a hammer to wield against mostly narco-enterprises). I suppose the additional preponderance of evidence gave the judge justification to push the sentence to the maximum allowed in the category?
It’s extremely common in for example diversion cases and others, where the defendant has to stipulate that they are agreeable to things being presented as in charging documents and evaluated based on preponderance by a court, not by a jury and not subject to principles of reasonable doubt.
This. Evidence that isn't strong enough to criminally convict can be used for other purposes (e.g. sentencing, knowledge/intent, civil forfeiture, civil damages etc).
(see OJ Simpson paying money damages for a crime he was acquitted of)
Wonder if he can be charged with that now? Was there anything in the pardon related to this? AFAIK there is no time limit on bringing charges related to murder?
According to Wikipedia[1], he was convicted of charges related to hacking, narcotics, money laundering, and more.
But during the trial, evidence was presented that he made murder-for-hire payments, the court found that he did by a preponderance of evidence, and the court took this into account when sentencing him.
So, he wasn't convicted of it, but it is part of the reason he was sent to jail for a very long time.
Yes the FBI had root or admin access to the Silk Road system and could have very easily changed or otherwise affected logs/record IDs that the technical case rested on. Two of the FBI agents on the case were later punished for corruption on the case.
The judge factored it into the sentencing, though. He likely did actually try to hire a contract killer - twice. In both cases he sincerely believed the murders were successfully committed, and he sent a lot of money to the assassins after being sent (doctored) "proof" of their killings.
I think it's fair to say judges shouldn't factor non-charged allegations into sentencing, but I think he's at least morally culpable, here, and should at the very least be expected to now show public contrition for repeatedly trying to murder people drug kingpin-style.
I doubt he will ever admit it, but now that he's free I still would like it. I don't care about people enabling drug sales but I do care about people with a God complex who feel entitled to end the lives of those they oppose (in one case because he thought someone stole from him, and another because he thought they would dox him).
A judge and system who would give him 2 life sentences for this should not be trusted when he also factored in things which he wasn't charged and convicted of.
It is common that several outcomes are subject - with the defendants specific agreement - to be evaluated by a court on preponderance, not a jury. This was not judicial malpractice.
I am sorry but there's no way giving him more than 2 life sentences has any justification whatsoever. Even the people who actually sold drugs on his site got out in 2 years. And the person who hired someone for hitman also only got 6 years. This is exactly the type of case where pardon makes 100% sense.
> Even the people who actually sold drugs on his site got out in 2 years.
And Ross made millions from those people selling drugs on his site. Quite possibly more than any person selling drugs on his site.
And attempted to hire hitmen to prevent anyone stopping it. Not even as a potential "crime of passion", but solely to protect his money train.
And there's this whole false narrative of "youthful indiscretions". He didn't start building the site til he was 28 and was mostly running it in his early 30s.
What would give you a hint that attempted murder conviction would prevent his pardon? Trump pardoned over a thousand attempted murdered already this week.
No, generally a pardon does not eliminate any civil liability or entitle you to refunds once the assets have been transferred to Treasury. He would still have to answer Yes to having been convicted of a felony and he would still not be entitled to vote in states that do not permit felons to vote.
> Where a person has paid a monetary penalty or forfeited property, the consequences of a pardon depend in part on when it was issued. If a monetary fine or contraband cash has been transferred to the Treasury, a pardon conveys no right to a refund, nor does the person pardoned have a right to reacquire property or the equivalent in cash from a legitimate purchaser of his seized assets or from an informant who was rewarded with cash taken from the pardoned person before he was pardoned.
This is obviously incorrect. Actually pardon means the charges filed has been voided, hence anything happening afterwards has had no merits and court decisions made are now rendered moot. For example, Roger Stone was charged and found guilty of multiple crimes and Trump pardoned him; he still brandish guns and was "proudly voting Trump" in 2024 in state of Florida. Getting pardon is literally like it never happened in the first place.
The pardon can restore certain rights in some cases, I'm not entirely familiar with the Stone shenanigans, but knowing the parties involved I can't assume that Stone was legally entitled to do what he did after the pardon, and maybe he was.
That said, the recovery of assets after transfer to Treasury is settled law. [1]
> More broadly, the Court ruled in several cases during this period that pardons entitled their recipients to recover property forfeited or seized on the basis of the underlying offenses, so long as vested third-party rights would not be affected and money had not already been paid into the Treasury (except as authorized by statute).
Was covered in Osborne v. United States, Knote v. United States, In re: Armstrong's Foundry, Cent. R.R. v. Bosworth and Jenkins v. Collard
Subsequent cases make it clear that the offense is not in fact "gone."
> ... the Court in Burdick stated that a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it."
> ... then, in Carlesi v. New York, the Court determined that a pardoned offense could still be considered “as a circumstance of aggravation” under a state habitual-offender law, reflecting that although a pardon may obviate the punishment for a federal crime, it does not erase the facts associated with the crime or preclude all collateral effects arising from those facts.
The court holds that it is not in fact as if it never happened.
No, because he was never found guilty of anything, or charged with anything. Pardons before a conviction are somewhat different than pardons after a conviction in that the state never established the facts. There's also a difference between blanket pardons and specific pardons.
As I referenced in a peer reply.
> “[A pardon] carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it."
I am not sure of the legality around his possessions but they are long gone. Even the ones stolen by FBI officers during the course of the investigation.
"Two former federal agents have been charged with wire fraud, money laundering and related offenses for stealing digital currency during their investigation of the Silk Road ..."
I'm more than happy to have the discussion with you but I have no requirement to provide all of the information that is widely available in the public domain.
Civil asset forfeiture should not be considered constitutional, and some day a test case will make it to the SCOTUS. As for this case though... the pardon does not make Ulbritch innocent! On the contrary, accepting the pardon implies guilt. So the pardon need not and might not extend to forfeitures. Though it's also possible that the presidential pardon could extend to the forfeitures, but I suspect that's a constitutional grey area.
Cases have made it to the Supreme Court --- recently! --- and it held up just fine. This is another message board fixation. I'm sure it's abused all over the place. It wasn't in this case.
What part of this makes you thing CAF is on shaky constitutional ground? This is a CAF case with reach-y fact patterns for the government and they won it handily. We didn't even get close to the question of whether CAF is itself constitutional; the court simply presumed it.
Pardons are forgiveness. They don’t roll back the clock, although the Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that acceptance of a pardon is not an assumption of guilt.
Was acceptance of a pardon an "assumption" by the court? Is it not "admission* of guilt", which I believe itself was never the case as this was based on a judge's aside that people didn't accept pardons because it was *percieved* as "an admission of guilt", i.e. the "percieved" part was not actually articulated in court but rather the judge was completing a thought before it was fully articulated.
What I find interesting is that the 5th amendment no longer applies after a pardon. The pardoned can no longer claim that protection for the crime he was convicted of.
My apologies I made a mistake. The Burdick SCOTUS case from 1915 said “carries an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it”
In 2021, an appeals court opined that: “not every acceptance of a pardon constitutes a confession of guilt.”
I thought the 2021 case was a Supreme Court case, and I was incorrect. I think in the public eye the pardon is viewed differently based on however the story is told.
That would arguably create some of the worst perverse incentives, as far as financial crimes go.
Any two-bit governor could team up with some criminal, and make enough money to be set up for life against a pardon. Even worse if it's a president, as they could likely get off scot-free.
Trump could literally scam everyone and everyone, step down, receive a pardon from the VP, and happy days.
That’s exactly what it’s doing. As long as you misbehave in Washington DC or commit a crime not chargeable in a state or too complex to prosecute, you’re good.
For example, you could defraud suckers into buying a pump and dump memecoin. Elon has repeatedly demonstrated that nobody will prosecute, and POTUS is above the law for as long as he decides to stay in office.
Until now I oddly never questioned how any government could seize someone's bitcoin and how a government keeps the private keys of their crypto wallets secure.
a lot of known best practices were not followed in 2013.
Every advancement in crypto was done after the government made a move. And all subsequent moves netted the government less.
Now it takes more agencies to seize darknet markets, and most merchants and consumers get their money back because it was a multisignature transaction and the server stored nothing. Even domains have been seized back from the government.
The crypto space calls it "antifragility", as in the idea - and now history - that the asset class and infrastructure improves under pressure.
I suspect there'll be a lot of people very carefully watching for transactions from wallets with some sort of links to Silk Road that have been dormant for 12 years or so.
It might be visible. Just not a large amount from one account to another. Thats not how laundering works and definitely not how trades work that are supposed to go unnoticed.
They seem to be pandering to the more libertarian tech community. This guy appeals to that and to the more radical maga types who want a revolution. I’m sure we’ll see more.
The Biden DOJs bungling of the insurrection, turning a jail into a martyrs club, slow rolling prosecutions, etc is ultimately worse than the insurrection for democracy.
Trump promised to do this at the Libertarian Party convention. This case is very important to the libertarian crowd. He is a martyr for many of their ideals. After Trump was so well received at the convention the LP, recently taken over by the right faction of the party, put forth a candidate specifically chosen to not get votes so that members would vote for Trump. Trump seems to be a man of his word.
It seems like the voters that were being referred to value restoring rights. How can something immediately achievable be balanced with "the economy", a thing so broad and deeply systemic?
It isn't clear from your original statement that those voters aren't from Pennsylvania. I interpret your statement as discounting the weight of their vote on actions they care about. There are many perspectives, and the values of those who did vote in that direction are being addressed in some way.
We're talking about Libertarians and not Republicans, atleast that is what the parent comment was referring to. I don't know what Republicans what or believe vs what they say. The action to pardon directly addresses the Libertarian ideals.
He promised to pardon the rioters during the election and it didn't hurt him. I think he decided it wouldn't hurt him (and Trump cares bout that first) and if he thought about the midterms ... maybe won't hurt then either.
Congress isn't directly involved in any of this anyway.
Congress is involved. They have to prove they can govern. It's hard to be the party of "law and order" if you need only to kiss the ring for your release.
October of 2001 they were up to 80% approval. Left to their own devices by Aug 2002 they were below 50%.
There's an argument to be made that congress doesn't really represent the people at large. Some people go on to make the argument that through gerrymandering politicians choose who's elected, and not the people.
The LP candidate was nominated due to some fluke/shenanigans/dealings between candidates. Based on the right-leaning demographics you would not expect him to win. It just happened to work out perfectly to get the people who would never vote for him anyway to vote for Trump. (Meanwhile the chairwoman encouraged Biden supporters to vote for the LP candidate).
Also, Trump actually got a mixed reception at the convention at best.
You may not like Trump but I remember he fulfilled or attempted to fulfill a lot of his campaign promises back in 2016 as well. Biden, the career politician, talked a lot about many things before election and then forgot about them after he was elected. For example, universal health care. Obama promised to enshrine a woman's right to abortion as law, and then when he had the House and Senate after he was elected, he said "it's not a priority for me." Then we lost Roe V Wade.
That's a really low bar with that bit added. "I didn't say it would be easy" was his line about his token tariffs the first term ... then he never tried again for the rest of that term.
Trump did just about what every president does - makes promises and then does some of them, tries to some others (successful unless thwarted by Congress), and ignores others.
Obama didn't have the votes in the Senate (to overcome the filibuster, also not as many Dems congressmen supported it as you might think). Neither did Clinton (people thought it would happen then)
Biden delivered on the IRA and climate change bill.
Trump promised to "drain the swamp" and filled it instead. I can't think of any major campaign promise that he fulfilled - he didn't even build the wall (probably his main promise).
I can't think of any major campaign promise that he fulfilled
Renegotiate NAFTA
Lower Taxes
Move the US Embassy to Jerusalem
Nominate to the Supreme Court from the list he shared
Kill TPP
No Social Security Cuts
Take No Salary
Where he failed, it generally wasn't for trying, but because he was getting blocked by Congress, the courts, and the general bureaucracy. You only have to look at the last 48 hours to see a better prepared Trump committed to his promises.
I'm not sure "No Social Security Cuts" should count, because (1) he did try to cut it in his proposed 2020 budget, (2) he did nothing to try to address the shortfall that is expected in the social security trust fund around 2033, and (3) he said that if he was reelected in 2020 he would get rid of the payroll tax, which would have moved the depletion of the trust fund up to around 2026.
Let's go through Trump's campaign promises: Infrastructure, Border wall, increased US manufacturing, repealing ACA, "drain the swamp". He achieved zero of those.
Biden in contrast followed up on his campaign promises: Infrastructure, increased US manufacturing, expanding ACA plus lowering costs. Among others.
This is 100% true. I am posting from an anon account (obviously), but I was heavily involved in this. I worked with members of the party to push part of their strategy - mainly the coalition with trump and an effort to get vivek and elon involved. We spoke about this in 2023. I didn't care about Ross, had my own motivations, but I wrote some of their playback with AI and it worked. I didn't know about certain things (like the losing candidate for example). I wrote strategy that seems to have made its way all the way to Trump's team.
Whether or not he was the sole or even primary reason, he knew about it beforehand as seen by his tweet last night saying it was coming soon. Love him or hate him, it's a bit concerning that he has that level of access IMO.
The clips of him rolling his eyes and head around in boredom at the inauguration definitely looked like he was suffering from some kind of withdrawal symptoms.
He promised international canvassers that we'd have peace in Ukraine on his first day in office. Whatever he arranged with druggie libertarians is chopped liver from a policy perspective. On the international stage it's the dictionary definition of a nothingburger.
Well even if he bet on going that route he wouldn't have to be "elected", and my last line applies none the less, it didn't hurt him during an actual election.
Yes. Except, "neutralize?" I don't know why the federal government would bother with the pretense of a 22nd Amendment when they demonstrably do not care in the slightest about the 14th or most of the Bill of Rights.
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
What do you mean? Trump just pardoned or commuted pretty much all of the J6 crowd. One guy convicted of crimes that don't require proving violence beyond a reasonable doubt is pretty tame in comparison. He is one of thousands.
Trump know the Jan 6 rioters and supported them. Pardoning is important to justify his claim that nobody did anything wrong as that the election was "stolen by the Dems".
I can't imagine he would have known Ross Ulbricht's case.
I'm just shocked it was a full pardon instead of a commutation or something. I don't think the US is gaining a ton from keeping him locked up but he still did run an organization he knew was used for selling drugs and other illegal things and a full pardon for that seems weird. I feel like I mainly heard people talking about commuting his sentence
He built a website. He didn't dictate how people used it. That was the point. He was charged as a drug kingpin with mobster era consequences. His sentence didn't fit whatever crimes he did or didn't commit.
Trump killed Net Neutrality during his first term and you think he would use it to justify the actions of someone running an internet black market that trafficked in drugs, prostitution and murder?
No one said anything about voting or benefits? That's an entire different discussion.
It's just that, in layman's terms, a pardon means "you did nothing wrong", whereas a commutation means "you did something wrong but were sentenced too harshly". As far as I know that's also what it more or less means legally (with some nuance).
I'm absolutely not a fan of "tough on crime" sentencing, but he absolutely did do something wrong, even if we ignore the contended "murder for hire" claims he should have been sent to prison for a number of years (personally, I'd say about 5-10 years). This is also by Ulbricht's own admission by the way.
What do you mean "lightly?" He ran an illegal drug market and tried to assassinate a competitor. We gave him the punishment that society has determined one should receive for this. Revoking his punishment is "light."
The judge issued the punishment at their sole discretion. The legislature sets the laws often without any input from the constituency.
Meanwhile a sizable campaign has materialized around this case and many people do feel he has done enough time and should be free without any restrictions
Hence why, if DPR was going to get off somehow, a sentence commutation would have been better rather than an unconditional pardon. The latter implies he did absolutely nothing wrong, which hilariously runs counter to Trump's supposed tough on drugs and crime shtick he has.
So does this mean the war on drugs is finally over and we're going to stop mass incarceration for non-violent drug offenses? If so, that _would_ be good news.
He also just classified drug cartels as terrorist organizations so drug dealers are now technically facilitating terrorism. Apart from liberating this white collar drug dealer, all of his other actions have escalated the war on drugs. While he was signing these orders, he claimed that drug cartels were responsible for up to 300,000 American deaths annually (a completely fabricated number.)
I would find this easier to celebrate if it was a commutation and not a pardon, or if it was a pardon that went hand in hand with a change in the laws he broke.
Legalities aside, is it more evil to hire a dude to kill your enemy, or to go kill your enemy yourself? (I'd go with the former because if you go kill your enemy yourself you're at least accepting that it may go the other way).
Crypto currency proponents benefit from the existence of dark net marketplaces because they are some of the main places for the non-speculative use of crypto currencies. I think Ross and his pardon represent a sort-of metaphor in crypto-currency proponents' eyes for the government's toleration of these dark net crypto marketplaces.
If you meant Trump, it's not hidden, they released a Trump meme coin and the rug pull was after the inauguration timed with the release of the Melania meme coin, though entirely speculatively makes more sense for the investors to be foreign governments buying influence less obviously than the last Trump administration like Saudi Arabia hiring his son in law.
I doubt Trump cares about Ulbricht as much as he cares (for whatever reason) about the continued support of various American libertarians (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and various crypto elites).
While he has made many promises this is significant for being one that he has kept.
RFK Jr is definitely not a libertarian (even compared to someone mainstream like Gary Johnson or Jared Polis), he supports strong state intervention in many areas of the economy and society
Trump went around to a huge number of niche communities and promised to fix their core concerns in exchange for their support. The crypto and libertarian communities are obsessed with freeing Ulbricht. It was honestly a brilliant strategy, and probably the reason he won. Ironic that an authoritarian fascist was able to get elected by enlisting the help of anti-authoritarian communities with a single issue promise.
It’s not ironic at all. The MAGA movement is really similar to how Mussolini came to power.
The campaign against barbarians (Steve Miller’s) crusade, Elons “not enough white babies” stuff, sucking up to the church (Vatican City is a Mussolini scheme), aspirations for conquest of Greenland and Panama, etc are all analogous to the maga playbook.
Most people are clueless. There are idiots who think they are getting $1 eggs next week. Riling up weirdos like libertarians lets the movement punch above their weight.
Unfortunately you could level the same type of name calling towards Democrats. It's now public record they colluded with all the major media outlets, coerced big tech to censor and debank opponents, imprisoned whistleblowers, violated bodily autonomy with unconstitutional mandates, weaponized the courts to conduct lawfare, and now issued an unprecedented number of pre-emptive pardons for unspecified crimes committed by Fauci, Hunter Biden, et al.
I remember when the Democrats were the anti-war party, but Biden was escalating the Ukraine war in the final days of his presidency, and celebrated Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris. Crazy how things have changed so much. The left unanimously viewed Bush and Cheney as obviously psychopathic war criminals, and now almost all the Neocons have jumped over to the Democrats. The left used to be extremely skeptical of globalization as evident by the Seattle WTO Protests, mass immigration as evident by Bernie Sanders' comments on its effect on workers' wages, and Big Pharma's perverse incentives to keep people sick and regularly consuming drugs. Yet the media has utterly psyop'd the progressives... it's kinda disturbing.
Authoritarianism is also popular with the democrats right now, but I don’t see how anything I said is name calling: I used terms with a specific meaning appropriate for the context- the only reason they have a negative connotation is because of what they actually mean. Do you know of other terms with the same meaning and more neutral connotations?
The democrats are broken. They keep running women, and not getting messages out that appeal to the average voter. They lost their core reliable voters (old people, Catholics, unions) and are alienating more traditional voting blocs like African Americans and some Hispanic populations with the constant drama over trans issues. Nobody heard about anything this election cycle other than abortion and transgender issues. It’s a big tent party, but when progressives steal all the oxygen, the wheels fall off the train.
They need to run a tall white dude with good hair who talks about economic opportunity, fair play and protecting the future.
My parents live in the country. A farmer (whose father was the county Democratic Party chair) has a massive sign “Trump. I don’t like him, but we need him”. That’s the 2024 election unfortunately.
It's a trite thing to say, but when it comes to Trump it fits the pattern of inside dealing ... I'm guessing he personally will profit from this somehow / someone promised a donation / money.
I am active in libertarian circles and Ulbricht was a cause celebre. The 2024 election was a game of inches, and many libertarians I know voted Trump purely on this issue. It is possible this was a key way Trump eked out a victory.
They just won something they cared about: perhaps you should be taking them even more seriously than you did.
And even if you are not a fan of a political group, you are the one being judgemental here on a factor that is very unlikely to be universal within the group.
Treating anyone according to political labels is divisive.
They got a single guy out of prison, but pretty much everything else in Trump's platform is diametrically opposed to libertarianism. It's hard to think of anything less libertarian than tariff-funded big government!
Tariffs are not good for free market diehards. However the nuance is that foreign countries like China do not operate on a fair playing field, they want free access to our markets but prevent our champions from entering their's. Something must be done here. I'm not convinced tariffs are the best tool, but at least it's something.
In terms of small government, there is news about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) every single day. There will be a massive downsizing in the federal workforce and the regulatory state over the next 4 years. This move towards small government is the thing that excites me most.
Trump has is proposing a 10% tariff on China, and a 25% tariff on Mexico.
Also he's handing out tariff exemptions to his political allies like candy.
There's not some high minded principal or strategy here. It's graft and spite. Trump even seems to be holding out the tariff threat as leverage to force the sale of TikTok.
Look you can agree with this stuff if you want but none of it is remotely aligned with libertarian principles. Even squishy ones.
Biden could have taken the wind out of Trump's sails by commuting Ulbricht's sentence when he was in office. If you don't think a group's interests are worth listening to, don't be surprised when that group votes for someone who does.
Very little about the Libertarian party is libertarian. Yet another party carrying water for authoritarianism, with the difference being that the implementation is through corporations.
Libertarians are a self selecting bunch. Very few were raised into this philosophy. You can appreciate that my self identification as a libertarian is a careful, reasoned decision and not one that was flippantly made. It is the philosophy that is the most accurate and truthful to me.
Read my comment again. I self-identify as a libertarian as I see individual freedom as paramount. But I kept going with the analysis to realize that the Libertarian Party does very little to represent that ideal.
My apologies, I thought you were accusing libertarians of authoritarianism (the irony!).
I find the Mises Caucus at least useful in pushing to do more than simply be an affinity group for people pretending to play politics. I find partying with LP officials to be very hilarious, what a group of odd balls. But the party itself has no hope of electoral victory, which is why everyone should vote Republican in the current iteration of two-party politics from the libertarian lens.
Libertarians are a joke because they refuse to realize that allowing corporations unlimited freedom means that the individual has less freedom. Their entire ideology just removes the boot of the state and replaces it with the boot of the corporation.
Libertarians are not a joke. Some of the most powerful people on earth are libertarians. The people who write off libertarians are blind.
I prefer corporations because I can voluntarily choose to take my business elsewhere, or even better, create my own competitor. Why I dislike the government is that it's the ultimate monopoly, with guns, and operated mostly by power-hungry sociopaths who will use that power to destroy innocent lives.
Given the corporation or the state, I take the corporation every time.
My point is that even if there were an electoral victory, the Libertarian Party would not bring individual freedom. They are operating from an assertion that starting with a list of moral axioms, every implication will be morally right by construction. By itself this is terribly mistaken (see Godel), but it goes askew even sooner when a few poor axioms are allowed to remain through "pragmatism", regulatory capture, etc.
As for the current political environment, I'd say that bureaucratic authoritarianism is at least the devil we know and can be routed around by individuals, whereas autocratic authoritarianism is at best a wildcard that stands to destroy a good chunk of the laws that have actually been restraining naked power.
I don't judge anyone too hard when they're willing to bend a bit to get someone out of jail after the key has been thrown away. I didn't vote Trump but I will admit the possibility of Ross being released made me pause when I marked my ballot, even his mom's image flashed in my mind and I felt guilty for not helping.
Winning by 1.6% is not a massive victory. It's actually a smaller margin than Hillary won the popular vote by in 2016 (despite losing the electoral vote).
I wonder if the decision to drop the "murder for hire" charges was originally influenced by his existing life sentence, and whether the pardon now alters that reasoning. Is it still possible for him to be prosecuted on those charges?
Two life sentences was a bit harsh. 11 years seems about right to me.
I suspect the idea beyond "Free Ross" in some circles was that his conviction wasn't so much about drug dealing, but rather it was more a political prosecution for popularizing real uses of cryptocurrencies.
These discussions are very interesting. So many red flags from Trump (this pardon, ending birthright citizenship...), and people try to justify these things. America is unfortunately heading for a very dark time. Politics aside, I am rather uncomfortable with the power the president possesses. We were always mindful that there are systems of checks and balances. However, given the current court overturned a precedent (Roe), I am unsure what the future holds. This pardon makes me very uneasy.
This thread really shows how unhinged the community is. Dude hired contract killers and ran the most prolific darkweb forum for whatever. He's not some martyr. He's just a bum.
I laundered money on The Silkroad (sent birthday cards filled with cash for bitcoin). It was a level of criminality I was fairly comfortable with. I do retain some fear that my door would be kicked in some day. Lawyers of HN, Am I in the clear now too? Ross tried to have a guy murdered, after all.
In one message, Ulbricht informed ELLINGSON that “[the murder target] is a liability and I wouldn't mind if he was executed.” In another message, Ulbricht stated: “[the murder target] is causing me problems . . . I would like to put a bounty on his head if it’s not too much trouble for you. What would be an adequate amount to motivate you to find him?” ELLINGSON responded, “[the p]rice for clean is 300k+ USD,” and the “[p]rice for non-clean is 150-200k USD depending on how you want it done.” ELLINGSON further explained, in part, that “[t]hese prices pay for 2 professional hitters including their travel expenses and work they put in.”
Ulbricht later sent ELLINGSON $150,000 worth of Bitcoin to pay for the purported murder. ELLINGSON and Ulbricht agreed on a code to be included with a photograph to prove that the murder had been carried out. In April 2013, ELLINGSON and Ulbricht exchanged messages reflecting that ELLINGSON had sent Ulbricht photographic proof of the murder. A thumbnail of a deleted photograph purporting to depict a man lying on a floor in a pool of blood with tape over his mouth was recovered from Ulbricht’s laptop after his arrest. A piece of paper with the agreed-upon code written on it is shown in the photograph next to the head of the purportedly dead individual.
Later in April 2013, ELLINGSON and Ulbricht exchanged additional messages regarding a plot to kill four additional people in Canada. Ulbricht sent ELLINGSON an additional $500,000 worth of Bitcoin for the murders. ELLINGSON claimed to Ulbricht in online messages that the murders had in fact been committed.
James Ellingson is a convicted federal criminal charged with numerous crimes related to this case.
Tasked with investigating Silk Road he ended up in jail himself, along with his co-workers.
There's a very good reason none of this stuff ever went to trial, it would be incredibly embarrassing for the agencies involved to see the light of day.
Given the farcical nature of those allegations and all that we now know, including that others with access to the Dread Pirate Roberts account assert that the DEA agent making the allegations (who is himself now in prison for attempting to steal some of the silk road bitcoin) had access as well, it will be wonderful if DoJ attempts to bring charges, just to further clear Ross' name.
There are not a shred of evidence that Ross ever had the slightest thing to do with those conversations, and it seems much more likely that the DEA used the DPR account to frame him.
When Snowden, is my question. RFK put a lot of words into "if I am in charge that'll be my first thing". Yeah, he's not the president but he's also not nobody anymore.
NGL it would be pretty funny if Snowden gets to return to the west but we hadn't actually fixed any of the stuff he brought forward in the meantime. Not sure what I would do in his shoes... I guess a pardon is pretty impossible for future presidents to get around, TBF
The courage a lot of these whistleblowers have shown is admirable. How the American public outrages, though: Facebook has targeted ads. How they don't outrage: their government is illegally tracking their own citizens' movements and communications including overseas.
Not going to say Ulbricht is a hero like some of the others, but he trail blazed like none before him! And he deserves his freedom years ago.
I thought it was a ridiculously long sentence compared to what other people have received. 10 years was right. That's enough time. I know that he was accused of hiring a hitman, but he was never convicted of that. It should have never been used in his sentencing. I think the government tried to make an example out of Ross Ulbrich, and it was a miscarriage of justice.
Or it could be different people commenting than on that original thread? And people might have changed their minds? HN is not a monolith. Humans are not static. You don't need to blame it on "politics being a mind virus".
I don't know. I personally know people that lost their minds because of an election. Completely well off people, whose lives are not affected at all by national politics, apart from slight changes in tax rates. They live in a state and city that shares their politics. They're isolated from everything on the national level.
Yet some of these people have rearranged their entire lives around a singular politician. Ended relationships, moved, started therapy or medication.
>Completely well off people, whose lives are not affected at all by national politics, apart from slight changes in tax rates. They live in a state and city that shares their politics. They're isolated from everything on the national level...
>What else would you call that?
This is one of those comments that accidentally reveals more than intended because I would call that "empathy". You are revealing that the only reason you think people should be concerned about politics is when it directly effects them. Some people actually genuinely care about other people and seeing someone elected who has promised to hurt people is a disturbing and troubling turn of events even if they themselves are likely to be safe.
So you’re saying people are making a rational estimation of the various harms caused to their fellowmen, determining that political actions in Washington are the primary component, and feeling bad about the harm?
I don’t buy it. Citing empathy is moral language to justify bad actions.
>So you’re saying people are making a rational estimation of the various harms caused to their fellowmen, determining that political actions in Washington are the primary component, and feeling bad about the harm?
Trump released an executive order yesterday that said some of my friends are no longer considered citizens of this country. Yes, sometimes it is incredibly obvious when Washington is to blame for people's suffering.
>This thread is about people whose well being and ability to enjoy life is ruined by politics
Another facet of empathy is being able to understand other perspectives besides your own. Maybe this was your interpretation of the bounds of the conversation. It doesn't mean that is the only interpretation.
Here are the exact words from the comment I replied to: "Ended relationships, moved, started therapy or medication." I don't think those are signs someone whose "ability to enjoy life is ruined". In fact, I see those as signs of someone enjoying life more by removing or addressing things that sap the joy out of life.
I think you should manage your health and safety first and those closest to you.
You're not helping by inflicting harm on yourself and those around you. If you want to canvas for the other side, donate, volunteer, great. But these people are obsessed and inflict a lot of damage on themselves for no good purpose.
Most people empathize to those that are infected with a virus. It's often out of their control. You can only offer them help and suggest they touch grass once in a while. But you shouldn't feed into their self delusions that self harm and obsession with things out of their control is healthy and a good way to live their life
The empathy you are showing in this comment would feel a lot more genuine if you didn't reveal with your prior comment how little empathy plays into your overall worldview. I'm personally fine, you don't have to waste your time telling me how to live a better life. I was just trying to explain to you what you were seemingly misunderstanding about your fellow humans.
> Some people actually genuinely care about other people and seeing someone elected who has promised to hurt people is a disturbing and troubling turn of events even if they themselves are likely to be safe.
Ya but, it's all a bit silly isn't it? Realistically those people wouldn't be doing any of that unless they were addicted to media and perhaps by consequence emotionally volatile. If I chose not to be chronically keeping up with stuff on a moment to moment basis that only has vague intangible impacts on my life or those around me, specifically online, does that make me less empathetic or less tolerant of having all my time, energy, and attention stolen from me? That's not always the case, but it often is, and if it's actually relevant, you're opting into poor mental health despite having zero control over anything even if you care, so you might as well not be so tuned in; which part is the good part again?
It's a bit fatalistic perhaps, but I feel like the greatest trick social media (and Trump) ever pulled was convincing us we'd be pariahs if we opted out. If not for chronically keeping up with nearly literally every word the new batch of chronies has to say, they might not be saying it.
>If I chose not to be chronically keeping up with stuff on a moment to moment basis that only has vague intangible impacts on my life or those around me, specifically online, does that make me less empathetic or less tolerant of having all my time, energy, and attention stolen from me?
Some people view empathy as an active ability to "put yourself in someone else's shoes". Other people view it as a passive feeling along the lines of "it hurts to see other people hurt". If you can just stop being empathic by not thinking about it, you are in the first group. Some of us are in the second group and can't just decide to ignore it.
Weird part is that these two groups generally belive are not that different in the general. Most of the fight on the ideological side is on marginal differences.
This all is mostly idiotic tribal fight when you hate each other because you just must to hate someone.
I profoundly hope for star trek like civilisation in the future
It’s religious conflict. Nobody cares really about differences in tax rates. But differences in foundational beliefs about the world and humanity will do that.
Talk like this is never apolitical. No political change can occur without discussion first and therefore preemptively dismissing political discussion is inherently an endorsement of the current power structures.
There is no way to actually discuss this specific story without discussing politics. A president pardoning someone is an inherently political act and that is only emphasized when it was done on his first day in office and with a statement that includes lines like "The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me." That is all part of the story of what happened here and it involves politics whether you like it or not.
People generally do not come up with absurd beliefs all on their own, those do spread like a virus and as a consequence of all that social contagion, they do not seem all that absurd anymore to the person who contracts them.
Yes let's use word that need massive essays to explain what one person believes they mean... Like "woke". And not just stick to words we know the meaning of. That surely aid the discussion. /s
Exactly. If anything, the one thing that’s guaranteed in these types of threads is that someone will make this same tired argument of “aha, but HN back then said differently” as if it’s some kind of gotcha. I used to always look, and not only was it never the same people but the threads are largely more balanced than the original poster let on. It’s like the contrarian dynamic, which dang has to explain over and over and over and over and over again.
Any time a criminal is caught, people want them to do hard time, but people believe we're too hard on crime if you don't use examples. People think the government should spend less, but are far less likely too agree to any specific cut. People thought Musk was a genius until they realised he is also a jerk.
And while it's sometimes different people, it's suspiciously reliably consistent in what you see said and upvoted.
Based on the sheer number of posts that have misrepresented the charges or misunderstood why he was actually in prison, it appears to partially be a lack of knowledge on the case, likely due to time hazing some of the memories. Of course someone will change their mind, and some may have their view influenced by who happens to support him.
"Politics" is a dismissive word for crypto's evolution over the last decade. North Korea ransoming our hospitals, industrial scale gambling and scam enablement, wealthy kingpins buying self-serving policy. Crypto grew up. So did our opinions.
That doesn't change what Ross Ulbricht did, but we can now see him as continuous with a great evil that we couldn't see at the time. With more information, our opinions changed, and they were right to change.
Wow. I thought you were being glib, but the average comment length is noticeably higher in the linked discussion. While length isn’t necessarily a valid proxy for meaningful conversation, this was definitely an eye-opening contrast to the current thread.
Well, that thread is almost a decade old. HN a decade ago was a very different vibe than today.
You are insinuating one thing, but perhaps it is also possible reason is that the same people with those old views of the crimes have grown and their views changed. I know mine certainly have gone that way. I’d have to imagine other users have grown with me.
Nah social media is just about engagement. People who are happy with the article don’t bother to comment. Those who are outraged comment. It’s just two different groups of people commenting
That people can't change their minds? That HN is a hivemind ? (news flash: it's not , it's more diverse than you actually think) or that everything is attributed to "Politics is a mind virus" ? if so, what do you mind by this term specifically?
I personally, find little substance in such comments. If you have an opinion on the matter (which seemingly you do), then please share it so that we can have a discussion about it.
At the time of sentencing, did we already know that the murder for hire plots were created by corrupt Secret Service and DEA agents on trial next door? and all of that was withheld from the defense and the jury?
because that's where the story really jumps the shark. I'm all for some accountability - such as the 12 years in prison already - but that particular case should have been dropped for several reasons, I've seen cases dropped for way less.
I think this comment would have got less downvotes if you could have made it somewhat shorter. Walls of text like this just scream Unabomber manifesto to me :)
I’m confused as Trump said he wanted to be tough on crime and drugs and “kill drug dealers”, but he just pardoned one of the worlds largest drug dealers.
He was never a drug dealer, he provided a platform that was used to sell drugs. The pardon was a surprise, however his sentence was unfairly strict and he was clearly made an example out of that hasn't happened to any other platform provider.
Just as an example, there have been investigations in to the use of Snapchat as a method for drug dealers and gangs of drug dealers to access kids to sell them drugs However there has been absolutely zero discussion in the public domain even about shutting it down or requiring new laws to stop this, let alone considering charging the owners.
There is a huge difference between a communication platform that some users abuse for illegal purposes, and a platform whose primary purpose is a marketplace for illegal goods.
Actually the marketplace was just a marketplace, it then was primarily used for illegal goods. It hasn't really ever been proven that it was setup as a marketplace for illegal goods.
I suppose it could be made consistent if we posit the existence of another hidden rule. For example, the skin-color or political-connectedness of the accused.
I think you need much more than "feels" to make claims like that, especially as they are directly contrary to HN guidelines, but also because making baseless claims, especially about other commenters, is a meaningless, inflammatory response.
So far you don't know what you are talking about and are making things up. If you do know what you're talking about and aren't making it up, please share your evidence and reasoning.
The two life sentences and 35 years extra that were given to Ross were most certainly abnormal and used to make an example of. I have yet to see this comparison made although if anyone could provide valid reasons in the difference I would be open to listening.
Secondly, the sheer number of posts on this site stating didn't he hire a hitman. No, and there was no conviction of that.
I distinctly remember listening to recordings of him hiring a hitman. It's been a long time and my memory is certainly prone to error, but that sort of thing does stick with you. I especially remember the irony because he also preached about non-violence at some point, obviously until someone's continued existence became inconvenient for him.
I don't agree with that and I don't understand why those charges were not taken to court (I don't believe it was purely because he already had 2 life sentences as when the appeals were going to the supreme court and there was a risk of him winning, it surely made sense to secure him if you had the evidence to proceed with another case). Whether that was true or not though, someone can only be sentenced and punished on what one was convicted of. Anything else is not based in justice or law.
I don't really believe that the US is a country ruled by law any more, but in some idealized land of the law you are probably correct. But you won't convince me that OJ Simpson walking on a double homicide he clearly committed is justice. For Ulbricht, it actually feels like things more or less balanced out, but he did try to have someone killed, and I don't think that's a nice thing to do.
Did the judge conclude, as part of sentencing, that hiring a hit (or two?) was likely?
What reasoning did the judge give for the sentencing? They might involve similar websites but the crimes can be much different. Two people can run the same drug cartel at different times, but that doesn't mean their crimes are the same.
It was pretty out of left field and seemingly uncharacteristic for the him to do this. It's fair to ask why. I think Trump is terrible in every way, think the pardon is fine, but can't help but wonder why and other questions about it
"I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross. The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
Good - edit - from what I recall he was some kid in a library running a website that got out of hand - he was an idealist who reminded me of Aaron. But I don’t know much more than that. Just my 2 cents.
Not going to try and sway you here but to learn more, read or listen to "American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road".
He has admitted his wrong doings and made efforts to change whilst in prison. I doubt he will go straight back to a life even remotely close to before. He was doing good in prison for other inmates and I imagine he will continue doing the same now he has this second chance.
What the future holds for someone who was pardoned is likely decided based on very different rationalization compared to how one acts while serving a lifetime prison sentence.
Whilst I understand your point of view that the change in circumstances can change how someone decides to act, I don't believe there is much history to show someone who gained a surprising second chance outside of prison has gone back to their previous life.
I'm wondering that too. I think there's three options: he either has secret money hidden away, is going to get a cushy job in tech by some fan, or he's going to be working as a walmart greeter in 3 years.
Honestly I'm hoping he gets an X account so I can follow him and see which it is lol
The sympathy for this guy from so many of you makes me sad.
The messages show he wanted and thought he was getting people murdered. But that's perfectly OK because it was actually the evil FBI he was talking to!
> “All my Republican donations were dark,” [SBF] said, referring to political donations that are not publicly disclosed in FEC filings. “The reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the f—k out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.”
> Given that he donated nearly $40 million to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle—and he admitted to giving an equal amount to Republicans—his total political contributions may have actually been around $80 million.
This is a rare Trump win. There are many things to criticize him for, but this pardon isn't one of them. I don't think anyone, after researching this case, would be okay with the life sentence handed down to Ross.
Most people in real life don’t even know who this guy is. This is a guy that online people know. I will agree it’s a win, he was unfairly sentenced. I just wish I would have been able to buy from SR. I did get to browse it before it was seized.
I guess this is why he was upset about Mexico sending drug dealers and murderers - he didn't want competition for our homegrown drug dealers and murderers.
I really wonder who benefits from this. Trump only does things that are good for him, or those close to him. I realize he's been making connections to the crypto world, and has his own meme coins. Does pardoning Ross somehow make crypto more valuable?
Partisan caricature is not a reliable starting point for logical inference or deduction. To answer your question - on the campaign trail he attended a convention of libertarian organizers and promised them that if he won he would free Ross, and has followed through on that promise today.
It’s also just good politics. There are a vocal group of voters that are in favor of this, so it gets those people on his side. And no reason not to (politically), as most people just don’t care about this topic, or if they do and disagree with the decision, this isn’t going to be the action that moves the needle for them on how they feel about Trump or the Republican Party.
A video from Reason magazine a few days ago[0] mentioned a deal between the Libertarian Party leadership and Trump in which they selectively didn't run their candidate in several states in order to help Trump. If this is true, Trump could have reneged, but evidently decided whatever political blowback for pardoning Ulbricht (which is probably small potatoes at this rate) wasn't worth the credibility cost.
I am happy to see that Trump is a man of his word. I voted for him just because of this campaign promise. I would have voted for almost anyone who promised this.
I am very sympathetic to the idea of voting just for Ross. It is unclear to me which candidate would be better, since neither of them are close to my political beliefs at all. It is a deadlock and I seem completely unrepresented. The consequences of voting based on any big issues I care about seems completely unpredictable; politics is a game of lies, smoke and mirrors. So I would perhaps rather vote for the candidate that would definitely save one person's life that is important to me.
What were your number 2 and 3 issues, out of curiosity?
Were there any accompanying policies that you would say, "despite promising to free Ross Ulbricht, I don't think accompanying Policy X would be worth it?"
Not OP, but yes, immensely. Two different galaxies.
The Paris Agreement is a joke; it has done nothing. It's just a bunch of big-ass politicians and a few celebrities bloviating about not solving the problem.
Look, I'm not disputing at all that global warming is an issue, or that we need to solve it, or that humans cause it, or whatever. But the Paris Agreement and those all other agreements are all about big idiots pretending to do stuff.
Probably the most effective thing we have done globally to combat warming is changing to electric cars, and that's NOT the Paris Agreement. Not even close.
The Paris Agreement is the ultimate politician's move. Global warming is a technical problem and must be solved by technical means.
Ironically, the one person who is doing more than all the politicians combined to solve this is backing the current administration. Twitter is nuts over if he did a Nazi salute, while doing nothing to focus on solving what they believe is the biggest issue in our lifetimes.
Yes. The Paris Agreement is a bunch of virtue signaling WEF nonsense. The biggest polluter is not reducing CO2 emissions, and the United States is reducing them, both in absolute terms and per capita, at a great cost to its industrial capacity: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=CHN~USA
Yes. If you stop producing steel (which we kinda did), and just buy it from China instead, you haven't "eliminated emissions". You've merely moved them to a country which is currently not subject to the environmental limits. We are on the same planet - in the long run it doesn't matter where you burn coal.
It's baffling to me that there are actually comments on Hacker Gosh Darn News of all places suggesting that Ross justly belonged in prison.
He successfully created a tool to undermine one of the most unjust and predatory policies of the US State - the policy of drug prohibition.
He's a damn hero. I don't understand why Trump, who most of the time seems like a simply awful human being with no end of appetite for state power, has chosen to do this, but I'll certainly take it.
It's beyond obvious that voting and other mechanics of representative rule have not succeeded at simple policy change such as ending prohibition. I look forward to several decades of truth trumping power in the form of the internet undermining states, until the asinine mode of political organization known as the nation state is deprecated entirely.
Just a reminder: the condition for accepting a pardon is acknowledging that you did commit the crime in question and accept the court's finding of guilt.
In contrast: Biden didn't pardon Leonard Peltier, the president commuted his sentence. Peltier maintains his innocence.
Can you share more about your first point? A brief search shows the 1915 Burdick supreme court case said that accepting a pardon can imply guilt. However, it doesn't seem to say that acknowledgement or acceptance of guilt is a requirement by the recipient of the pardon.
The latest string of pardons are blatant political power moves. He pardoned _all_ of the January 6 insurrectionists. Many of these people have been filmed attacking police and literally raiding the nations capitol to overturn 2020 election. Violent folks being released back into the public is not good.
Now he’s just getting favors with crypto bros and “libertarians”. Man is building his personal army filled with angry racists, poor men that can be easily manipulated.
Sends a clear message - do this illegal thing for me, I’ll sign away any consequences.
Since no one is posting it, here's Trump Truth Social post on the matter:
"I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross. The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
I have nothing in particular to say about the dead comments in this very young thread, but they're sort-of-interesting comments to have been killed so quickly!
Is it due to HN policy? I guess they're subjective and ideological, and prone to starting arguments rather than debates.
Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
I'm honestly just curious as a conscientious internet citizen lol
> I have nothing in particular to say about the dead comments in this very young thread, but they're sort-of-interesting comments to have been killed so quickly!
[dead] is different than [flagged][dead]. [dead]-only (no [flagged]) means they're auto-dead, they aren't killed by someone reviewing the comments (moderator or users flagging). One of the two commenters was shadow banned years ago but still gets vouched for occasionally (including by me at times). The other one was shadow banned (looked through their history) 11 days ago, with a comment from dang at the time stating as much. They also get vouched for on occasion, based on their comment history.
> Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
dang does usually respond to people with something like that first, then for people who get repeatedly flagged or repeatedly engage in certain kinds of behavior, he bans them.
Just to add one point, flagged comments are mostly flagged by users (as opposed to mods). We can only guess why users flag things, but from looking at a sample in the current thread it's probably because they're mostly flamewar-style comments and/or political-battle style comments (or both). Those aren't good for HN because what we want here is curious, thoughtful conversation.
Nothing wrong with HN in particular. Every polarising discussion on a platform with moderation or up/down voting system ends up this way. This structure is fantastic for technical discussions just not amazing for politics
Removing moderation or voting systems (simple chronological comment sorting) creates another set of issues so this problem can't be solved without entirely changing discussion formats
> This structure is fantastic for technical discussions just not amazing for politics
No, it's not. Because the same magnification effect causes the causal, simple and correct sounding to float to the top and the nuanced "<signs deeply> so I dealt with this for 20yr and here's the deal" takes that nobody wants to hear because they're not simple and easy wind up at the bottom but above the flagrantly wrong crap and the trolls.
There's a reason that nothing with real stakes adopts this format and technical discussions that matter still mostly happen in some sort of threaded format that doesn't allow voting or any sort of drive-by low effort interaction to effect much.
Format like this is good for driving interaction, which is why public facing websites use it for their comment sections.
Interesting -- what other system could you possibly have, other than votes...? I'm not sure I understand what you're suggesting. I guess traditional forum threads (sometimes with votes, a-la GitHub) are nice, but ultimately that's just trading "correct sounding" for "early commenter".
Otherwise, the only thing that comes to mind is StackOverflow functionality where OP can mark a single answer as "accepted" and push it to the top instantly (which obv. wouldn't translate well to general discussions).
I knew people who were wringing it out of medicated patches and sniffing it out of Afrin bottles during high school in the 90s. I also knew someone who ODd and died from tainted/fake pills they bought from one of The Silk Road's (immediate) successors.
Some number of people also OD on "traditional" street drugs every day. So, this is really not a sound argument.
Where's the paper bag that holds the liquor?
Just in case I feel the need to puke
If we'd known what it'd take to get here
Would we have chosen to?
So you wanna build an altar on a summer night
You wanna smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch
Aintcha heard the news? Adam and Eve were Jews
And I always loved you to the max
I see those people in my personal life, too. Ironically, they're also the ones who regularly drive drunk and do a little cocaine now and again because _it doesn't really count_.
Given there are at least thousands if not millions of people who "provide online forums," and pretty much this single one is in prison, I have to wonder if there's something unique about this case?
I don't know anything about this guy. Is there really nothing unique about his case?
Yes, it was the biggest drug market on the dark web at that time, and the 50,676 bitcoins seized by the feds from then is today worth 5,3 billion dollars to give you an idea.
Also there was a long side story with disappeared bitcoins, presumably stolen by federal investigators.
Silk Road was, at its height, uniquely successful and making an absolute mockery of the United States government's capacity to regulate drug trafficking. In addition, he fashioned himself an anti-establishment persona, going by the handle "Dread Pirate Roberts" online.
He was unique in his magnitude of success. Governments can successfully magnify their enforcement ability by making an example of outliers.
The seven offenses in question: distributing narcotics, distributing narcotics by means of the Internet, conspiring to distribute narcotics, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiring to commit computer hacking, conspiring to traffic in false identity documents, and conspiring to commit money laundering
A judge bypassed the jury and prosecutor and sentenced him as if he hired hit men and admitted doing so. The sentence upgrade was based on a preponderance of evidence, whereas they would have had to proven beyond a reasonable doubt had he been charged.
Framing this as judicial activism is false. Many sentencing arrangements include - with the agreement of the defendant (since it is their rights in this case) - to have other related activities factored in exactly this manner.
It happens all the time in pleas and diversion agreements, so don’t frame it as a reckless lone judge going off the reservation.
do you know that is actually the case ? i've been trying to find the text of the pardon and haven't been able to yet. can only find Trump's description of it as "full and unconditional"
This was a pandering to get Libertarians' votes. It has nothing to do with the crime itself. I wouldn't commit any crimes and expect to get away with them unless I anticipated becoming the pawn in someone's scheme to get elected.
But MLK also talks about moral obligation and not other forms of obligation.
He was not trying to create a free for all where everyone gets to decide which laws are okay or not, because he (and jefferson) were not complete morons.
Touche, however there is plenty of evidence of people throughout history making this assertion, including MLK.
He was trying to create a more just, egalitarian society. I don't understand how you can consider acting in accordance with leading research on successful drug policy "moronic"?
> Considering that his rhetoric was very much based on Christianity, it's clear what standard of "unjust" he was applying.
Considering the diversity of standards of justice within the history of Christianity (which, in just the US, includes—relevant to this topic—MLK, sure, but also the Southern Baptist Convention, founded explicitly in support of slavery), I don't know that having rhetoric grounded in Christian theology tells much of substance about the standard of justice one is appealing to.
Is it unjust to prohibit the sale of illegal drugs, weapons, etc.? Society has good reasons for regulating certain goods. I regularly see people in my community who are enslaved by fentanyl and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. The society I live in decided to make selling it illegal. What is unjust about that?
As I recall weapons weren't permitted on the platform.
The society didn't decide, the ruling class decided to use drug policy to attack their own citizens.
History shows that prohibition is an abject failure. The fent epidemic is symptomatic of this failed policy.
If they actually cared about the epidemic, addicts would have access to regulated, pharmaceutical grade heroin whilst also having ready access to treatment.
But then we'd have empty prisons and the police would be free to solve real crimes so we can't have that.
> addicts would have access to regulated, pharmaceutical grade heroin
We tried that, it was called the opioid epidemic and Purdue was the pharmacist. We had readily available, doctor-prescribed, high quality narcotics available to anyone who wanted them and the result was an epic disaster that cost thousands of lives.
>We tried that, it was called the opioid epidemic and Purdue was the pharmacist.
Not really, this was a case of a private company deliberately pushing narcotics for profit without oversight or any associated increase in access to treatment options.
Now the "opioid epidemic" has been replaced with a "fentanyl epidemic" which is objectively a much more dangerous drug with absolutely no regulation and murderous cartels instead of doctors - and we're still throwing people in prison for the crime of being addicts rather than treating it as a medical issue.
I don't know the stats (or if it's even possible to accurately collect statistics due to prohibition) but I'm fairly certain this costs more lives than the short lived opioid epidemic.
Is Trump pushing for broad drug decriminalisation? I feel like that would be necessary for this pardon to make sense on the basis of current drug laws being unjust.
Not exactly, fentanyl epidemic was specifically started by one family seek profit and ousted doctors to over prescribe it while claiming it was mildly addictive.
The war on drugs have caused immeasurable harm due to failure to understand most people use drugs either as escapism or as a tendency.
There are healthier middle grounds we could explore where e.g. advertisements are banned and individuals could register themselves as being banned from participating in certain addictive vices because they don't consistently have the willpower to quit or don't want to tempt fate trying it (and make it a crime to sell to an individual who has voluntarily banned themselves), but it's hard to argue that The War on Drugs has been in any way just.
I expect in such a society, certain groups (e.g. Mormons) would normalize banning yourself from vices the day you turn 18.
What is just is decided both by an individual and the society they exist in. "It is one's moral obligation to fight injustice" is a pretty common tenent to hold. Injustice can be city laws encouraging anti-homeless spikes. Injustice can also be genocide in a remote country. Those injustices get fought in very different ways. One can be handled by individual vigilanteeism and peacefully petitioning local governance. The other might require global war.
In my personal belief, everyone[0] has the right and moral obligation to fight the injustice they care about at the level they can manage. If that's handing out water at the protest or inventing penicillin, do what you personally can do to improve the world.
[0]the average layperson, obvious exceptions for power/money apply
Sure, but the facts matter. Making millions of dollars by operating a marketplace for illegal drugs is not even close to the same ballpark as protesting a draconian anti-homeless law, let alone resisting genocide!
The only reasonable argument for drug legalization, in my opinion, is the libertarian one - the idea that you should be free to take the drugs you want to take. I am sympathetic to this argument. I am someone who is able to make wise decisions about the drugs I take. But I also recognize that millions of my fellow citizens are not. The harm to society from drug addiction and overdoses outweighs the benefit to me getting high whenever I want.
I mean strictly speaking the people voted for Trump, so collectively they're all okay with this.
Of course Trump's platform was enormously based on law & order and combatting the drug trade, which he seems to think should still be actually illegal and is not ending the war on drugs so, I don't know - make of that what you will.
Maybe Thoreau? That's more authentic and gets at similar themes. On more than one level considering his circumstances and run-ins with law enforcement.
”Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
But there were also abolitionists at the time, even amongst that class. Jefferson not being among them does, actually, diminish his standing and his views on justice. This quote, for example, does not acknowledge that there are also laws which are unjust to obey; such as the owning of human beings in chattel slavery.
Jefferson did, certainly. He was instrumental in starting a war from what I understand.
Ross though? The government alleged it but never bothered to prove it. Furthermore the government agents involved were laughably corrupt, so anything they alleged needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. For all anybody here know, they fabricated the entire assassination story to distract the public from their plot to loot Ross's money (which unlike the assassination stuff, has been proven in court.)
This conversation is presently flagged. Why? When Ross was sentenced HN had a discussion about it with more than 600 comments. His conviction has been discussed numerous additional times in other threads throughout the years. His pardon is plainly on-topic for HN, and this discussion is a necessary followup to those previous discussions.
Of course it's on topic. Why did users flag it? Probably some combination of not liking the event itself and fatigue with political stories. But that's just a guess.
In any case, we turned the flags off when we saw it.
I don't see how this benefits the American economy, jobs, or national security. I do see that for a cohort of people in the Libertarian community this was held to be a central Tenet: Ulbricht was their "hostage" just as the Proud Boys thought their leader was.
But, I can't see how this becomes net beneficial in Congress, or in the wider economy. At best it's providing lower friction movement of goods and services. They tend not to go to Federal Tax collecting exchanges, so I cannot for the life of me see how this helps the exchequer, but maybe thats the point?
A possible line of reasoning is that drugs should be legal, but the property and violent crimes committed around them shouldn't be, in the same way that adults are legally permitted to drink alcohol, but they're not legally permitted to drive drunk. The "ruining cities" is about the crimes, not the drugs themselves.
That's the logically consistent line of thought, yes. Which is one I don't particularly disagree with, because of the harm the war on drugs has caused.
But the inconsistency comes from people advocating for a black market drug site and bending towards the far right. The same people who in the same breath also further criminalize drugs, reduce access to things that help addicts while arguing that drug dealers should be deported and our streets swept.
The logical inconsistency is that 'their' drug dealers are conducted by people of virtue therefore they did nothing to break the law. And not being willing to deal with the actual fallout of said illegal drug empire.
Most libertarians considered the Silk Road a place to buy psychedelics like LSD or mushrooms or experimental synthetic drugs (not that these don’t come with numerous risks). Not a bulk heroin warehouse. So the perception is different from that of a wholesale fentanyl clearing house.
Just because the far right complains about 'drugged out zombies' ruining cities thanks to drug smugglers from Mexico, doesn't mean libertarians think that. Libertarians have been opposed to the "war on drugs" for decades.
Do you think it's possible the 11 years he spent in prison could have had any rehabilitation effect? Or should we jail anyone who ever commits a crime to a life sentence?
Whether Ulbricht is a changed man is somewhat immaterial to the signaling to other young would-be drug kingpins that the President thinks you shouldn't be punished so harshly for setting up online black markets.
I agree: online black markets should be free trade. If drugs were legalized, even fewer issues would exist, and it would be easier to isolate the actual crime which imposes negative, third party externalities like traffiking or violence.
B) I don’t see this sort of leniency being offered to other drug dealers, in fact, the Trump administration wants to designate Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations.
C) a day 1 pardon communicates that it’s a top priority of the administration that drug dealers and cop killers (Jan 6) get freed.
D) he was convicted by a jury of his peers who know full well what a judge would sentence him to. Now Trump comes out to overrule that.
The time to change sentencing would have been pre-trial. We tried doing that, but that was a massive loser electorally.
E) it wasn't merely commutation, it was a pardon. A pardon means that President is declaring the defendant not guilty. A commutation merely reduces the sentence.
Pretty sure she is currently in jail.. if not, she's finished doing the time she was sentenced.
Her husband took the fall, whatever the facts actually are, and got a longer sentence.
SBF - well the scale, number of laws violated, duration, number of victims, profile of victims, complete lack of contrition, etc would be why he got a much longer sentence.
Disclosure - I immensely dislike Trump and think Ross Ublricht deserved to be convicted.
That said - There is no evidence that anyone was ever killed, there is pretty thin evidence that he actually ever intended to hire any hitmen (though he may have defrauded people who thought they were hiring hitmen), and a life sentence for non-violent drug trafficking seems draconian. I certainly don't think this should have been one of Trump's priorities (I'm guessing it came through Vance, Musk, or someone else in the crypto community), but I don't have a big problem with it.
For all his many defects and cloudy motives for doing it, Trump deserves applause for this. It's with actions such as this that he also shows why he's a genuine maverick of a president, with who it's genuinely possible to expect deeply unexpected actions (for better or worse).
For all his talk of being progressive and cultivation of a youthful maverick image of his own, you would have never seen such a move from Obama and forget about it under the mealy mouthed Biden or a hypothetical Hillary administration. With Trump, rather uniquely and singularly, it happened.
Ulbricht made many mistakes, less so morally but definitely legally, of the kind with which he could have expected to cause punishment to rain down upon him, but the way in which his case was managed and the way in which he was sentenced truly were both disgusting in numerous ways.
They were classic examples of prosecutorial and political vengeance and give much truth to Trump's own description of the same as "The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”
If you in any way mistrust heavy-handed government prosecutions and persecutions, it's hard to disagree much, even if it's also not hard to imagine Trump being just as abusive in other contexts where prosecution of enemies would suit his interests and personal vengeance.
Now if we see him pardon Snowden too, i'd happily give a standing ovation.
Before someone here smugly chimes in about how Ulbricht also tried to hire out a murder by contract, bear in mind that this accusation was riddled with holes, suspicions of entrapment and in any case wasn't formally used for his sentencing, AND still wouldn't justify the kind of onerously grotesque sentence that was dumped on him. Pedophiles who committed child murders have been sentenced to less than Ulbricht was.
the fact that he will never pardon Snowden tells you all you need to know: this pardon was pandering and suits his own purposes. there are no higher principles here besides quid pro quo.
Absolute no brainer, he should be celebrated. Countless lives were saved via the harm reduction effect of a peer reviewed, reputation based platform. Of course if we had less draconian drug policy, it wouldn't be necessary but here we are.
> Countless lives were saved via the harm reduction effect of a peer reviewed, reputation based platform.
The basic immorality/pointlessness of the war on drugs aside, I don't know how you can assert this: it's not like there's a chain of provenance, and there's no particular guarantee that whatever grade of pure drugs was sold on Silk Road is the same purity that ended up in peoples' bodies.
My understanding of the Silk Road case is that, at its peak, it was servicing a significant portion of the international drug market. The dimensions of that market include adulteration; Silk Road almost certainly didn't change that.
The overwhelming majority of drug sales are for personal use. That doesn't mean that large sales weren't made, or that those weren't in fact a significant portion of the site's revenue.
>it's not like there's a chain of provenance, and there's no particular guarantee that whatever grade of pure drugs was sold on Silk Road is the same purity that ended up in peoples' bodies.
The fact that the majority of listings on the site were for personal use quantities suggests that the majority of sales were to end users rather than traffickers.
It's hard to dispute that this saved lives and I would speculate that it saved many lives.
>That doesn't mean that large sales weren't made, or that those weren't in fact a significant portion of the site's revenue.
Nobody made any claim that large sales weren't made, of course they were.
> It's hard to dispute that this saved lives and I would speculate that it saved many lives.
See below; the observation is that the people who were buying individual quantities of drugs from SR were not at serious risk of harm in the first place, relative to typical at-risk populations. Anecdotally, the people I know who bought drugs from SR during its heydey were very much test-everything-twice types.
By contrast, the large sales that SR facilitated almost certainly ended up in street drug markets, where harm reduction would have made a difference. But those people didn't benefit from SR's community standards, insofar as they existed: they got whatever adulterated product made it to them.
This is the basic error in saying "most sales were small": the big sales are what matter, socially speaking.
Anecdotally, Planet Money looked into this years ago and their reporting was that as far as they could tell, drugs on Silk Road weren't less safe than street drugs. Most of them were likely "fell off the truck" samples from the original manufacturers being sold by people with an in on the supply, but no otherwise-easy access to an out on the demand.
Their observation was that reputation mattered on SR a lot and a well-kept reputation was valuable at scale in a way that it isn't for being a street-corner pusher looking to stretch your buck by cutting your supply with adulterants. The smart play was to provide a high-quality product at a reasonable price (the latter being the easiest part since they were bypassing the obscene markup of official channels).
> Anecdotally, Planet Money looked into this years ago and their reporting was that as far as they could tell, drugs on Silk Road weren't less safe than street drugs.
Yeah, I'm not saying they're less safe. In fact, on average, I'm willing to bet that the drugs sold on Silk Road were much safer than their street equivalents.
My point was about large sales: Silk Road moved not just personal drug sales, but also industrial quantities of drugs that were almost certainly re-sold. Those latter sales are impossible to track and (by volume) almost certainly represent the majority of "doses" sold through SR. Given that, I doubt the OP's assertion that SR itself represents a particularly effective form of harm reduction.
Or as another framing: SR gave tech dorks a way to buy cheap, clean drugs. But those aren't the people who really need harm reduction techniques; the ones who do are still buying adulterated drugs, which are derived from the cheap, clean drugs on SR.
You shouldn't assume that all "street transfers" of drugs are peaceful or have a positive outcome for those involved. Harm reduction comes in many forms.
I'm pretty sure my comment says the exact opposite. I'm saying that SR was a massive operation that fueled street traffic, which in turn lacked any of the harm reduction virtues that SR is being assigned.
No no no, he is right. Its safe because if you receive a bad batch of drugs you can leave a negative review on the page of the drug cartel that has your name and address, no chance of that having any repercussions for you at all.
even if its not perfect for every situation it was a lot better then what existed.
negative reviews aren't the only review, absence of positive reviews is a signal, along with a lot of other positive reviews. later markets at least had reviews outside the markets too
if you are in the bulk and resale drug market you probably aren't getting package with your name on it to your home.
Yup. Drugs and the accompanying business disputes (there's a reason street dealers are armed or have armed people around) that would be normal in any other industry are sooo many people's (who would other wise not be violent criminals) entry point to violence. Letting parties remain at arms length yet transact successfully is such a huge step forward compared the prior status quo. Anything that gets buyers and sellers (either at the retail or distribution level) in illegal industries farther from each other is a win as far as I care.
As well as online drug marketplaces? Or would running one without legal trouble require a campaign-contribution booster pack?
What a beautiful political anschluss between people who just want to ban contraceptives and abortifacients, and people who just want to shoot up heroin. Not sure how you square that circle[1], but it's 2025, and here we are.
It's very telling about libertarian priorities when a cryptobro running an online drug marketplace who tried to hire a hitman gets amnesty, while hundreds of thousands of people who have been convicted of drug possession[1] do not. Likewise, somehow reproductive rights are just not a libertarian issue, either. It's not a party of freedom, it's a party of freedom for wealthy men.
[1] Biden gave a blanket pardon for people convicted of marijuana posession, but that's far less important for libertarians than Ulbricht.
I think most libertarians are against the war on drugs and would happily pardon or commute the sentences of non violent drug offenders, but the DPR probably takes priority for them because of the free trade issue compounded with the popularization of a non state-backed currency.
He has both drugs + crypto vs just drugs. *Ignoring the accusations of hit ordering, which I would imagine all librarians cannot excuse.
If they are actually trying to maximize any kind of public welfare utility function, surely commutations and pardons and decriminalization and harm reduction for hundreds of thousands of people mean a wee bit more than this entirely transactional act.
Until you can prove to me that all courts, judges, attorneys, and juries are above reproach and no innocent people are imprisoned there absolutely should be a method for someone to pardon. Sometimes a pardon will be issued for people you disagree with, but that’s part of it. Just like somebody will say something that pisses you off, but that’s the cost of free speech
you say lawful convictions, but yet have not provided any evidence of all convictions being lawful. we absolutely know that people have been wrongly imprisoned. but at this point i feel like i'm talking to a 3month old bot
So I'd prefer to give a good person the power to do good things by pardoning those worthy of liberty, and a bad person the power to make their corruption evident for the world to see.
Genuinely thought we’d never see the day. My feelings on Ulbricht are mixed and have evolved over the decade he’s been in prison.
However, the Silk Road allowed me to try LSD as an 18 year old in a safe(r) way than those that came before me.* It was those experiences that revealed I’d been depressed most of my life, and that it also didn’t have to be that way, by way of experiencing what that would feel like. I went on to seek new experiences, make new friends for the first time in my life, engage with professional mental health support, went to university, and started multiple businesses. It also introduced my staunchly-atheist self to the experience of spiritual/transcendental experiences, and how those can exist separately from, and don’t require, belief in deities or religion.
It can’t be said where I’d have wound up without those experiences, but my own understanding of myself feels pivotally tied to something I couldn’t have gone through without Ross’ actions. Still, I acknowledge it appears more likely that not he tried to have people killed, and regardless of the circumstances surrounding this, that is condemnable.
*Had it not been for an anonymous group at the time, The LSD Avengers, posting reviews using gas chromatography mass-spectrometry and reagent tests of suppliers on the site, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to take the risk of trying what I’d received. LSD is physiologically safe, not to say anything of any psychological risks, but knowing the dose allowed me to enter into the shallow end of the pool, so to speak. Common substitutes however cannot have the same said of them.
If I’d lived in a time and place that allowed for state-funded drug testing (something my own state has in fact recently abolished despite wildly successful trials), perhaps things would’ve not required a Ross Ulbricht to exist in my case, but I see this as a failure of the system and of drug prohibition as a whole.
Ross would’ve existed one way or another I believe, for better or worse, by another name, had he chosen another path. Now he gets the chance to try his life again. I felt the same way.
Tangentially related: I had the disconcerting experience of reading a Wired article about his arrest[1] while unknowingly sitting about six feet from the spot where he was apprehended. When I read that the FBI agents had stopped at Bello Coffee while preparing their stakeout, I thought, huh, interesting coincidence, I just had a coffee there.
Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
Having this tableau unexpectedly unfold right in front of my eyes was a fascinating experience, and it certainly made the article suddenly get a lot more immersive!
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2/
EDIT: to be clear, I was not present for the arrest. I was reading the magazine, some years after the arrest, but in the same place as the arrest. (I didn’t qualify the events with “I read that...” since I thought the narrative ellipsis would be obvious from context; evidently not.)
Sorry, it went over my head a bit, you read about his arrest while he was being arrested?
He was being arrested in the article, not IRL. When I say “Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me” I mean that I read
> He went... past the periodicals and reference desk, beyond the romance novels, and settled in at a circular table near science fiction, on the second floor... in a corner, with a view out the window and his back toward the wall.
and realized that I was in the Glen Park public library, at a circular table near science fiction on the second floor, in a corner with my back to the window, and facing directly towards where the article had just said he had sat.
I see so you accidentally retraced his footsteps from years prior and then realized it as you were reading about it.
I had the same confusion initially, interestingly chat GPT gets it:
So while wolfgang42 wasn't there when Ulbricht was actually arrested, their realization created a vivid mental image of the event unfolding in that space, which made the story feel more immersive.
In short: they were reading about an old event, but it happened to occur in the same spot they were sitting at that moment. Hope that clears it up!
Okay, that's actually pretty wild. I totally misunderstood too, but the response from the "AI" does indeed "clear it up" for me. A bit surprised actually, but then again, I suppose I shouldn't be, since language is what those "large language models" are all about after all... :)
Indeed. But their is something surprising here, however. people like chomsky would present examples like this for decades as untracktable by any algorithm, and as a proof that language is a uniquely human thing. they went as far as to claim that humans have a special language organ, somewhere in their brain perhaps. turns out, a formula exists, it is just very very large.
Just as an additional datapoint, since I’m confused by fellow commenters’ confusion—I thought your narrative was clear, colorful, and entertaining, and I hope you’ll keep things so literary and engaging in your future contributions too :)
As with so many matters of crime, punishment, and high dudgeon, the physical reality of the situation always feels so banal. Dread Pirate Roberts’ lawless dark kingdom, where he commissions trans-national assassinations… looks a lot like a nerdy dude’s laptop on a municipal library table.
> When the FBI agents stopped to have a drink I thought
You mean "when I read the part where the FBI agents stopped to have a drink I thought"?
This part makes your comment super confusing. Where you there then or later?
I believe they are suggesting an experience of imaginatively visualising the events of the arrest linearly as they were narrated in their read-through of the article, serendipitously aided by being physically present at the same location, and are referencing the article's narration partially in the present tense to similarly immerse us in medias res as we follow their remark.
Alternatively, they are themselves Ross Ulbricht, describing an out-of-body fever dream or post-traumatic flashback. This seems ... somewhat less likely.
I thought that starting my story in media res would make for a better dramatic effect, but it seems I overestimated my audience and went a little too heavy on the narrative ellipsis.
Boo! Don't blame the audience!
> Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
Alternately:
> Ulbricht had walked into the public library
gives the game away.
If you still want to play around a bit:
> I could see where Ulbricht walked into the public library. The table he sat at. I looked up and saw where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
That way you are leaving some ambiguity, but are not directly lying with the tenses.
I think you could have told it as experiencing the events without making your post confusing, but you'd have to redo your first paragraph. Your first paragraph is external, meta, and places his arrest in your past, which throws off the effect when that suddenly changes in the next sentence. It's not the audience's fault that that is hard to parse.
I enjoyed it, personally.
I understood exactly what you meant and that is an awesome experience
Maybe the single most confusing comment ever
This is why I love SF. It’s so small.
You can walk anywhere, and there’s a good chance something big happened nearby.
I assume you mean "I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in" figuratively?
I mean, it’s possible that the library had rearranged their chairs in the intervening years and that exact one was now at a different table, but it was certainly a chair in the same location.
this is Neurath's library¹.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurath%27s_boat
You did a Boondock Saints!
THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT
for the record, I appreciated your creative prose and enjoyed the trippy narrative
Before I got to the edit I was convinced you were in The Neverending Story
Give it up for Glen Park.
Wait, you were reading about his arrest while he was being arrested? That article was written after his conviction?
He first read the article while sitting where Ulbricht was when Ulbricht was arrested.
Plot twist: wolfgang42 is Ulbricht
Clearly time travel. He had brought the article back in time so he could read it as it happened.
By the way, I thought the post was written well. It did take a little thinking but it was an interesting take.
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The responses to this comment show that people's ability to read and comprehend text has decreased dramatically in the last few years. Frightening...
If every reply is pointing out how confusing it is, maybe the original comment is just poorly written.
You’re not going to hear from the people who thought it made perfect sense, so the replies are a pretty biased sample. (This is also true of the parent complaint about reading comprehension, tbh.) But I see three confused replies and three corrections (not counting my own), so it doesn’t seem to be every reply.
I think the problem is that I took an artistic style in an attempt to paint a picture for the reader, but I did it in a long thread on a technical forum where people are probably mostly skimming rather than engaging in literary criticism, so I should maybe have anticipated this would be a problem.
I thought it was fine, I wasn't confused for a moment. The only real problem here is that HN attracts a certain brand of nerds who are inclined to think it's hilarious when Maurice Moss says "Yes, it's one of those", many of whom are likely frothing right now because I just committed a comma splice in the previous sentence.
I was afraid of this too but it turned out to be presbyopia
Or HN just has a lot more international readers now and English isn't their first language.
An engineering forum may not be the place for creative prose, too.
> The responses to this comment show that people's ability to read and comprehend text has decreased dramatically in the last few years
Or they show that GP wrote an ambiguous piece of text.
Aaron695's comment are always fun to read. For some reason he's kinda 86'ed here.
I (and others) have vouched a few of his comments back to life, he does write a good comment.
I don't know the original reasons for his apparent perma-dead'ing (users can option to "show dead" and see these comments) but I suspect it's due to going fully Australian wih swear words and invectives when he gets a bit passionate about something .. or even just adding colour for a lark, as we do.
I think his original sentence was absolutely deserved—even though the charge of hiring a contract killer to assassinate his business competition may have been dropped, I think it's clear he did many things in the same vein. Even if you support his original pursuit of a free and open online marketplace, I think most people would agree he took it a bridge too far in the end.
That said, I do think he absolutely deserved to be released, not because he didn't deserve to be locked up in the first place, but because he's clearly been rehabilitated and has done great work during his time in prison. All that considered, ten years seems like a not unreasonable prison sentence for what he did. I hope he'll continue to do good when he's released.
His original sentence was life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
So you can’t agree with the original sentence and then say he “absolutely deserved to be released.”
Without the chance of parole, a pardon from the president is one of the few ways he could get out of jail.
Commuting is the typical response for “he was totally guilty but sentenced too long”.
Good point, you are absolutely correct. Then I suppose life “with the possibility of parole” would have been a more appropriate sentence, though I don’t know if that’s typically given. In any case, I feel prisons ought to release prisoners if they demonstrate exceptional rehabilitation and remorse, as Ross has, though of course that’s a difficult line to draw in practice.
As an aside, in Canada, a sentence of life without parole is considered unlawful because it conflicts with Section 12 of the Charter guarantees that individuals have the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Courts have ruled that life without the possibility of parole deprives offenders of any hope of rehabilitation or reintegration into society, which could amount to cruel and unusual treatment.
A sentence must balance the gravity of the offense with the circumstances of the offender, while still allowing for hope and redemption. A life sentence without parole forecloses this balance.
It's always struck me as odd that the United States - a nation that is packed with far more Christians than Canada - doesn't shape its system of incarceration to be more inline with Christian values and the teachings of Jesus.
Canada's explicit rejection of life sentences without parole (LWOP) through decisions like R v Bissonnette more closely aligns with Jesus's teachings about redemption and mercy. In Canada, even those convicted of the most serious crimes retain the possibility of parole - not a guarantee of release, but a recognition of the potential for rehabilitation that echoes Jesus's teachings about transformation and second chances.
This philosophical difference manifests in several ways:
- In Canada, the emphasis on rehabilitation over retribution is reflected in the term "correctional services" rather than "penitentiary system"
- Canadian prisons generally offer more rehabilitative programs and education opportunities
- The Canadian system places greater emphasis on Indigenous healing lodges and restorative justice practices that align with Jesus's focus on healing broken relationships
- Canadian courts have explicitly recognized that denying hope of release violates human dignity, which parallels Jesus's teachings about the inherent worth of every person
The contrast becomes particularly stark when considering multiple murders. While many US jurisdictions impose multiple life sentences to be served consecutively (effectively ensuring death in prison), the Canadian Supreme Court has ruled this practice unconstitutional, maintaining that even the worst offenders should retain the possibility - though not guarantee - of earning redemption through genuine rehabilitation.
This doesn't mean Canada is soft on crime - serious offenders still serve lengthy sentences, and parole is never guaranteed. But the maintenance of hope for eventual redemption, even in the worst cases, better reflects Jesus's teachings about grace, transformation, and the limitless possibility of spiritual renewal.
The irony is particularly pointed given that the US has a much higher proportion of self-identified Christians than Canada, yet has adopted a more retributive approach that seems less aligned with Jesus's teachings about mercy and redemption.
But hey, you just have to wait for the right president to be elected and you might get your chance. So I guess that's something.
Ross Ulbricht was not sentenced for murder-for-hire charges.
Those allegations were used to deny him bail and influenced public perception, they were not part of his formal conviction or sentencing.
He was convicted on non-violent charges related to operating the Silk Road website, including drug distribution, computer hacking, and money laundering.
Does this change your opinion of sentencing being well-deserved?
This opinion [1] from the judge in his case indicates that the murder-for-hire evidence was admitted during his trial. The document outlines the evidence for all 6 murder for hire allegations and explains why, although not charged, the evidence is relevant to his case.
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1391...
This opinion (after appeal) also details how they taken into consideration with sentencing. See pages 130-131
https://pbwt2.gjassets.com/content/uploads/2017/05/15-1815_o...
He was found during sentencing to be guilty of hiring a hit on a competitor using a preponderance of evidence (lower then presumption of innocence). While this is a lower standard than a conviction, it is still a higher standard than most apply in public discourse.
That isn't fair, the point of the trial is to test whether something is to be acted on. To act on something that wasn't directly part of the trial is a bit off. I'm sure the judge is acting in the clear legally, but if someone is going to be sentenced for attempted murder then that should be after a trial that formally accuses them of the crime.
He wasn't sentenced for attempted murder, the sentence Ulbricht received was within the range provided by statute for the crimes he was convicted of. Judges have discretion in sentencing and they are allowed to consider the character of the defendant. The fact that Ulbricht attempted to murder people was demonstrated to the judges satisfaction during the trial and influenced her to sentence at the higher end of the range allowed for the crimes he was duly convicted.
The range allowed for those sentences is way too wide. Life without parole is nowhere near reasonable for hacking, money laundering, and drugs. Being within the sentencing range is meaningless when the range encompasses any possible sentence.
This cuts both ways as judges often adjust their sentencing downward based on mitigating evidence. For both aggravating and mitigating circumstances evidence does need to be submitted, and there are standards of proof to be applied. It's just that the procedural rules can be different and, depending on the context and jurisdiction, sufficiency can be decided by the judge alone. In some jurisdictions, for example, aggravating evidence may need to be put to the jury, while mitigating evidence need not be.
The U.S. is rather unique in providing a right to jury trials for most--in practice almost all, including misdemeanor--criminal cases. And this is a major factor for why sentencing is so harsh and prosecutions so slow in the U.S. In myriad ways the cost of criminal trials has induced the system to arrive at its current state favoring plea deals, with overlapping crimes and severe maximum penalties as cudgels. Be careful about what kind of "protections" you want to impose.
Sentencing is complicated in the US. Generally speaking, they have a huge range and a standard for computing where one falls in that range, but everything within that range is open to judge's discretion. Life without parole was within that range for the crimes that Ulbricht was convicted of.
This standard is an enormous document, https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines which lays out the rules for adjustments. Evidence is admissible (by both sides!) for sentencing, with a lower standard of evidence and burden of proof, to either raise or lower the sentence within the very wide numbers of what the conviction was for. So the Judge in this case found that the lower burden of proof was met for additional violent crimes being committed (with Ulbricht's legal team having an opportunity to rebut), and that impacts the sentencing calculations.
Not a lawyer, but I have listened to US lawyers on podcasts.
Other acts of those charged are routinely brought up in trials. Fir example, criminals being charged with crime A that already committed similar crimes in the past are used to show that the likelihood of crime A being committed this time is higher.
> a higher standard than most apply in public discourse
Is it? Preponderance of the evidence is basically “more likely than not”
That's one way of phrasing it, and unfortunately some jurisdictions have adopted that phrase, but it is not correct.
A preponderance of the evidence is the greater weight of the evidence after all evidence is considered. Heuristics along the lines of "yeah that fits my priors"—which is what is actually meant by "more likely than not"—are explicitly disallowed.
If Joe Smith in Smalltown, Ohio was hit by a blue bus, and hammock owns 51 of the 100 blue busses in Smalltown whereas torstenvl owns 49 of the 100 blue busses, that is insufficient evidence by itself to prevail by a preponderance standard against hammock in a civil suit.
Yea, and most public discourse is at the level of "I saw a post online about it once". Most people aren't doing deep research before their opinions about things that aren't actually that relevant to their day to day lives. 95% of the world, at best, still has no idea who Ross Ulbricht is even today.
It does not change my opinion that the sentence was well deserved in the eyes of the law. Those are all things, that independently, can lead to serious jail time. The scale of his operation was also substantial.
There are murderers who hardly do more than a few years in prison. He was jailed for much longer than what violent criminals get.
yeah it's a tragedy - those violent criminals should have received more time
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I don't see how that should change anyone's opinion on whether the sentence was deserved. Whether it was legally/procedurally correct, sure. Whether he didn't get the day in court he should have had, sure. But given that no-one seems to seriously dispute that he did try to pay to have the guy killed, what he deserves is a long prison sentence, and whether that's imposed by a court doing things properly, a court doing things improperly, or a vigilante kidnapper isn't really here or there on that point.
(The rule of law is important, and we may let off people who deserve harsh sentences for the sake of preserving it, but it doesn't mean they deserve those sentences any less)
> But given that no-one seems to seriously dispute that he did try to pay to have the guy killed
If there was enough evidence to demonstrate that he attempted to murder someone, why wasn't he charged and convicted of it?
Also, 2 of the DEA agents involved in his investigation were convicted of fraud in relation to the case.
I do believe he probably did attempt to have someone killed, but I'm far from certain of it, and think it should have no bearing on the case if there's not enough evidence to convict him.
I don't think he did. The guy who he allegedly ordered a hit on doesn't believe it and argued for Ross's release.
You say the rule of law is important, but also we should impose extra-legal long sentences even if the rule of law doesn't allow us to? How do you reconcile this perspective?
I say people sometimes deserve sentences longer than that which the law imposes on them. I didn't say anything about what we should do in that case.
> The rule of law is important,
The rule of law says innocent until proven guilty.
The reason they didn't go after him for murder for hire allegations isn't because they felt bad for him or that they didn't want to waste tax payer's money.
The reason they didn't go after him for 'murder for hire' was that they knew there was no merit in it.
This is self evident.
They did go after him for "murder for hire"; the murders were part of his conspiracy predicates, and evidence for them was introduced. This stuff about him not being taken all the way through a case charged on murder-for-hire, after receiving a life sentence in a case where those murders were part of the case, is just message board jazz hands.
>case where those murders were part of the case, is just message board jazz hands.
you're trying to look like you don't understand or aren't aware that jury didn't convict him of murder-for-hire.
He chose a trial by jury, not by a judge. Nevertheless the judge herself decided that he is guilty of the murder-for-hire, and additionally the judge used significantly lower standard than required for conviction.
That's not what happened at all. You can just read the filings on PACER; I'm sure they're all free on Courtlistener by now.
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Feel free to use the search bar to see what's been written (including by me) in the zillion discussions we've had on this case in the past. Again: primary source documentation of what happened in that trial is right there for you to read; you're just a Google search away from it.
Did you read my comment? I said:
> even though the charge of hiring a contract killer to assassinate his business competition may have been dropped
Just because the charge was dropped doesn't mean he's innocent of it. In fact, reading the chat logs makes his guilt pretty clear. Of course, because the whole operation was a scam, there's little he could have been convicted of. Yet just because the murder was never carried out doesn't mean he didn't intend to have someone assassinated. In my book, paying someone money to kill another person is definitely grounds for imprisonment.
The case for this was dropped because he was sentenced for it in the other case.
So you think people should be sentenced based on charges that were not proven in court?
That happens all the time, when people confess to a charge ahead of time, instead of proceeding to a trial. Remember that the purpose of the trial is to find out whether they are guilty when there is a factual dispute about that question. Here, I suppose the existence of a factual dispute is itself disputed: does that need to go to a jury, or is it enough that the trial judge and the appeal court looked at the record and decided there wasn't a dispute?
Confessing is the same as being convicted though.
No. I'm talking more from an ethical standpoint. I think someone who hires contract killers deserves to go to prison. I also think people shouldn't be convicted for charges that were not proven in court. As I said before, in Ross' case, the charge was dropped.
So you should apologize for not paying attention to the original comment before stamping in to 'correct' it. A little manners goes a long way.
> Just because the charge was dropped doesn't mean he's innocent of it
That’s exactly what it means under the presumption of innocence.
Advocating for the continued imprisonment of someone for something they are legally considered innocent of, is quite literally vigilantism.
> Just because the charge was dropped doesn't mean he's innocent of it.
If you had a trial and they can't prove that, then yes it means you are innocent of this charge in the eyes of the law
Ah that's not strictly true. I believe Scotland is the only place in the world I am aware of where there is Innocent, unproven, and Guilty verdicts. I believe in reality a not guilty verdict is, we didn't have the evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt this person committed the crime. Finding someone not guilty is a legal term. Considering whether someone is innocent or not is more of a moral/factual term.
Does anyone know if Ross had a jury trial and if not, why not?
He had a jury trial.
The other user directly addressed that in his comment.
Honestly any time I read the procedural history of this stuff I get nerd sniped by the bizarre details and I lose track of the big picture. I feel like the whole thing could be three competing Dateline NBC style six-part crime specials and I still wouldn't get tired of it.
Ross heard that one of his Silk Roads moderators was arrested, and so he hired someone to kill the mod? The assassin sent a confirmation photo of his mod, asphyxiated and covered in Campbell's Chicken and Stars Soup?? The supposed assassin was actually a corrupt DEA agent who later served federal prison time for crimes so embarrassing that they were never fully disclosed?!?!
There is some kind of thorny moral question I cannot quite wrap my brain around.
Ross did not successfully have anyone killed, but it seems that he must have thought he was successful?
Ross (it is alleged, and chat logs seem to show) ordered someone's death and paid for it and got explicit confirmation that they were dead. [actually several someones.] Did he feel like a murderer at this point? What a fascinating, real life Raskolnikov style figure.
Later, perhaps much later, he gets strong evidence that the murder was fake. Nothing has changed in the outside world after he learns this -- the victim is no more alive before or after he learns this. Does this change his identity? Is he more or less of a murderer than before?
Do the people who kill with modified Xbox controllers from a warehouse in Las Vegas do the same kind of killing that Ross thought he did?
And then there is some kind of moral thought experiment happening at a Silicon Valley Rationalist, Effective Altruism kind of scale that I can't quite wrap my head around. Do people matter as much in person as if they're just blips on a screen you'll never meet? If Ross could have sent 1 BTC to prevent fatal malaria in a dozen young kids, thousands of miles away, but he didn't, should he feel responsible in some way for their death? Is he about equally responsible for them as for the online people he is pretty sure he ordered killed from afar, but never met?
It's just a lot. The whole story is supernaturally intense; it's hard to believe it was real. It will make for great TV.
See, e.g.
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/murdered-silk-road-employee-... for the faux forum moderator killing
- https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/silk-road-drug-vendor-w... for the other faux five killings (another scam on Ross - he thought he was having extortionists killed? he kept getting confirmations?)
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What has always sat odd with me regarding this, is we don't truly know the extent of the fbi's corruption in this. They stole, so it's not hard to imagine they planted evidence too.
I assume that the feds corruption is as bad as it is in every other high profile case case involving fed informants and politically charged topics. Randy Weaver, all the muslims they radicalized and then goaded into doing terrorist things post 9/11, the Michigan Fednapping. It seems like every time these people have a chance to entrap someone they do, but they do it in a "haha, jokes on you we run the system so while this probably would be entrapment if some beat cops did it the court won't find it that way" sort of way. They just can't touch anything without getting it dirty this way and the fact that that is a 30yr pattern at this point depending on how you count speaks volumes IMO. While I'm sure they can solve an interstate murder or interstate fraud or whatever just fine I just don't trust them to handle these sorts of cases.
It seems like all of these people they wind up charging probably are questionable people who wanted to do the thing and probably did some other lesser things but they probably would have given up on the big thing if there wasn't a federal agency running around doing all the "the informant says the guy is lamenting not having explosives, quick someone get him some explosives" things in the background.
It took a bit of tracking down, but I finally found an apparently egregious example of this sort of thing I had vaguely remembered: Iraqi citizen and legal US resident Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab was sentenced last February to 14 years in prison for his role in an alleged plot to murder George W. Bush, and his involvement in smuggling terrorists into the United States. [1] But his sentencing (after his guilty plea) contains an interesting caveat: lifetime supervised release.
Why is a terrorist and would-be assassin of a former President getting lifetime supervised release? None of the media coverage of the case, going back years, makes that clear. However, a footnote in the original criminal complaint against[2] him offers a likely explanation:
"In or around the end of March 2022, United States immigration officials conducted an asylum interview with SHIHAB. After the interview was conducted United States immigration officials advised the FBI that SHIHAB may have information regarding an ISIS member that was recently smuggled into the United States."
With a little reading between the lines of the criminal complaint, a very different story emerges: Shihab never dealt with any terrorists. He was a paid middleman between two government informants or agents pretending to be terrorists. He took their money, played along, and ratted them out to INS during an asylum interview. After that, once they realized the jig was up, the FBI arrested and charged him at its earliest opportunity - for the plot they had created and paid him to participate in, and which he in turn had informed the government about.
1. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/columbus-man-sentenced-...
2. https://truthout.org/app/uploads/2022/06/Shihab-complaint.pd...
As part of the FBI conviction they were accused of tampering user logs and taking over accounts. So… literally none of it can be used as evidence imo.
What evidence would you have even needed to plant? He ran the largest internet drug market and openly tried to assassinate a competitor.
Many people, including myself, do not believe that he really did any of the activity related to the assassination attempts. Demonstrably corrupt law enforcement agents had the opportunity to do it all themselves and it would be typical behaviour for those agencies. He is politically passionate about non-violence and it would go against everything he stood for. I cannot believe he would do it. What do you mean "openly"?
Agreed. He willingly engaged with the alleged hitman (which ended up being the FBI contact). He didn't need to do anything or not have the thought to murder others cross his mind.
Allegedly. The 2 rules of his Fight Club were no underage sex stuff and no physical harm. That hitman claim was not part of his charges or sentencing. The heavy sentencing was to like "send a message" the judge said.
They weren't part of his sentencing because a different court entirely was pursuing the hit for hire attempt charge, but because another court in NY got the book thrown at him for running the site, they decided to drop it because it didn't seem necessary anymore.
In hindsight, the prosecution probably wished they didn't do that, since they are said to have had overwhelming evidence and proof, and there is even a Wired article about chat logs pertaining to DPR seeking services, but those are the breaks! If you don't do your due diligence, criminals can be let off on a technicality too!
I haven't looked into the case(s) for years, but prosecutors don't often just drop charges because other charges were found guilty. People get charged even after life sentences have been handed down.
> I haven't looked into the case(s) for years, but prosecutors don't often just drop charges because other charges were found guilty.
They absolutely do that all the freaking time. Especially when other convictions already result in a long sentence.
Prosecutors have limited bandwidth, and just wasting time adding one more life imprisonment on top of a life imprisonment is not helpful.
Perhaps. I can't think of why they ultimately decided not to move forward with it, but here we are.
They dropped the murder for hire charges because discovery would have.. discovered the FBI doing very very bad things.
Prosecutors do not work for the FBI, and the FBI has no say in who gets prosecuted nor for which charges.
I doubt that's the reason. It could simply be bandwidth reasons as another commenter in the thread implied.
He never admitted to the attempted murder. So it's not a leap to assume that might of been tainted
But the feds would never attempt shading means of solving a problem that they're being heavily pressured to solve in a timely manner! Don't be a hecking conspiracy theorist.
Tainted how?
> openly tried to assassinate a competitor.
Unmitigated nonsense. The evidence that he was involved in this is somewhere between unreliable and nonexistent, and he (and the supposed victim) have disputed it since day one. WTF do you mean "openly"?
>we don't truly know the extent of the fbi's corruption in this
the corruption what we do know about already tainted the case to the point that it should have been thrown out.
I don't care about Ulbricht, and whether he is guilty of all or some of the charges or innocent. What bothers me in this case is that the government can get away and in particular can get its way in court even with such severe criminal behavior by the government.
Rare case when i agree with Trump:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7e0jve875o
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening."
Trump even personally called Ulbricht mother. I start to wonder whether i have been all that time in blind denial about Trump.
Ross Ulbricht was not a good person. Full stop.
He organized and operated a global criminal drug ring and conspired to have people killed. The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar is that DPR was running his drug business in the 2010s instead of the 1980s.
> The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar is that DPR was running his drug business in the 2010s instead of the 1980s.
Asserting moral equivalence between someone who ordered dozens of innocent women and children not just killed but dismembered - solely as a lesson for others. Orders which were actually carried out multiple times and DPR who was never charged, tried or convicted of conspiring with a supposed online hitman to kill a competitor (who both were actually FBI informants - clearly making it entrapment). Yeah, that's quite a reach.
Sure, DPR was no saint but why push for the absolute maximally extreme interpretation? Even asserting he "organized and operated a global criminal drug ring" is a stretch. My understanding is he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers. I'm not aware that Ross ever bought or sold drugs as a business or hired others to do so. There is more than a little nuance between 1) buying drugs from distributors, delivering drugs to buyers and collecting the money, and 2) running online forums and messaging for people who do those things. At most, #2 is being an accessory to #1.
> My understanding is he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers. I'm not aware that Ross ever bought or sold drugs as a business or hired others to do so.
Ah yes, he accumulated over $5 billion in Bitcoins by entirely legal means. He didn't facilitate the wholesale distribution of illegal (and dangerous) drugs at all. He never contributed to the massive distribution of Fentanyle-laced dopes to the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. He was just the online guy!
You've mischaracterized what I said.
> he accumulated over $5 billion in Bitcoins by entirely legal means.
I never claimed he didn't break the law. I said the opposite, that he's guilty of being an accessory to drug dealing.
> He didn't facilitate the wholesale distribution of illegal (and dangerous) drugs at all.
I said "he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers."
> He was just the online guy!
I said he's "no saint" and in an earlier post in this thread I also said he deserved a jail sentence and that "ten years was enough" for what he was charged with and convicted of as a first-time offender.
I challenged your assertion of "no difference" between DPR and Pablo Escobar as extreme and your response is to mischaracterize my position as DPR committing no crime instead of responding to my actual position that he's a criminal who is guilty and deserved ten years in jail but not two life sentences plus 40 years without parole. There is a middle ground between "completely innocent of anything" and "no different than Pablo Escobar." I don't understand why you can't acknowledge such a middle ground might exist - and that it is my position.
Well in any case, Ross Ulbricht got what he deserved. Now he'll spend the rest of his life wearing an ankle bracelet.
You appear to be confused about the difference between a pardon and parole (and even parole doesn't entail monitoring "for life").
Also, your response didn't respond to what I said (which was about previously only responding to a straw man I didn't say). I like to think we strive in good faith for a little higher level of discourse here on HN. Try to do better.
Are you sure this is the right forum for you?
Regardless of Ross Ulbricht's crimes, the pro's and con's of the pardon deserve considered discussion.
Are you bringing thoughtful and interesting considerations to this thread?
For example; will he actually wear an ankle bracelet for the rest of his life under the terms of a full and unconditional pardon?
a metaphorical bracelet, I guess. The orange-faced man pardoned the guys in the orange jumpsuits. Seems fitting haha
I think you're in the wrong thread
The other poster was specifically replying to what you were claiming. How can they be in the wrong thread?
Are you for real using today’s value of the Silk Road bitcoins to say he amassed $5 billion dollars.
Sorry, that’s just dishonest. Those coins were worth less than 30 million at the time of his arrest.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/10/25/fbi-sa...
Tbh you probably don't know what your talking about. Silk road and fentanyl in drugs didn't over lap. Fent really showed up a couple years after the market was shut down.
I don't think anyone in here is making the case that Ulbricht is a "good person", but comparing Escobar to Ulbricht is next-level delusional.
One of these people attempted to place hits on 3-4 individuals, the other one planted a bomb on a passenger plane that resulted in the deaths of over a hundred people.
Get some perspective and/or learn your history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_203
> I don't think anyone in here is making the case that Ulbricht is a "good person",
I am.
He built a tool that allowed people to circumvent a wantonly unjust legal framework by an aging, decreasingly relevant state.
We need more of that.
DPR dabbled with the idea of violence.
Pablo Escobar revelled in it.
PE put bombed newspapers and killed hundreds, if not thousands of people unrelated to any criminal enterprise or to arresting him. I mean, actual innocent, minding their own business civilians. Over 4000 murders have been directly attributed to the actions and orders of Escobar. Estimates to the actual count range closer to 8000.
DPR went over to the dark side a bit in that entrapment racket, or at least it seems so.
Thinking that someone needs to be murdered isn’t necessarily a character flaw, imho.
It depends on what DPR was led to believe about this fictional person. It is reasonable to imagine that the FBI took every possible measure to make their fake victim seem as murder worthy as possible. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that the “victim” may have been painted as a purveyor of child trafficking, CSAM, or other things repugnant. My point is we don’t know. And if we don’t know, we should reserve judgment.
>DPR went over to the dark side a bit in that entrapment racket
It has to start somewhere
Was he ever convicted on conspiracy to murder?
Because in my opinion the ethics of operating a drug ring is not as black as white as you state.
The existence of drug rings is an inevitable outcome from the war on drugs and I would argue the blame lands on the politicians who maintain the status quo that incentivises the creation of the black market for drugs.
wait what? Escobar was responsible for conservatively 4,000 people killed, some at his own hand
DPR conspired but didn't actually directly kill anyone
Not saying DPR was a good person, but a little perspective is in order
He did order (and pay for) at least one murder. It just happens that both the victim and the would-be hit man were both informants so they staged the murder. Ross’ argument is that he knew it was fake, but that makes no sense in context.
It was right that they dropped the charge because it was quite obviously entrapment. But none of it reflects well on Ross Ulbricht’s character.
> The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar
The only difference?
A 10 year prison sentence was apt. He did knowingly break the law (the marketplace defense doesn't really apply, since admins had to create the categories that were obviously illegal). A life sentence was ridiculous, and added punishment for unconvicted crimes, however likely, is a gross violation of constitutional protections.
I'm more interested in the subtext of the pardon.
Why this person specifically? And why at this time? Perhaps the discussion shouldn't be about the actual subject of the pardon, and perhaps more about the motives of the pardoner...
Bitcoin
Trump came to the Libertarian Party convention and specifically promised to free Ross if he got their support. He actually promised a commutation; I wonder why he upgraded to pardon. He also promised a libertarian in his cabinet; oh well.
The LP chairwoman has made very interesting political moves this election.
Yeah, I'm pleased that Ross is out after serving over 10 years, but I wish it had been a commutation. He was guilty. The problem is the judge wildly over sentencing. Ten years served is about right for what he was convicted of.
These two thoughts are incompatible though, aren't they? Politics and shenanigans around the case aside, the original sentence should have taken into account the possibility of rehabilitation. But he got life without parole.
That said, it was entrapment and everyone involved should be deeply ashamed and prosecuted. At least those two agents did get some wire fraud charges [0], but the entrapment angle got explored because the charges were dropped.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-federal-agents-charged...
Ross Ulbricht was widely regarded by friends and family as a fundamentally decent and idealistic person—if admittedly naïve about the implications of his actions. Those who knew him personally describe him as thoughtful, intelligent, and motivated by a vision of a freer and more equitable society. His philosophical motivations were rooted in libertarian ideals, particularly the belief that consenting adults should have the right to make decisions about their own lives, including the substances they consume.
I just learned that he was an Eagle Scout.
Not exactly the résumé of someone getting locked up and the key thrown away.
This argument is problematic because it implies that a person from a different background who committed the same crimes (e.g., a poor, black, uneducated person without any fancy philosophical ideals) /should/ be locked up and the key thrown away. It doesn’t work that way. The law applies the same to all, and that’s the way I like it.
Seriously, that was pretty blatant "he was one of the good guys like me and so the law shouldn't really punish him, not like one of those other people with different value that should be punished to the full extent."
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> has done great work during his time in prison
What work?
He set up an excellent in prison market
He's known to locate certain things from time to time.
According to Reuters he was found guilty of "charges including distributing drugs through the Internet and conspiring to commit computer hacking and money laundering." In addition to running an illegal market bazaar for 4 years.
What a travesty. Maybe life was too long a sentence but this was far too short.
10 years is plenty. No point in keeping non-violent offenders behind bars for absurd amounts of time.
- sackler family engineered opioid crisis and went unscathed - hacking is a bogus charge applied to everything touching PCs - money laundering is another victimless crime that very few actual money launderers gets charged with, for some reason
Yeah, the Sacklers should be in jail too.
And you didn't bother to address that he ran a market for illegal goods and services, for some reason.
>Sacklers should be in jail too.
but they didn't, so we can forget about concept of justice.
So that means Sackler should be charged, not that Ross should get off lol.
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Case law obsessively cites other case law. So yeah, that's how it works. His trial was a farce and was meant to send a message to others to not, um, do drugs online or something.
Drug Cartels were just categorized as terrorist organizations so I'm not sure the current admin is ok with drugs
"But he was a libertarian!" Shrugs
learn to read. he clearly was over sentenced.
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People have served more time for selling less drugs and attempting to murder fewer people than Ross Ulbricht did.
Just because he was decent with computers does not mean he should be busted out of jail.
The attempted murder charge was dropped.
Under our system that means he should be considered innocent of it.
This conversation is messy mostly because people are refusing to do that, which is akin to vigilantism.
A good faith discussion should only involve the charge he was convicted of and pardoned for, which is the narcotics charge.
The prosecution dropped the charges. That does not make anyone innocent.
The presumption of innocence is a legal principle that every person accused of any crime is considered innocent until proven guilty.
Under the presumption of innocence, the legal burden of proof is thus on the prosecution, which must present compelling evidence to the trier of fact (a judge or a jury). If the prosecution does not prove the charges true, then the person is acquitted of the charges.
> The presumption of innocence is a legal principle that every person accused of any crime is considered innocent until proven guilty.
That should be "considered innocent by the legal system". People are still free to come to their own conclusions--and act on them--even without a jury rendering a verdict.
Rather famously, for example, OJ Simpson was acquitted by a jury of murdering his wife. But most people these days would agree with the statement that he murdered his wife.
It is also the case that prosecutors need to decide both the probability of conviction, the effort needed to do so and whether likely conviction on other serious charges are sufficient for the people to feel that justice has been done.
And if the prosecution doesn't like the probability of conviction, they doubt their ability to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, guilt.
There can be whatever reason he wasn't convicted, it doesn't change the fact that he wasn't and presumed innocence is the legal default.
My understanding is they never brought the charges in the first place. The supposed online hitman and the victim were both FBI informants. They never filed any charges because it was clearly entrapment and no one was ever in any danger.
The prosecutors later used that evidence as support for their sentencing request after Ross was convicted of only non-violent offenses, which has a much lower standard of evidence. The allegations of murder-for-hire were never tested at trial. They may have evaporated under cross-examination by a competent defense. Our system of justice holds that Ross is innocent of those allegations unless convicted at trial.
For purposes of a criminal conviction and locking them away (or the death penalty), sure. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
For purposes of random citizens saying "he tried to commit murder", no. We're absolutely not bound by that same standard of proof.
It does. Innocent until proven guilty.
He should be considered innocent by the courts - and he was (innocent of the murder for hire charges, I mean). In the public we aren't obligated to follow the same standards of evidence as the courts. I think he almost certainly did pay to have those people killed, and that can shape my opinion of him.
That's perfectly reasonable - but I don't think it should really have a bearing on whether he should be pardoned. That is not exactly a matter of the courts (by definition), but I think as an official public act it should be subject to the presumption of innocence as well.
> Under our system that means he should be considered innocent of it.
Nope. This doesn't mean anything, and the charges can be picked up again.
Oh wait, no. He was pardoned completely.
What makes you think I support those people being locked up either? Also, afaik Ulbricht didn't sell drugs himself, he simply provided an unmoderated marketplace.
Because attempted murder is bad. I didn't think that would be contentious.
If the law is unethical then you may be pushed to do "bad" things. For example if you are a Jew living with family in a Nazi Germany and someone know your secret and he feels he need to disclose it to the authorities then you may consider... murdering him. Would you really be a bad guy?
The hypothetical is simply a bob and weave. Hiring a contract killer to execute a business rival is clear and unequivocal — no distractions, no gymnastics. Saying otherwise is frankly shameful.
People also served no time for selling more drugs and actually murdering more people.
> I think it's clear he did many things in the same vein
It is clear as mud. We now know:
* At least four other people had access to the DPR account, by design.
* One of those people (the person whose murder was supposedly ordered, who has vehemently defended Ross!) asserts that he knew that Nob (who we know who was a DEA agent) was one of those four people.
* Nob is a serial liar, and is now in prison for having stole some of the bitcoin from this operation.
...what about that make clear that Ross was within a mile of this supposed 'murder for hire' business?
Is this president extremely concerned about drug dealers and gangs in the US?
Why is he pardoning a drug trafficker?
I understand your point, but it has become a waste of energy to try to point out hypocridy and ideological inconsistency among that group.
It's better to ignore the rational reasons to oppose them and focus on the emotional ones. For starters, people are repulsed by their cruelty.
Trump clearly values favoritism to a high degree. He is doing exactly as he has promised, running the country like a businessman. If you scratch his back, he will scratch yours. Principles take a back seat to "getting the job done". For other examples, see his changed stances on TikTok, various foreign interests, cryptocurrencies, EVs post Elon support, etc. And in the opposite vein, he abandons support for anyone who challenges his authority on principles.
Pardoning Ulbricht was a campaign promise he made at the Libertarian National Convention in response to it being a popular demand among the libertarians.
And more importantly, among the crypto crowd that dumped millions into his campaign. Libertarians have essentially no clout or money on their own. This was a pardon bought by Coinbase and Gemini and A16z.
Why would Coinbase and Gemini and A16z care about an obviously shady person who reportedly tried to hire a person to kill someone? surely they could find a more legitimate hero to advance the legal crypto case? i mean, it's kind of like them - companies trying to do legit crypto - rallying today around SBF when they already have image problems from other exchanges?
There is no "legit crypto" - it's a myth. Every single exchange that swaps spit with the Bitcoin ledger is laundering money made by criminal (often violent or fraudulent) means. Many if not most altcoins are equally as fraudulent, or used to launder ("tumble") other suspicious coins.
Let's be honest anyways, the cryptocurrency "industry" as we know it is less than 4 years old, and in 4 years it may be gone. Exchanges like coinbase and so-called defi innovators like A16Z need this legally-dubious signalling or they'll risk never having another leader corrupt enough to sanction their behavior.
I got cash out of an airport currency exchange ATM the other week, and when I tried to use it to by groceries yesterday, the cashier tested it for cocaine and it came back positive. There is no "legit cash".
Their CEOs are all crypto OGs from 2012
they represent the crypto gentry quite well, nut the supposition is flawed, they werent the only ones donating and the freeross campaign is a thing too
SBF can get fucked
No no no, my friend. Ulbricht was not a lowly drug trafficker (also, incidentally, not black or latino). He was an _entrepreneur_ who built a _marketplace_ that would bring together buyers and sellers, cutting out the middleman, and driving _efficiency_! Basically trustedhousesitters.com, just for illegal drugs instead of pets ;)
To appease the broligarch technologists, who all enjoyed buying LSD with cryptocoins.
what's it like to be poor in a rich country? the libertarian party supported his reelection bid and by support Ross he garnered more of their votes. this couldn't be more obvious. he did the same for crypto.
according to Trump: "A promise made is a promise kept", he is keeping his promise to his constituents.
enjoy your CNN propaganda.
Basically he’ll do anything to get the votes he needs, there’s no morality behind it.
thank god he won. someone had to do whatever was necessary.
I wish we had leaders with integrity, but we won’t for the foreseeable future.
I am just happy someone is slowing the H1B and indian out sourcing down. between that and AI california tech was about to die for Americans.
Whether that happens remains to be seen. In the first row on his inauguration was an Indian tech CEO and Elon loves H1Bs.
A drug trafficker sells drugs
A developer builds a platform like eBay but without censorship that can be used by the drug trafficker
It's not the same thing
I make and sell soap. The soap contains an ingredient that anyone can use to make bombs. Some people buy my soap only for that purpose. I know because they literally tell me how they use my soap. I can remove that ingredient but I would loose a lot of sales.
The police finds my soap in the lab of someone who blew up a building. Some people died. Was it my fault, knowing how it was being used? Did I do anything illegal? Unethical? Immoral?
Interesting thought experiment, but no, I don't think it's llegal/unethical/immoral to sell that soap. But in practice this sort of business will change their formula to avoid bad press and regulation.
> I can remove that ingredient but I would loose a lot of sales.
Or: I can remove that ingredient but it goes against my principle of not accepting constraints.
> Some people died. Was it my fault, knowing how it was being used? Did I do anything illegal? Unethical? Immoral?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15398776/
Jail is for people that don't accept constraints outlined by democratic society.
I think the attacks on some of these black and gray markets has increased violent crime in the real world. I wish the federal government would stop shutting them down and instead use them as tools to build cases against people breaking the law.
For example, for a while most prostitution and sex work seemed to be online, on places like Craigslist right next to ads for used furniture and jobs. And it seemed to be really effective in getting prostitutes off the streets.
Now that those markets were shut down, I'm seeing here in Seattle we're having pimp shootouts on Aurora and the prostitutes are more brazen than ever. Going after Craigslist has had a negative effect on our cities and has increased crime, and I suspect going after SilkRoad has had a similar impact.
I don't think much changed, really. The contraband and services offered on these marketplaces has always been backed by criminal enterprises. Mostly the markets provided level of indirection that made purchasing palatable and gave a false sense of safety.
Online markets for sex work allowed women to operate far more safely than "the street" allow. I had friends who were affected by the crackdown on craigslist etc.
Ask an actual sex worker what they think about that.
Sure, but the point is about secondary effects. If pimps are "competing" online then they need to compete on, well, marketing and UX. If they compete in real life then it is about who controls physical territory.
There are lots of studies about the unintended consequences of prohibition.
you are either a naive man or a dumb man, unclear which.
I wish instead of criminalizing addiction we'd fund harm reduction centers and rehabilitation services.
I would much rather the police be focused on stopping violent crime rather than these victimless crimes.
Legitimizing drugs/prostitution makes is easier to regulate and ultimately make safer. Shoving this stuff into a black/gray market is what ultimately creates violent crime.
> I wish instead of criminalizing addiction we'd fund harm reduction centers and rehabilitation services.
We tried that in SF, I was a supporter. Seeing it first hand with a with a family member in public school flipped me. Dumping money into people who aren't ready to convert back into tax payers (even in the most basic sense) while schools got the back burner was enough. Not to mention the tents.
> Seeing it first hand with a with a family member in public school flipped me.
Why is this an either or?
SF spends about $1 billion dollars on schools [1] and while the program ran it had around a $40 million dollar budget [2]. For an area that houses huge tech companies, this doesn't seem like an extreme budget to be working with.
> Not to mention the tents.
Ok? And what options would you give these people, just be homeless somewhere else where you can't see them?
[1] https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/...
[2] https://sfstandard.com/2021/11/17/supervisors-approve-6-5m-i...
SF spends nearly $1B on the homeless.
Homeless and drug addicts are not the same.
Letting the homeless block streets with tents is not the same as caring for them, or rehabilitating them.
While I think anecdotes are valuable and should not be easily dismissed, we have decades of research and evidence supporting the benefit of harm reduction centers. They reduce risk of overdose morbidity and mortality while not increasing crime or public nuisance to the surrounding community.
E.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8541900/
It's just really hard to swallow the findings in this paper (all non-US cities) when you can see such a visible change on the streets in SF since the pandemic.
By all official accounts crime is down in SF, but many agree something has changed in the way homeless carry. I would dare to use the word "entitled" to describe the cavalier way large encampments and bicycle chop shops are set up.
no victim means no crime. victimless "crimes" are just 'arbitrary rule' violations (like going 56mph in a 55mph zone) or infractions. the twisting and distortion of language by the state is counterproductive to society.
Those won't stop the problem at the root, right?
The inflow/manufacture of narcotics won't be affected at all. You'll still have a constant new influx of junkies, and it you'll essentially by funding this widescale and expensive solution forever.
Much better to simple make drug trafficing and manufacture a capital offense. It's been extremely effective in a lot of jurisdictions. Even if you're squeamish about the death penalty, a back of the envelope calculations will tell you you're saving a lot more lives than you spend due to decreased overdoses, drug wars etc,
Where has that strategy been effective? Do you have any numbers? Does it have any side effects?
Any non-twitter reporting on this?
Edit: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-silk-road-fou...
Guardian: <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/21/ross-ulbrich...>
CNN: <https://lite.cnn.com/2025/01/21/politics/silk-road-ross-ulbr...>
NPR: <https://www.npr.org/2025/01/21/nx-s1-5270051/trump-pardons-d...>
MSN: <https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/trump-pardons-...>
Reuters: <https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-silk-road-fou...>
AP: <https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/trump-pardons-...>
It seems a lot of reddit communities are starting to block xitter as it's painful to use now without an account. Should HN do the same?
The main reason all the subs made this change today is because of the elon nazi salute, not the fact that twitter is hostile to unauthenticated user agents.
> not the fact that twitter is hostile to unauthenticated user agents.
Yep, Twitter has had aggressive authentication gating for almost 2yrs now and HN frequently has Twitter links
Am I remembering correctly that when Elon first took over, he took that gate down because of his whole free speech thing. I'm guessing they re-instated it as soon as it hit the bottom line. Makes me wonder if government should still rely on it for comms.
One of the first things Twitter did post Elon was remove sign in gating then I guess the bankers pressed Elon and it went back up. Can't always do everything you want in business, I guess. Bills come first.
Nah. I just wanted to see a source I trusted to be legitimate before sharing a sensational story.
if its on front page of HN already w/ hundreds of votes, i think its fair to assume its legitimate regardless of the source.
True looking nonsense floats to the top of HN semi-regularly; it's not a good enough metric.
No. Let us decide how we want to handle it. Most of us could handle it ourselves through scripts and extensions if it really bothered us anyway.
Of course not, the tweet here is _the_ original source for that news
it's in nytimes
Well, I think that justice has been served. The feds' prosecution of Ulbricht was the epitome of throwing the book at someone to make an example, when the government's case was pretty flawed, in my opinion. 10 years is enough time to pay the debt of running the silk road.
I am glad that Ulbricht has been pardoned and I feel like a small iota of justice has been returned to the world with this action.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading the comments on this thread. Multiple teenagers (one in Australia) died from the drugs distributed on Silk Road. Ross was ok with selling grenades, body parts, etc on there. But everyone is saying he served his time ???
People regularly die from drinking alcohol. Should liquor store owners be doing life in prison? (And why are Australians special?)
Why not incarcerate all car makers and doctors then too?
You are hopelessly lost my friend, unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.
The law recognizes that a bottle of beer generally cannot be used to murder someone else.
But it easily can. Break the end off and poke.
The comment you replied to referenced "multiple teenagers" - the very people that liquor stores cannot sell alcohol to since they're not recognized as mature enough to be freely allowed to drink.
SR allowed children to buy addictive poison without any regulation whatsoever, and Ross profited off of those transactions.
These are not comparable institutions.
Teenagers routinely drink alcohol and sometimes die.
Charles Manson never murdered anyone. Should his sentence been commuted?
Body parts? huh
Maybe spend a little less time reading propaganda.
Wait… you’ve clearly never used The Silk Road, have you?
People die when they take drugs all the time, whether brought online or not.
But the war on some drugs are a failure, but also impossible to change due to stupid people, so Silk Road and crypto was a means to work around this, while lowering crime and turning it into an iterated prisoners dilemma so that quality etc could stay high.
It's ridiculous. I think a lot of the people here have a chip on their shoulder because they suspect they bought their ketamine from the same guy Elon did.
What Ross did was not a demonstration of showing restraint. You cannot defend a mafia boss for killing people by saying "at least he didn't rape the dozen bystanders that were watching" and you can't defend Ulbricht's actions, or the consequences of them, simply by saying he reduced harm. He spread harm - he ran a craigslist for drugs that ran off ad-hoc rules that could not promise safety for it's customers. It was illegal and rightfully so.
The precedent this sets is that you can live as a respected American drug lord if your skin is white. If it is not, the United States will use it's military power to prosecute you with absolute impunity.
He wasn't dealing them. He's not exactly culpable for the effects of his platform any more than Zuckerberg is responsible for mass hate speech coordinated by third-world dictators or Evan Spiegel for facilitating millions of nude images of children and teenagers.
People have died from things bought on Amazon, too
Also, Ross wasn't selling those things. He was just operating a market where other people sold things.
wasn't there evidence of hiring a hitman to commit a murder in furtherance of the Silk Road? that's not part of "the debt of running the silk road"
The hitman was a conman for a murder on a fictitious person. While he fully believed he was committing a real assassination, you can't convict people for killing imaginary people.
This doesn’t sound like an imaginary person
https://www.vice.com/en/article/murdered-silk-road-employee-...
You can convict for murder for hire in that circumstance.
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I'm indifferent to him being pardoned. But people saying he didn't deserve any punishment seems weird to me.
To me too. But life without parole seemed weird as well.
That's why commutation is a thing. The courts have ruled this as within the pardon powers. His sentence could be changed to reflect something much more aligned with other convictions for the same crimes.
Commutation is not considered during sentencing or mandatory minimums or anything like that. It's only an option for very popular cases and even then it's rare.
Yeah. That was harsh, I agree.
This is wonderful. I've never argued that Ross shouldn't have served time but it's always been clear his prosecution and sentencing were excessive and unjust. The prosecutors asked for a 20 year sentence, which seemed disproportionate given the sentencing guidelines for a first-time offender and the non-violent charges he was convicted of. But the judge sentenced Ross to TWO life sentences plus 40 years - without the possibility of parole. There's no doubt Ross made a series of unwise and reckless decisions but serving over ten years of hard time in a FedMax prison is more than enough given the charges and his history.
It's just unfortunate that Trump, and now, excessive pardons are politically polarized, which could cloud the fact that justice was done today. I don't credit Trump in any way for doing "the right thing" or even having a principled position regarding Ross' case. Clearly, others with influence on Trump convinced him to sign it. It doesn't matter how the pardon happened. Biden should have already pardoned Ross because that crazy sentence shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Madoff got 150 years for non-violent charges (and he didn't even try to have anyone killed). Died in prison.
It is wildly harmful and an escalation of monstrous practices to look at one or several unjust actions and/or sentences and declare that those who do worse than the person who was dealt out such a retribution should receive an even longer sentence.
If someone gets 10 years for smoking weed, the solution is not to put someone in prison for 20 years for punching someone.
I wasn't implying that either Ulbricht or Madoff's sentences were unjust.
Madoff stole $20-35B, but by some measures a human life is only worth $10M. I am not really asserting those figures are comparable, just that Madoff stole a lot of money.
Nah, it's more that you do not fuck with the money system. SBF is learning that same lesson.
Jeff Skilling (Enron) served 12 years in jail for insider trading and securities.
Not saying that Skilling, Maddoff or SBF shouldn't have gone to jail. They deserved it. But I do find it interesting that financial crimes can tend to be the most harshly judged, likely because of who they impact (the people with money) and because they cause distrust of the financial system as a whole.
> Madoff stole $20-35B
Not to defend Madoff, but it's not like he made off with that money himself, so I'm not sure "stole" is the correct term. Most of that money went to investors -- it just went to a different set of investors than the ones who had put that money in (the nature of a Ponzi scheme).
> Nah, it's more that you do not fuck with the money system.
Isn't a common critique of the justice system that white-collar crime gets you less prison time (in nicer jails) than being for ex a drug dealer?
Plenty of finance scammers and conmen who stole millions get <5-10yr sentences
> Biden should have already pardoned Ross because that crazy sentence shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Biden did commute the sentence of several other non-violent cases just last week or thereabouts, and Trump has been talking about Ulbricht for quite some time so it's not a complete surprise.
I guess the whole "murder for hire" thing excluded him from the "non-violent" category. But how that got tacked on seems very odd; the judge basically said "we didn't really handle it in the court case and it wasn't a charge, but it was mentioned a few times and it seemed basically true, so I included it in the sentencing". Like, ehh, okay?
To be honest, I don't really understand much of the logic ("logic") of the US justice system....
Judges are allowed to consider some evidence during sentencing which was not presented at trial. The standard for this evidence is lower than the "beyond a shadow of doubt" standard required for a criminal conviction. This is allowed because during sentencing the judge is considering information related to the history and character of the defendant. The 'hiring an online hitman' (who was an FBI informant) allegation was never charged or tried. Even if it hadn't been obvious entrapment, it might well have evaporated under discovery and cross-examination by a competent defense.
Including such evidence in sentencing consideration is not uncontroversial in the U.S. However, it can cut both ways, in that a judge can consider extenuating circumstances in a defendant's life to reduce sentencing. We want judges to evaluate cases and make sentencing adjustments where appropriate. So, I don't think I'd do away with the practice. The real issue is that this specific judge went absolutely bonkers far beyond the 20 years the prosecution asked for during sentencing (which was already very high) and sentenced Ross to two life sentences plus 40 years without parole.
Most of us who are happy that Ross was pardoned agree that he was guilty and deserved a jail sentence for the crimes he was convicted of. The only problem is the sentence was so wildly excessive for a non-violent, first-time offender. Compared to guidelines and other sentences it was just crazy and wrong. Ross has served over ten years. Now he's free. That's probably about right.
Wasn’t he in jail for hiring a contract killer?
I’m all for the freeing him of his crimes when it comes to his crypto anarchic philosophy. But I find it hard to pardon someone for contract killing essentially. Also I’m not an apologist for the FBIs handling of this case either.
No, that charge was dropped. IIRC, it was on shaky ground and they were just trying to throw the book at him.
The charge was dropped, but the court did hold a hearing on it when deciding on sentencing. They heard the evidence for and against and ruled by a preponderance of the evidence that he did in fact do it.
Then why would they drop the charge if they thought the evidence pointed to the fact he did it.
Separate courts. He was indicted and tried for all the non-murder stuff in a New York federal court. He was indicted separately in a Maryland federal court on a murder-for-hire charge.
The New York court convicted him, and then considered the murder-for-hire allegations when determining his sentence. They found them true by a preponderance of the evidence and and that was a factor in his sentence to life without parole. He appealed, and the Second Circuit upheld the sentence.
The prosecutors in Maryland then dropped the murder-for-hire charge because there was no point. They said this would allow them to direct their resources to other other cases where justice had not yet been served.
Ironically, he was only pardoned for drug related crimes, so he could still be charged with murder related ones if they were not dropped with prejudice (i didn't look)
This is all AFAIK, they haven't released the text broadly yet, but his lawyers/etc say he was pardoned for crimes related to drugs.
Even what people call a 'full and unconditional' pardon is usually targeted at something specific, not like "a pardon for anything you may have ever done, anywhere, anytime' which people seem to think it means sometimes.
It's more of a legal term of art to describe pardons that erase convictions, restore rights, etc.
Rather than clemency which, say, commutes your sentence but leaves your conviction intact.
Just to nitpick…
Most recent pardons have been announced in documents labeled "Executive Grant of Clemency", so I don't think "clemency" and "pardons" are as distinct as you're saying.
And while I know you said "usually", I can't help but note that Hunter Biden was pardoned for any federal thing he may have done, anywhere, anytime in the last 10 years. Some of the last-minute pardons were pretty broad as well.
The judge wrote at sentencing the murder for hire 'counted' as an element of the criminal enterprise. So if he was pardoned for his crimes that includes the murder for hire per the judgement of his case.
Even if correct, he would still be chargeable at the state level in any related state.
The only thing it would protect him against would be the federal murder for hire statute (18 USC 1958).
I doubt the pardon will be considered to cover that, but we'll have to wait to see the text.
Murder is usually state-level jurisdiction, and the President can only pardon federal jurisdiction.
Yes, i'm aware - there are federal murder statutes, but they are mostly about murder of federal police officers, hate crime murders, etc.
However, murder for hire is also federal crime - see 18 USC 1958 and the DOJ CRM on this: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
So depending on the pardon text and interpretation, he may or may not be chargeable with this statute still federally.
I agree this has zero effect on charging him at the state level, and most states do not have statute of limitations on these types of crimes (or they are very long)
One issue with any potential trial for murder-for-hire is that the allegation as presented in the Maryland indictment has two problematic witnesses: DEA agent Carl Force who acted as the hitman, now in prison for embezzling cryptocurrency from the Silk Road case, and Curtis Green, the would-be victim in this case, who has previously insisted that Ulbricht was innocent of plotting his murder (and was also recently imprisoned for cocaine distribution last year, although I don't think that would be too relevant). Maybe the other allegations might have more meat on the bone, but they didn't make it on to any indictment.
Fascinating. It is news to me that a federal court can consider the evidence for crimes not proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal sentencing. Learn something new every day.
Since he was sentenced federally, he'd be under the federal sentencing guidelines, but I imagine those are pretty harsh around the money laundering and drug trafficking (since they're tuned to provide a hammer to wield against mostly narco-enterprises). I suppose the additional preponderance of evidence gave the judge justification to push the sentence to the maximum allowed in the category?
It’s extremely common in for example diversion cases and others, where the defendant has to stipulate that they are agreeable to things being presented as in charging documents and evaluated based on preponderance by a court, not by a jury and not subject to principles of reasonable doubt.
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The Silk Road run by Ross Ulbricht did not have assassins on it, nor did it have any human trafficking on it.
I support your right to disagree with the pardon. But please don't recklessly post disinformation like that.
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That's not true. It wasn't a free for all platform.
'preponderance' is the clue, criminal is 'beyond all reasonable doubt', civil is preponderance. Ross was being charged under criminal law.
This. Evidence that isn't strong enough to criminally convict can be used for other purposes (e.g. sentencing, knowledge/intent, civil forfeiture, civil damages etc).
(see OJ Simpson paying money damages for a crime he was acquitted of)
Possibly because he was already facing a long sentence and it wasn't worth pursuing that charge.
this would be a criminal charge preponderance of the evidence wouldn't be enough to convict
Sentencing phase
Wonder if he can be charged with that now? Was there anything in the pardon related to this? AFAIK there is no time limit on bringing charges related to murder?
According to Wikipedia[1], he was convicted of charges related to hacking, narcotics, money laundering, and more.
But during the trial, evidence was presented that he made murder-for-hire payments, the court found that he did by a preponderance of evidence, and the court took this into account when sentencing him.
So, he wasn't convicted of it, but it is part of the reason he was sent to jail for a very long time.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht
Some info from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33045520
I haven't reviewed the info for a while but it was pretty clearly entrapment as I recall.
Didn't Ulbricht actually run the Silk Road? Did someone from the FBI persuade Ulbricht to do it?
I think they're talking about just the murder-for-hire. It may have just been undercover agents the whole time and no murders actually occurred.
Attempting to hire a hitman who turns out to be an FBI agent is still a crime, and likely not entrapment in the legal sense.
By accepting the pardon the accused concedes to guilt in the crime.
Yes the FBI had root or admin access to the Silk Road system and could have very easily changed or otherwise affected logs/record IDs that the technical case rested on. Two of the FBI agents on the case were later punished for corruption on the case.
He was in jail for running a darknet drug marketplace. Hiring a contract killer was a crime he was neither charged with nor convicted of.
The judge factored it into the sentencing, though. He likely did actually try to hire a contract killer - twice. In both cases he sincerely believed the murders were successfully committed, and he sent a lot of money to the assassins after being sent (doctored) "proof" of their killings.
I think it's fair to say judges shouldn't factor non-charged allegations into sentencing, but I think he's at least morally culpable, here, and should at the very least be expected to now show public contrition for repeatedly trying to murder people drug kingpin-style.
I doubt he will ever admit it, but now that he's free I still would like it. I don't care about people enabling drug sales but I do care about people with a God complex who feel entitled to end the lives of those they oppose (in one case because he thought someone stole from him, and another because he thought they would dox him).
A judge and system who would give him 2 life sentences for this should not be trusted when he also factored in things which he wasn't charged and convicted of.
There are only mandatory minimums -- not mandatory maximums in sentencing.
I feel like me might disagree on Ulbricht, but overall mandatory maximums make a lot of sense.
It is common that several outcomes are subject - with the defendants specific agreement - to be evaluated by a court on preponderance, not a jury. This was not judicial malpractice.
I am sorry but there's no way giving him more than 2 life sentences has any justification whatsoever. Even the people who actually sold drugs on his site got out in 2 years. And the person who hired someone for hitman also only got 6 years. This is exactly the type of case where pardon makes 100% sense.
Ps. El Chapo got shorter sentence than Ross.
> Even the people who actually sold drugs on his site got out in 2 years.
And Ross made millions from those people selling drugs on his site. Quite possibly more than any person selling drugs on his site.
And attempted to hire hitmen to prevent anyone stopping it. Not even as a potential "crime of passion", but solely to protect his money train.
And there's this whole false narrative of "youthful indiscretions". He didn't start building the site til he was 28 and was mostly running it in his early 30s.
> Ps. El Chapo got shorter sentence than Ross.
They both had greater-than-life sentences, which in practice is the same thing.
Ulbricht was indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single murder-for-hire charge.
The case was dropped after NY conviction since he was sentencing to life, so there was little point in continuing.
Clearly that was a mistake if a lack of an attempted murder conviction helped him get a pardon.
What would give you a hint that attempted murder conviction would prevent his pardon? Trump pardoned over a thousand attempted murdered already this week.
Will he get his possesions back then?
50,676 bitcoins, today valued at 5,3 billion USD.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-h...
No, generally a pardon does not eliminate any civil liability or entitle you to refunds once the assets have been transferred to Treasury. He would still have to answer Yes to having been convicted of a felony and he would still not be entitled to vote in states that do not permit felons to vote.
> Where a person has paid a monetary penalty or forfeited property, the consequences of a pardon depend in part on when it was issued. If a monetary fine or contraband cash has been transferred to the Treasury, a pardon conveys no right to a refund, nor does the person pardoned have a right to reacquire property or the equivalent in cash from a legitimate purchaser of his seized assets or from an informant who was rewarded with cash taken from the pardoned person before he was pardoned.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/presidential-pardons-sett...
This is obviously incorrect. Actually pardon means the charges filed has been voided, hence anything happening afterwards has had no merits and court decisions made are now rendered moot. For example, Roger Stone was charged and found guilty of multiple crimes and Trump pardoned him; he still brandish guns and was "proudly voting Trump" in 2024 in state of Florida. Getting pardon is literally like it never happened in the first place.
The pardon can restore certain rights in some cases, I'm not entirely familiar with the Stone shenanigans, but knowing the parties involved I can't assume that Stone was legally entitled to do what he did after the pardon, and maybe he was.
That said, the recovery of assets after transfer to Treasury is settled law. [1]
> More broadly, the Court ruled in several cases during this period that pardons entitled their recipients to recover property forfeited or seized on the basis of the underlying offenses, so long as vested third-party rights would not be affected and money had not already been paid into the Treasury (except as authorized by statute).
Was covered in Osborne v. United States, Knote v. United States, In re: Armstrong's Foundry, Cent. R.R. v. Bosworth and Jenkins v. Collard
Subsequent cases make it clear that the offense is not in fact "gone."
> ... the Court in Burdick stated that a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it."
> ... then, in Carlesi v. New York, the Court determined that a pardoned offense could still be considered “as a circumstance of aggravation” under a state habitual-offender law, reflecting that although a pardon may obviate the punishment for a federal crime, it does not erase the facts associated with the crime or preclude all collateral effects arising from those facts.
The court holds that it is not in fact as if it never happened.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...
Your example doesn't seem to involve restoring property / funds due to a pardon that were already confiscated / already paid.
Is there some example of someone getting such money back?
Part of getting pardoned is admitting guilt - ask joe arpaio ...
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No, because he was never found guilty of anything, or charged with anything. Pardons before a conviction are somewhat different than pardons after a conviction in that the state never established the facts. There's also a difference between blanket pardons and specific pardons.
As I referenced in a peer reply.
> “[A pardon] carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it."
This is the referenced case.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/236/79
I am not sure of the legality around his possessions but they are long gone. Even the ones stolen by FBI officers during the course of the investigation.
I think that requires convincing evidence. Also, how is it relevant to the question?
It is easy to look up the cases against the agents. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-federal-agents-charged...
Both served time.
Thanks, that links to the charges.
"Two former federal agents have been charged with wire fraud, money laundering and related offenses for stealing digital currency during their investigation of the Silk Road ..."
I'm more than happy to have the discussion with you but I have no requirement to provide all of the information that is widely available in the public domain.
Are you replying to the wrong comment? :)
I’ll let you Google the pleas and sentences. Stop with the asinine recalcitrance.
Well the American Government auctioned the bitcoin, and the two FBI agents were tried and sentenced for theft. I don't need evidence.
I am curious how the American government can reimburse those pardoned.
I see those are your claims, but do you have evidence of them?
Its well known and well covered facts regarding this high status case, you even got links in a sibling comment so read them
If they were from the commission of a crime, then no.
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It's a full pardon; there is no crime.
That's not how it works. The money can still be guilty of a crime outside of the Defendant's acquittal in civil cases like this.
source: hundreds of hours in forfeiture court
Civil asset forfeiture should not be considered constitutional, and some day a test case will make it to the SCOTUS. As for this case though... the pardon does not make Ulbritch innocent! On the contrary, accepting the pardon implies guilt. So the pardon need not and might not extend to forfeitures. Though it's also possible that the presidential pardon could extend to the forfeitures, but I suspect that's a constitutional grey area.
Cases have made it to the Supreme Court --- recently! --- and it held up just fine. This is another message board fixation. I'm sure it's abused all over the place. It wasn't in this case.
If the cases start with: "US v $200,000", that probably needs to go away.
I doubt I would be able to get away with "bb88 v $2B". It should so belong to me.
https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/news/16740-civil-forfeiture-d... ?
That's not very conclusive.
What part of this makes you thing CAF is on shaky constitutional ground? This is a CAF case with reach-y fact patterns for the government and they won it handily. We didn't even get close to the question of whether CAF is itself constitutional; the court simply presumed it.
Civil asset forfeiture connected to an actual crime should be. You should not own the guns you used to murder someone else, e.g.
Otherwise it's "your $100,000 in dollars in cash looks guilty to me."
Right, if you've been found guilty, the your assets can be forfeited.
Pardon the money!
He can't. The President doesn't have civil pardon power.
A pardon results in the relief from the consequences of a crime. There being a pardon doesn't necessarily mean there was no crime.
Pardons are forgiveness. They don’t roll back the clock, although the Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that acceptance of a pardon is not an assumption of guilt.
Was acceptance of a pardon an "assumption" by the court? Is it not "admission* of guilt", which I believe itself was never the case as this was based on a judge's aside that people didn't accept pardons because it was *percieved* as "an admission of guilt", i.e. the "percieved" part was not actually articulated in court but rather the judge was completing a thought before it was fully articulated.
What I find interesting is that the 5th amendment no longer applies after a pardon. The pardoned can no longer claim that protection for the crime he was convicted of.
My apologies I made a mistake. The Burdick SCOTUS case from 1915 said “carries an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it”
In 2021, an appeals court opined that: “not every acceptance of a pardon constitutes a confession of guilt.”
I thought the 2021 case was a Supreme Court case, and I was incorrect. I think in the public eye the pardon is viewed differently based on however the story is told.
That would arguably create some of the worst perverse incentives, as far as financial crimes go.
Any two-bit governor could team up with some criminal, and make enough money to be set up for life against a pardon. Even worse if it's a president, as they could likely get off scot-free.
Trump could literally scam everyone and everyone, step down, receive a pardon from the VP, and happy days.
That’s exactly what it’s doing. As long as you misbehave in Washington DC or commit a crime not chargeable in a state or too complex to prosecute, you’re good.
For example, you could defraud suckers into buying a pump and dump memecoin. Elon has repeatedly demonstrated that nobody will prosecute, and POTUS is above the law for as long as he decides to stay in office.
Hard to agree here. A jury of his peers convicted him of the crime.
I don’t believe that’s true. A pardon does not excuse a crime.
Until now I oddly never questioned how any government could seize someone's bitcoin and how a government keeps the private keys of their crypto wallets secure.
a lot of known best practices were not followed in 2013.
Every advancement in crypto was done after the government made a move. And all subsequent moves netted the government less.
Now it takes more agencies to seize darknet markets, and most merchants and consumers get their money back because it was a multisignature transaction and the server stored nothing. Even domains have been seized back from the government.
The crypto space calls it "antifragility", as in the idea - and now history - that the asset class and infrastructure improves under pressure.
> a lot of known best practices were not followed in 2013.
like Secret Service and DEA agents getting immediately caught trying to steal Bitcoin from Silk Road?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/03/30/federal-agent...
Was that profits or users’ deposits?
obviously not.
Hey may have other wallets...
I suspect there'll be a lot of people very carefully watching for transactions from wallets with some sort of links to Silk Road that have been dormant for 12 years or so.
with a name like DPR id have to assume its buried treasure
Genuine question: Of all the people to pardon, why him?
because it was a promise he made to the libertarian camp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8ofi6U0eWE
He upgraded from commutation to pardon, I wonder about what happened there.
Elon transferred a BTC wallet over to Trump. Prove me wrong!
it would be visible on-chain, so if you notice something weird you can take a look and point it out to us.
It might be visible. Just not a large amount from one account to another. Thats not how laundering works and definitely not how trades work that are supposed to go unnoticed.
They seem to be pandering to the more libertarian tech community. This guy appeals to that and to the more radical maga types who want a revolution. I’m sure we’ll see more.
The Biden DOJs bungling of the insurrection, turning a jail into a martyrs club, slow rolling prosecutions, etc is ultimately worse than the insurrection for democracy.
According to Trump, he is doing this to get libertarian support.
It's because of his mother Lyn.
She was a tireless advocate for his release from the start, and it became a part of the libertarian cause to see him released.
It worked. Trump courted the libertarian vote, and this was his most popular promise to them.
She's an inspiring woman. I'm so glad she lived to see this.
Yay the drug trafficker and hitman hirer is free! What a happy ending! /s
Trump promised to do this at the Libertarian Party convention. This case is very important to the libertarian crowd. He is a martyr for many of their ideals. After Trump was so well received at the convention the LP, recently taken over by the right faction of the party, put forth a candidate specifically chosen to not get votes so that members would vote for Trump. Trump seems to be a man of his word.
Voters wanted a better economy first, not pardons for drug traffickers and violent offenders.
This could have waited until after the midterms.
> This could have waited until after the midterms.
On the contrary, he can just bury it in the first 48 hours. This will fade into the background soon enough but that group is kept happy.
It seems like the voters that were being referred to value restoring rights. How can something immediately achievable be balanced with "the economy", a thing so broad and deeply systemic?
The people in Pennsylvania who elected him, didn't want this.
It isn't clear from your original statement that those voters aren't from Pennsylvania. I interpret your statement as discounting the weight of their vote on actions they care about. There are many perspectives, and the values of those who did vote in that direction are being addressed in some way.
A lot of republicans want a "shining city upon the hill". Drug free, sin free, tough penalties on crime.
A lot of republicans want a working economy. High paying jobs, low taxes.
A lot of republicans believe in a free market economy. Freedom to innovate, freedom to hire and fire.
And then we have this.
We're talking about Libertarians and not Republicans, atleast that is what the parent comment was referring to. I don't know what Republicans what or believe vs what they say. The action to pardon directly addresses the Libertarian ideals.
I guess if Trump really wanted to run Libertarian, he could have run under the Libertarian ticket.
He attended the convention. Is is for all intents and purposes representing them.
Republicans are not a monolithic group of social conservatives.
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>This could have waited until after the midterms.
He promised to pardon the rioters during the election and it didn't hurt him. I think he decided it wouldn't hurt him (and Trump cares bout that first) and if he thought about the midterms ... maybe won't hurt then either.
Congress isn't directly involved in any of this anyway.
Congress is involved. They have to prove they can govern. It's hard to be the party of "law and order" if you need only to kiss the ring for your release.
GOP house could hardly operate last round and … they won more seats.
I think this is funny.
People hate congress. Yet each person can vote to only change one congressman at a time.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx
October of 2001 they were up to 80% approval. Left to their own devices by Aug 2002 they were below 50%.
There's an argument to be made that congress doesn't really represent the people at large. Some people go on to make the argument that through gerrymandering politicians choose who's elected, and not the people.
It was one signature? Doesn't seem like a big time sink. Many of these early actions were prepared prior to inauguration.
In war, you point your biggest gun at the enemy. You don't shoot yourself in the foot.
Eh, lowering the price of eggs is not as easy so
man of his word, ok. https://www.azquotes.com/quote/660639
The LP candidate was nominated due to some fluke/shenanigans/dealings between candidates. Based on the right-leaning demographics you would not expect him to win. It just happened to work out perfectly to get the people who would never vote for him anyway to vote for Trump. (Meanwhile the chairwoman encouraged Biden supporters to vote for the LP candidate).
Also, Trump actually got a mixed reception at the convention at best.
> Trump seems to be a man of his word.
when there's political gain, sure
You may not like Trump but I remember he fulfilled or attempted to fulfill a lot of his campaign promises back in 2016 as well. Biden, the career politician, talked a lot about many things before election and then forgot about them after he was elected. For example, universal health care. Obama promised to enshrine a woman's right to abortion as law, and then when he had the House and Senate after he was elected, he said "it's not a priority for me." Then we lost Roe V Wade.
>or attempted
That's a really low bar with that bit added. "I didn't say it would be easy" was his line about his token tariffs the first term ... then he never tried again for the rest of that term.
He also lies all the time about many things. People are are sometimes honest are called 'liars'.
> when he had the House and Senate after he was elected, he said "it's not a priority for me."
How could he get it through the Senate without a filibuster-proof majority?
Trump did just about what every president does - makes promises and then does some of them, tries to some others (successful unless thwarted by Congress), and ignores others.
Obama didn't have the votes in the Senate (to overcome the filibuster, also not as many Dems congressmen supported it as you might think). Neither did Clinton (people thought it would happen then)
I'm privately predicting the senate will remove the filibuster this term.
> universal health care
that was Obama - Biden never promised that
Biden delivered on the IRA and climate change bill.
Trump promised to "drain the swamp" and filled it instead. I can't think of any major campaign promise that he fulfilled - he didn't even build the wall (probably his main promise).
that was Obama - Biden never promised that
https://jacobin.com/2022/08/joe-biden-public-option-health-c...
I can't think of any major campaign promise that he fulfilled
Renegotiate NAFTA
Lower Taxes
Move the US Embassy to Jerusalem
Nominate to the Supreme Court from the list he shared
Kill TPP
No Social Security Cuts
Take No Salary
Where he failed, it generally wasn't for trying, but because he was getting blocked by Congress, the courts, and the general bureaucracy. You only have to look at the last 48 hours to see a better prepared Trump committed to his promises.
I'm not sure "No Social Security Cuts" should count, because (1) he did try to cut it in his proposed 2020 budget, (2) he did nothing to try to address the shortfall that is expected in the social security trust fund around 2033, and (3) he said that if he was reelected in 2020 he would get rid of the payroll tax, which would have moved the depletion of the trust fund up to around 2026.
When did Biden talk about universal healthcare?
Let's go through Trump's campaign promises: Infrastructure, Border wall, increased US manufacturing, repealing ACA, "drain the swamp". He achieved zero of those.
Biden in contrast followed up on his campaign promises: Infrastructure, increased US manufacturing, expanding ACA plus lowering costs. Among others.
>Trump seems to be a man of his word.
One of the big reasons I voted for him. He actually keeps the promises he made as far reality will allow.
What's really stupid is that keeping promises made isn't the norm for politicians, of all kinds.
This is 100% true. I am posting from an anon account (obviously), but I was heavily involved in this. I worked with members of the party to push part of their strategy - mainly the coalition with trump and an effort to get vivek and elon involved. We spoke about this in 2023. I didn't care about Ross, had my own motivations, but I wrote some of their playback with AI and it worked. I didn't know about certain things (like the losing candidate for example). I wrote strategy that seems to have made its way all the way to Trump's team.
Without proof this is just a bedtime story.
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Presumably musk pushed for it. Not sure who else in/near the administration would even have him on their radar
Whether or not he was the sole or even primary reason, he knew about it beforehand as seen by his tweet last night saying it was coming soon. Love him or hate him, it's a bit concerning that he has that level of access IMO.
The tweet:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881524296386031892
It’s been a campaign of Mike Cernovich’s for a long time.
And Trump cares what Mike Cernovich thinks because.... ?
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Musk is definitely a fan recreationally chemistry
The clips of him rolling his eyes and head around in boredom at the inauguration definitely looked like he was suffering from some kind of withdrawal symptoms.
Trump promised it when he attended the libertarian convention
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Why now, and not 4 years from now when Trump is about to leave office?
How do republicans in Idaho (who don't even have medical marijuana on the books), defend Trump pardoning someone convicted of drug trafficking?
That argument isn't contrary to the GP comment: It's very possible Trump is offered a benefit now that he wasn't offered in 2020.
You could ask the same of any deal: Why not instead of years ago? Because the deal wasn't available years ago.
He promised the Libertarians he would and he's holding true to his word. Say what you will but at least he's fulfilling his campaign promises.
What about his campaign promise for law and order?
Trump's Law, not you know, the people's law.
He promised international canvassers that we'd have peace in Ukraine on his first day in office. Whatever he arranged with druggie libertarians is chopped liver from a policy perspective. On the international stage it's the dictionary definition of a nothingburger.
Why not now?
Trump isn't up for re-election. It's his act alone.
He promised in the election to pardon other criminals and it didn't hurt him.
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Well even if he bet on going that route he wouldn't have to be "elected", and my last line applies none the less, it didn't hurt him during an actual election.
Yes. Except, "neutralize?" I don't know why the federal government would bother with the pretense of a 22nd Amendment when they demonstrably do not care in the slightest about the 14th or most of the Bill of Rights.
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You believe there are "selfless politicians" operating in America right now?
I believe there's a wide range of choices and behaviors and any poor choice is not equivalent to all poor choices.
I honestly kinda think that first degree murder is similar to other first degree murders. But that's just me.
Ah, so when challenged, you immediately acknowledge there is a spectrum and not a black and white picture. That makes for a poor thread.
I don't know what you mean.
Yes. I think many of them are. The harassment and constant criticism isn't worth it unless you really care about the people you serve in most cases.
It's pretty obvious which ones are doing it for themselves.
Trump explains it eloquently:
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
What do you mean? Trump just pardoned or commuted pretty much all of the J6 crowd. One guy convicted of crimes that don't require proving violence beyond a reasonable doubt is pretty tame in comparison. He is one of thousands.
Trump know the Jan 6 rioters and supported them. Pardoning is important to justify his claim that nobody did anything wrong as that the election was "stolen by the Dems".
I can't imagine he would have known Ross Ulbricht's case.
What? All crimes were proved beyond a reasonable doubt according to a jury of our peers. (Or they plead guilty).
The violent element was not proven for Ross. The judge decided on preponderance of evidence he hired the hit man, and sentenced him as if he did.
Ulbricht was convicted of crimes by a jury of his peers though.
There are no mandatory maximums in sentencing guidelines. Just mandatory minimums.
Ross Ulbricht on X: https://x.com/realrossu
Keep in mind that he spent 11 years locked up.
He's not getting off lightly!
I'm just shocked it was a full pardon instead of a commutation or something. I don't think the US is gaining a ton from keeping him locked up but he still did run an organization he knew was used for selling drugs and other illegal things and a full pardon for that seems weird. I feel like I mainly heard people talking about commuting his sentence
He built a website. He didn't dictate how people used it. That was the point. He was charged as a drug kingpin with mobster era consequences. His sentence didn't fit whatever crimes he did or didn't commit.
Trump killed Net Neutrality during his first term and you think he would use it to justify the actions of someone running an internet black market that trafficked in drugs, prostitution and murder?
Is there some reason he should not be allowed to vote, own a firearm, or receive federal benefits?
No one said anything about voting or benefits? That's an entire different discussion.
It's just that, in layman's terms, a pardon means "you did nothing wrong", whereas a commutation means "you did something wrong but were sentenced too harshly". As far as I know that's also what it more or less means legally (with some nuance).
I'm absolutely not a fan of "tough on crime" sentencing, but he absolutely did do something wrong, even if we ignore the contended "murder for hire" claims he should have been sent to prison for a number of years (personally, I'd say about 5-10 years). This is also by Ulbricht's own admission by the way.
Why should he be treated differently then people who committed similar crimes?
He was convicted and the party of law and order typically views these punitive post release measures to be part of the punishment.
Yes. He was convicted of several crimes.
What do you mean "lightly?" He ran an illegal drug market and tried to assassinate a competitor. We gave him the punishment that society has determined one should receive for this. Revoking his punishment is "light."
The judge issued the punishment at their sole discretion. The legislature sets the laws often without any input from the constituency.
Meanwhile a sizable campaign has materialized around this case and many people do feel he has done enough time and should be free without any restrictions
> many people do feel he has done enough time and should be free without any restrictions
This could be said for any number of people rightfully detained by the US for crimes of incredible magnitude.
Hence why, if DPR was going to get off somehow, a sentence commutation would have been better rather than an unconditional pardon. The latter implies he did absolutely nothing wrong, which hilariously runs counter to Trump's supposed tough on drugs and crime shtick he has.
It's still not enough.
I wonder if Assange will get the pardon he’s campaigning for:
https://www.action.assangecampaign.org.au/
So does this mean the war on drugs is finally over and we're going to stop mass incarceration for non-violent drug offenses? If so, that _would_ be good news.
He also just classified drug cartels as terrorist organizations so drug dealers are now technically facilitating terrorism. Apart from liberating this white collar drug dealer, all of his other actions have escalated the war on drugs. While he was signing these orders, he claimed that drug cartels were responsible for up to 300,000 American deaths annually (a completely fabricated number.)
I would find this easier to celebrate if it was a commutation and not a pardon, or if it was a pardon that went hand in hand with a change in the laws he broke.
> a pardon that went hand in hand with a change in the laws he broke
Trump doesn't have the power to unilaterally change laws (fortunately!)
Because their isn't a change in law doesn't mean the convictions were secure and bound by law before.
DPR is free!! I'm very happy for him and hope he makes good on this second lease on life.
Legalities aside, is it more evil to hire a dude to kill your enemy, or to go kill your enemy yourself? (I'd go with the former because if you go kill your enemy yourself you're at least accepting that it may go the other way).
Was there anything said about pardoning Snowden?
I had no idea this was a campaign promise. Why? I don’t understand.
Crypto currency proponents benefit from the existence of dark net marketplaces because they are some of the main places for the non-speculative use of crypto currencies. I think Ross and his pardon represent a sort-of metaphor in crypto-currency proponents' eyes for the government's toleration of these dark net crypto marketplaces.
Wouldn't be surprised if he is sitting on a billion dollars of hidden crypto somewhere.
If you meant Trump, it's not hidden, they released a Trump meme coin and the rug pull was after the inauguration timed with the release of the Melania meme coin, though entirely speculatively makes more sense for the investors to be foreign governments buying influence less obviously than the last Trump administration like Saudi Arabia hiring his son in law.
It would have to be bitcoin, which isn't very hidden
So "parked" rather than "hidden" then.
I also suspect Ulbricht quite likely has keys for wallets the FBI didn't find out about (and it's corrupt agents didn't steal).
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"Wouldn't be surprised if " is speculation. Nobody should be surprised if a pirate has buried treasure.
* Ulbricht's conviction became a cause célèbre in American libertarian circles.
* In May 2024, candidate Donald Trump said that if re-elected President, he would commute Ulbricht's sentence on his first day in office
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht
I doubt Trump cares about Ulbricht as much as he cares (for whatever reason) about the continued support of various American libertarians (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and various crypto elites).
While he has made many promises this is significant for being one that he has kept.
RFK Jr is definitely not a libertarian (even compared to someone mainstream like Gary Johnson or Jared Polis), he supports strong state intervention in many areas of the economy and society
Trump went around to a huge number of niche communities and promised to fix their core concerns in exchange for their support. The crypto and libertarian communities are obsessed with freeing Ulbricht. It was honestly a brilliant strategy, and probably the reason he won. Ironic that an authoritarian fascist was able to get elected by enlisting the help of anti-authoritarian communities with a single issue promise.
It’s not ironic at all. The MAGA movement is really similar to how Mussolini came to power.
The campaign against barbarians (Steve Miller’s) crusade, Elons “not enough white babies” stuff, sucking up to the church (Vatican City is a Mussolini scheme), aspirations for conquest of Greenland and Panama, etc are all analogous to the maga playbook.
Most people are clueless. There are idiots who think they are getting $1 eggs next week. Riling up weirdos like libertarians lets the movement punch above their weight.
Unfortunately you could level the same type of name calling towards Democrats. It's now public record they colluded with all the major media outlets, coerced big tech to censor and debank opponents, imprisoned whistleblowers, violated bodily autonomy with unconstitutional mandates, weaponized the courts to conduct lawfare, and now issued an unprecedented number of pre-emptive pardons for unspecified crimes committed by Fauci, Hunter Biden, et al.
I remember when the Democrats were the anti-war party, but Biden was escalating the Ukraine war in the final days of his presidency, and celebrated Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris. Crazy how things have changed so much. The left unanimously viewed Bush and Cheney as obviously psychopathic war criminals, and now almost all the Neocons have jumped over to the Democrats. The left used to be extremely skeptical of globalization as evident by the Seattle WTO Protests, mass immigration as evident by Bernie Sanders' comments on its effect on workers' wages, and Big Pharma's perverse incentives to keep people sick and regularly consuming drugs. Yet the media has utterly psyop'd the progressives... it's kinda disturbing.
Authoritarianism is also popular with the democrats right now, but I don’t see how anything I said is name calling: I used terms with a specific meaning appropriate for the context- the only reason they have a negative connotation is because of what they actually mean. Do you know of other terms with the same meaning and more neutral connotations?
People in power in this era do that.
The democrats are broken. They keep running women, and not getting messages out that appeal to the average voter. They lost their core reliable voters (old people, Catholics, unions) and are alienating more traditional voting blocs like African Americans and some Hispanic populations with the constant drama over trans issues. Nobody heard about anything this election cycle other than abortion and transgender issues. It’s a big tent party, but when progressives steal all the oxygen, the wheels fall off the train.
They need to run a tall white dude with good hair who talks about economic opportunity, fair play and protecting the future.
My parents live in the country. A farmer (whose father was the county Democratic Party chair) has a massive sign “Trump. I don’t like him, but we need him”. That’s the 2024 election unfortunately.
Old people actually leaned bluer this year relative to past elections.
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In 2016 John McAffee tried to run for president as a libertarian candidate, RIP.
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I know he was a drug addict, but a pedophile? I never heard about that, can you tell me more or are you just being weird?
What is the age of consent for whales?
Lol, that tweet I remember!
> Unfortunately my previous comment was flagged, presumably by pedophiles or their supporters.
Or, you know... people who think it's a dick move to call an entire political movement pedophiles without a shred of evidence.
> Ironic that an authoritarian fascist was able to get elected by enlisting the help of anti-authoritarian communities with a single issue promise.
Ironic? It's the oldest trick in the book bro
It's a trite thing to say, but when it comes to Trump it fits the pattern of inside dealing ... I'm guessing he personally will profit from this somehow / someone promised a donation / money.
To the libertarians.
because the crypto bros love him
who else will buy new treasury DOGE coins?
I am active in libertarian circles and Ulbricht was a cause celebre. The 2024 election was a game of inches, and many libertarians I know voted Trump purely on this issue. It is possible this was a key way Trump eked out a victory.
Libertarians are very hard to take seriously because of shit like this. Nothing about Donald Trump is Libertarian.
They just won something they cared about: perhaps you should be taking them even more seriously than you did.
And even if you are not a fan of a political group, you are the one being judgemental here on a factor that is very unlikely to be universal within the group.
Treating anyone according to political labels is divisive.
They got a single guy out of prison, but pretty much everything else in Trump's platform is diametrically opposed to libertarianism. It's hard to think of anything less libertarian than tariff-funded big government!
Tariffs are not good for free market diehards. However the nuance is that foreign countries like China do not operate on a fair playing field, they want free access to our markets but prevent our champions from entering their's. Something must be done here. I'm not convinced tariffs are the best tool, but at least it's something.
In terms of small government, there is news about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) every single day. There will be a massive downsizing in the federal workforce and the regulatory state over the next 4 years. This move towards small government is the thing that excites me most.
Trump has is proposing a 10% tariff on China, and a 25% tariff on Mexico.
Also he's handing out tariff exemptions to his political allies like candy.
There's not some high minded principal or strategy here. It's graft and spite. Trump even seems to be holding out the tariff threat as leverage to force the sale of TikTok.
Look you can agree with this stuff if you want but none of it is remotely aligned with libertarian principles. Even squishy ones.
Biden could have taken the wind out of Trump's sails by commuting Ulbricht's sentence when he was in office. If you don't think a group's interests are worth listening to, don't be surprised when that group votes for someone who does.
Very little about the Libertarian party is libertarian. Yet another party carrying water for authoritarianism, with the difference being that the implementation is through corporations.
Libertarians are a self selecting bunch. Very few were raised into this philosophy. You can appreciate that my self identification as a libertarian is a careful, reasoned decision and not one that was flippantly made. It is the philosophy that is the most accurate and truthful to me.
Read my comment again. I self-identify as a libertarian as I see individual freedom as paramount. But I kept going with the analysis to realize that the Libertarian Party does very little to represent that ideal.
My apologies, I thought you were accusing libertarians of authoritarianism (the irony!).
I find the Mises Caucus at least useful in pushing to do more than simply be an affinity group for people pretending to play politics. I find partying with LP officials to be very hilarious, what a group of odd balls. But the party itself has no hope of electoral victory, which is why everyone should vote Republican in the current iteration of two-party politics from the libertarian lens.
Libertarians are a joke because they refuse to realize that allowing corporations unlimited freedom means that the individual has less freedom. Their entire ideology just removes the boot of the state and replaces it with the boot of the corporation.
The boot of the state is very much going to remain intact in this administration.
Libertarians are not a joke. Some of the most powerful people on earth are libertarians. The people who write off libertarians are blind.
I prefer corporations because I can voluntarily choose to take my business elsewhere, or even better, create my own competitor. Why I dislike the government is that it's the ultimate monopoly, with guns, and operated mostly by power-hungry sociopaths who will use that power to destroy innocent lives.
Given the corporation or the state, I take the corporation every time.
My point is that even if there were an electoral victory, the Libertarian Party would not bring individual freedom. They are operating from an assertion that starting with a list of moral axioms, every implication will be morally right by construction. By itself this is terribly mistaken (see Godel), but it goes askew even sooner when a few poor axioms are allowed to remain through "pragmatism", regulatory capture, etc.
As for the current political environment, I'd say that bureaucratic authoritarianism is at least the devil we know and can be routed around by individuals, whereas autocratic authoritarianism is at best a wildcard that stands to destroy a good chunk of the laws that have actually been restraining naked power.
yeah but freeing ross was a key campaign promise made by trump to sway libertarian voters
However both Libertarians and Trump are transactional.
I don't judge anyone too hard when they're willing to bend a bit to get someone out of jail after the key has been thrown away. I didn't vote Trump but I will admit the possibility of Ross being released made me pause when I marked my ballot, even his mom's image flashed in my mind and I felt guilty for not helping.
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It was a decisive electoral vote victory, but 2.3 million votes difference works out as 49.8% of the popular vote to 48.3% of the popular vote.
I believe around 230,000 votes across Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin would have made the difference.
I think that counts as eking, personally.
Winning by 1.6% is not a massive victory. It's actually a smaller margin than Hillary won the popular vote by in 2016 (despite losing the electoral vote).
he lost be like 68 that much to grandpa Biden
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How are cartels terrorist organizations but online drug markets are not illegal ?
I wonder if the decision to drop the "murder for hire" charges was originally influenced by his existing life sentence, and whether the pardon now alters that reasoning. Is it still possible for him to be prosecuted on those charges?
Without any snark, why? What's the motivation?
There's probably still some SR btc they wanted the keys to.
Two life sentences was a bit harsh. 11 years seems about right to me.
I suspect the idea beyond "Free Ross" in some circles was that his conviction wasn't so much about drug dealing, but rather it was more a political prosecution for popularizing real uses of cryptocurrencies.
Possibly a deal with the Libertarian Party, which chose not to run their candidate in several states to help Trump: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhDKYYdD2vY
It was one of the promises he made at a Bitcoin conference he attended a few months ago. It has been a popular issue in crypto circles
Just feels all around
These discussions are very interesting. So many red flags from Trump (this pardon, ending birthright citizenship...), and people try to justify these things. America is unfortunately heading for a very dark time. Politics aside, I am rather uncomfortable with the power the president possesses. We were always mindful that there are systems of checks and balances. However, given the current court overturned a precedent (Roe), I am unsure what the future holds. This pardon makes me very uneasy.
Explain to me like to five year old why when I create a _successful_ drug marketplace that sold whole bunch of illegal drugs should be pardoned?
This thread really shows how unhinged the community is. Dude hired contract killers and ran the most prolific darkweb forum for whatever. He's not some martyr. He's just a bum.
Ross just posted this photo on X. Man served 10 years, time for him to be free.
https://x.com/Free_Ross/status/1881925029497377104
I laundered money on The Silkroad (sent birthday cards filled with cash for bitcoin). It was a level of criminality I was fairly comfortable with. I do retain some fear that my door would be kicked in some day. Lawyers of HN, Am I in the clear now too? Ross tried to have a guy murdered, after all.
That depends, did you send the cards on their birthday?
IANAL, but I think you should be in the clear as long as you left a big red lipstick kiss on the bottom of the card.
I can’t believe Trump did something right. If Harris were prez he’d be languishing there till who knows when.
The right decision.
In one message, Ulbricht informed ELLINGSON that “[the murder target] is a liability and I wouldn't mind if he was executed.” In another message, Ulbricht stated: “[the murder target] is causing me problems . . . I would like to put a bounty on his head if it’s not too much trouble for you. What would be an adequate amount to motivate you to find him?” ELLINGSON responded, “[the p]rice for clean is 300k+ USD,” and the “[p]rice for non-clean is 150-200k USD depending on how you want it done.” ELLINGSON further explained, in part, that “[t]hese prices pay for 2 professional hitters including their travel expenses and work they put in.”
Ulbricht later sent ELLINGSON $150,000 worth of Bitcoin to pay for the purported murder. ELLINGSON and Ulbricht agreed on a code to be included with a photograph to prove that the murder had been carried out. In April 2013, ELLINGSON and Ulbricht exchanged messages reflecting that ELLINGSON had sent Ulbricht photographic proof of the murder. A thumbnail of a deleted photograph purporting to depict a man lying on a floor in a pool of blood with tape over his mouth was recovered from Ulbricht’s laptop after his arrest. A piece of paper with the agreed-upon code written on it is shown in the photograph next to the head of the purportedly dead individual.
Later in April 2013, ELLINGSON and Ulbricht exchanged additional messages regarding a plot to kill four additional people in Canada. Ulbricht sent ELLINGSON an additional $500,000 worth of Bitcoin for the murders. ELLINGSON claimed to Ulbricht in online messages that the murders had in fact been committed.
James Ellingson is a convicted federal criminal charged with numerous crimes related to this case.
Tasked with investigating Silk Road he ended up in jail himself, along with his co-workers.
There's a very good reason none of this stuff ever went to trial, it would be incredibly embarrassing for the agencies involved to see the light of day.
That is table stakes for Trump
https://archive.today/FNvkp
From wikipedia:
> "full and unconditional pardon for any crimes related to drugs".
Does "any crimes related to drugs" include the murder for hire allegations? Does this mean new charges related to that could be brought against him?
Wasn't charges about paying a hitmen dropped?
Seems like it.
Given the farcical nature of those allegations and all that we now know, including that others with access to the Dread Pirate Roberts account assert that the DEA agent making the allegations (who is himself now in prison for attempting to steal some of the silk road bitcoin) had access as well, it will be wonderful if DoJ attempts to bring charges, just to further clear Ross' name.
There are not a shred of evidence that Ross ever had the slightest thing to do with those conversations, and it seems much more likely that the DEA used the DPR account to frame him.
All I can think about after reading this is "Rest In Power Aaron Swartz"
The laws should change too. Legalize and regulate drugs and access.
When Snowden, is my question. RFK put a lot of words into "if I am in charge that'll be my first thing". Yeah, he's not the president but he's also not nobody anymore.
Oh that’s going to be good if it happens.
Everyone will celebrate Trump’s good deed while he funnels more government money to companies like Palantir to do things similar to PRISM.
NGL it would be pretty funny if Snowden gets to return to the west but we hadn't actually fixed any of the stuff he brought forward in the meantime. Not sure what I would do in his shoes... I guess a pardon is pretty impossible for future presidents to get around, TBF
The courage a lot of these whistleblowers have shown is admirable. How the American public outrages, though: Facebook has targeted ads. How they don't outrage: their government is illegally tracking their own citizens' movements and communications including overseas.
Not going to say Ulbricht is a hero like some of the others, but he trail blazed like none before him! And he deserves his freedom years ago.
private intelligence still has a few ways to go before whistleblowers don't have all their rights stripped by the state
I'd be worried about the Russians putting him in jail if the US pardoned him.
I don't think Putin would want to taint his relationship with Trump on his first week on the White House.
That doesn't mean that he would want to be seen to be a pushover https://thehill.com/policy/international/5098063-donald-trum...
For someone that likes to take top secret documents and share them with unauthorized people, Snowden sounds perfect for this guy to pardon
Good.
I wonder if this action was executed at the suggestion of Mr. Musk?
It seems questionable Trump even understands or cares what Silk Road did or how it worked.
those thinking this is a criminal who shouldn’t be released i recommend reading this thread https://x.com/tayvano_/status/1641931312385888256
I thought it was a ridiculously long sentence compared to what other people have received. 10 years was right. That's enough time. I know that he was accused of hiring a hitman, but he was never convicted of that. It should have never been used in his sentencing. I think the government tried to make an example out of Ross Ulbrich, and it was a miscarriage of justice.
finally! let’s go!
though he was very stupid with how he did it, I am happy he is a free man
Wait, is he smart or stupid ?
This thread is a great lesson in "Politics is a mind virus"
I recommend you read the HN thread when Ulbricht was sentenced [0] first, then come here and read all the "Honest, genuine question, why?"s
Then start practicing not letting politics influence your thought process
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9626985
Or it could be different people commenting than on that original thread? And people might have changed their minds? HN is not a monolith. Humans are not static. You don't need to blame it on "politics being a mind virus".
But “mind virus“ is such a cool phrase, and it implies that people who disagree with you are not just wrong, but diseased. Great bit of rhetoric.
I don't know. I personally know people that lost their minds because of an election. Completely well off people, whose lives are not affected at all by national politics, apart from slight changes in tax rates. They live in a state and city that shares their politics. They're isolated from everything on the national level.
Yet some of these people have rearranged their entire lives around a singular politician. Ended relationships, moved, started therapy or medication.
It happens on both sides and its pretty sad.
What else would you call that?
>Completely well off people, whose lives are not affected at all by national politics, apart from slight changes in tax rates. They live in a state and city that shares their politics. They're isolated from everything on the national level...
>What else would you call that?
This is one of those comments that accidentally reveals more than intended because I would call that "empathy". You are revealing that the only reason you think people should be concerned about politics is when it directly effects them. Some people actually genuinely care about other people and seeing someone elected who has promised to hurt people is a disturbing and troubling turn of events even if they themselves are likely to be safe.
So you’re saying people are making a rational estimation of the various harms caused to their fellowmen, determining that political actions in Washington are the primary component, and feeling bad about the harm?
I don’t buy it. Citing empathy is moral language to justify bad actions.
>So you’re saying people are making a rational estimation of the various harms caused to their fellowmen, determining that political actions in Washington are the primary component, and feeling bad about the harm?
Trump released an executive order yesterday that said some of my friends are no longer considered citizens of this country. Yes, sometimes it is incredibly obvious when Washington is to blame for people's suffering.
This thread is about people whose well being and ability to enjoy life is ruined by politics (Enemy centered mindset).
It’s normal to feel bad for someone you know impacted by bad a policy. Ruining your life on their behalf is not empathetic.
>This thread is about people whose well being and ability to enjoy life is ruined by politics
Another facet of empathy is being able to understand other perspectives besides your own. Maybe this was your interpretation of the bounds of the conversation. It doesn't mean that is the only interpretation.
Here are the exact words from the comment I replied to: "Ended relationships, moved, started therapy or medication." I don't think those are signs someone whose "ability to enjoy life is ruined". In fact, I see those as signs of someone enjoying life more by removing or addressing things that sap the joy out of life.
I think you should manage your health and safety first and those closest to you.
You're not helping by inflicting harm on yourself and those around you. If you want to canvas for the other side, donate, volunteer, great. But these people are obsessed and inflict a lot of damage on themselves for no good purpose.
Most people empathize to those that are infected with a virus. It's often out of their control. You can only offer them help and suggest they touch grass once in a while. But you shouldn't feed into their self delusions that self harm and obsession with things out of their control is healthy and a good way to live their life
The empathy you are showing in this comment would feel a lot more genuine if you didn't reveal with your prior comment how little empathy plays into your overall worldview. I'm personally fine, you don't have to waste your time telling me how to live a better life. I was just trying to explain to you what you were seemingly misunderstanding about your fellow humans.
> Some people actually genuinely care about other people and seeing someone elected who has promised to hurt people is a disturbing and troubling turn of events even if they themselves are likely to be safe.
Ya but, it's all a bit silly isn't it? Realistically those people wouldn't be doing any of that unless they were addicted to media and perhaps by consequence emotionally volatile. If I chose not to be chronically keeping up with stuff on a moment to moment basis that only has vague intangible impacts on my life or those around me, specifically online, does that make me less empathetic or less tolerant of having all my time, energy, and attention stolen from me? That's not always the case, but it often is, and if it's actually relevant, you're opting into poor mental health despite having zero control over anything even if you care, so you might as well not be so tuned in; which part is the good part again?
It's a bit fatalistic perhaps, but I feel like the greatest trick social media (and Trump) ever pulled was convincing us we'd be pariahs if we opted out. If not for chronically keeping up with nearly literally every word the new batch of chronies has to say, they might not be saying it.
>If I chose not to be chronically keeping up with stuff on a moment to moment basis that only has vague intangible impacts on my life or those around me, specifically online, does that make me less empathetic or less tolerant of having all my time, energy, and attention stolen from me?
Some people view empathy as an active ability to "put yourself in someone else's shoes". Other people view it as a passive feeling along the lines of "it hurts to see other people hurt". If you can just stop being empathic by not thinking about it, you are in the first group. Some of us are in the second group and can't just decide to ignore it.
Belief.
Belief short circuits reason.
Weird part is that these two groups generally belive are not that different in the general. Most of the fight on the ideological side is on marginal differences.
This all is mostly idiotic tribal fight when you hate each other because you just must to hate someone.
I profoundly hope for star trek like civilisation in the future
It’s religious conflict. Nobody cares really about differences in tax rates. But differences in foundational beliefs about the world and humanity will do that.
Integrity?
i prefer 'mind-killer', myself.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i...
Talk like this is never apolitical. No political change can occur without discussion first and therefore preemptively dismissing political discussion is inherently an endorsement of the current power structures.
There is no way to actually discuss this specific story without discussing politics. A president pardoning someone is an inherently political act and that is only emphasized when it was done on his first day in office and with a statement that includes lines like "The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me." That is all part of the story of what happened here and it involves politics whether you like it or not.
People generally do not come up with absurd beliefs all on their own, those do spread like a virus and as a consequence of all that social contagion, they do not seem all that absurd anymore to the person who contracts them.
Yes let's use word that need massive essays to explain what one person believes they mean... Like "woke". And not just stick to words we know the meaning of. That surely aid the discussion. /s
Exactly. If anything, the one thing that’s guaranteed in these types of threads is that someone will make this same tired argument of “aha, but HN back then said differently” as if it’s some kind of gotcha. I used to always look, and not only was it never the same people but the threads are largely more balanced than the original poster let on. It’s like the contrarian dynamic, which dang has to explain over and over and over and over and over again.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
This is often a bit of a cop-out.
Any time a criminal is caught, people want them to do hard time, but people believe we're too hard on crime if you don't use examples. People think the government should spend less, but are far less likely too agree to any specific cut. People thought Musk was a genius until they realised he is also a jerk.
And while it's sometimes different people, it's suspiciously reliably consistent in what you see said and upvoted.
Based on the sheer number of posts that have misrepresented the charges or misunderstood why he was actually in prison, it appears to partially be a lack of knowledge on the case, likely due to time hazing some of the memories. Of course someone will change their mind, and some may have their view influenced by who happens to support him.
"Politics" is a dismissive word for crypto's evolution over the last decade. North Korea ransoming our hospitals, industrial scale gambling and scam enablement, wealthy kingpins buying self-serving policy. Crypto grew up. So did our opinions.
That doesn't change what Ross Ulbricht did, but we can now see him as continuous with a great evil that we couldn't see at the time. With more information, our opinions changed, and they were right to change.
The main thing I notice is that back then we were writing paragraphs.
Wow. I thought you were being glib, but the average comment length is noticeably higher in the linked discussion. While length isn’t necessarily a valid proxy for meaningful conversation, this was definitely an eye-opening contrast to the current thread.
The value of the <EOS> token has gone up since then.
I mostly stopped typing in paragraphs because I use a smart phone for most of my internetting. It's a lot easier to write your thoughts on a keyboard
Using a touchscreen halves my IQ.
(I'm challenged enough to start with.)
Well, that thread is almost a decade old. HN a decade ago was a very different vibe than today.
You are insinuating one thing, but perhaps it is also possible reason is that the same people with those old views of the crimes have grown and their views changed. I know mine certainly have gone that way. I’d have to imagine other users have grown with me.
I don't see anything special about that thread. There are in fact more people there who believe the contract killing allegations than now.
Nah social media is just about engagement. People who are happy with the article don’t bother to comment. Those who are outraged comment. It’s just two different groups of people commenting
What exactly are you trying to say here?
That people can't change their minds? That HN is a hivemind ? (news flash: it's not , it's more diverse than you actually think) or that everything is attributed to "Politics is a mind virus" ? if so, what do you mind by this term specifically?
I personally, find little substance in such comments. If you have an opinion on the matter (which seemingly you do), then please share it so that we can have a discussion about it.
So.. care to elaborate?
At the time of sentencing, did we already know that the murder for hire plots were created by corrupt Secret Service and DEA agents on trial next door? and all of that was withheld from the defense and the jury?
because that's where the story really jumps the shark. I'm all for some accountability - such as the 12 years in prison already - but that particular case should have been dropped for several reasons, I've seen cases dropped for way less.
It’s different people commenting on each post. There’s no “mind virus”.
Man, that shit is so old. Even if you're right, which I don't think you are, you are adding nothing to the conversation but cynicism.
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Don't cut and paste AI output. Anyone on HN who wants it can generate it themselves. Post your own thoughts.
For anyone who followed the Silk Road / Ross Ulbrict saga, this is all obvious and surface-level.
I think this comment would have got less downvotes if you could have made it somewhat shorter. Walls of text like this just scream Unabomber manifesto to me :)
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I’m confused as Trump said he wanted to be tough on crime and drugs and “kill drug dealers”, but he just pardoned one of the worlds largest drug dealers.
He was never a drug dealer, he provided a platform that was used to sell drugs. The pardon was a surprise, however his sentence was unfairly strict and he was clearly made an example out of that hasn't happened to any other platform provider.
Just as an example, there have been investigations in to the use of Snapchat as a method for drug dealers and gangs of drug dealers to access kids to sell them drugs However there has been absolutely zero discussion in the public domain even about shutting it down or requiring new laws to stop this, let alone considering charging the owners.
Hmm, but you have to be squinting pretty hard to see an equivalence between Snapchat and silk road
Even if you compare like for like, SR Vs SR2, the responses, charges, and sentences still aren't the same.
There is a huge difference between a communication platform that some users abuse for illegal purposes, and a platform whose primary purpose is a marketplace for illegal goods.
Actually the marketplace was just a marketplace, it then was primarily used for illegal goods. It hasn't really ever been proven that it was setup as a marketplace for illegal goods.
Why would anyone need an anonymous poor UX marketplace for anything other than illegal goods?
It seems a big strectch, 99%+ revenue was from illegal goods, and it wasn’t like it was some decentralized blockchain marketplace.
The value created was reducing “legislative risk” for buyers and sellers of illegal goods.
Also, people just run ads on Facebook for drugs, counterfeit money, stolen debit cards.. it’s wild.
[dead]
Are you really confused? Did you believe him? He commits many crimes himself and so do his associates.
I suppose it could be made consistent if we posit the existence of another hidden rule. For example, the skin-color or political-connectedness of the accused.
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I think you need much more than "feels" to make claims like that, especially as they are directly contrary to HN guidelines, but also because making baseless claims, especially about other commenters, is a meaningless, inflammatory response.
So far you don't know what you are talking about and are making things up. If you do know what you're talking about and aren't making it up, please share your evidence and reasoning.
I mean daily we have responses and posts based on feels, but anyway I would state mine is based on fact.
Firstly, The sentence for running the exact same website, was 5 years.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/silk-road-2-founder-dread-pi...
The two life sentences and 35 years extra that were given to Ross were most certainly abnormal and used to make an example of. I have yet to see this comparison made although if anyone could provide valid reasons in the difference I would be open to listening.
Secondly, the sheer number of posts on this site stating didn't he hire a hitman. No, and there was no conviction of that.
I distinctly remember listening to recordings of him hiring a hitman. It's been a long time and my memory is certainly prone to error, but that sort of thing does stick with you. I especially remember the irony because he also preached about non-violence at some point, obviously until someone's continued existence became inconvenient for him.
I don't agree with that and I don't understand why those charges were not taken to court (I don't believe it was purely because he already had 2 life sentences as when the appeals were going to the supreme court and there was a risk of him winning, it surely made sense to secure him if you had the evidence to proceed with another case). Whether that was true or not though, someone can only be sentenced and punished on what one was convicted of. Anything else is not based in justice or law.
I don't really believe that the US is a country ruled by law any more, but in some idealized land of the law you are probably correct. But you won't convince me that OJ Simpson walking on a double homicide he clearly committed is justice. For Ulbricht, it actually feels like things more or less balanced out, but he did try to have someone killed, and I don't think that's a nice thing to do.
Did the judge conclude, as part of sentencing, that hiring a hit (or two?) was likely?
What reasoning did the judge give for the sentencing? They might involve similar websites but the crimes can be much different. Two people can run the same drug cartel at different times, but that doesn't mean their crimes are the same.
I think one can say the sentences were too severe and still think some sentence was fine.
I would agree with this. He deserved punishment as he did break the law.
Your link says that was a court in England. England generally has different sentencing standards than the US.
Valid point, however even those involved that were comvicted in the US such as Brian Farrell only received single digit sentences.
It was pretty out of left field and seemingly uncharacteristic for the him to do this. It's fair to ask why. I think Trump is terrible in every way, think the pardon is fine, but can't help but wonder why and other questions about it
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Donald literally cites Mommy Ulbricht's political inclinations...
Could you post the literal text? I don't really want to make a Doubleplustruth Social account, and it doesn't seem to be in other news excerpts.
His posts are public:
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1138691127416...
"I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross. The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
Thanks, I tried their front-page but it seemed to demand an account before any browsing or searching.
Good - edit - from what I recall he was some kid in a library running a website that got out of hand - he was an idealist who reminded me of Aaron. But I don’t know much more than that. Just my 2 cents.
Aaron tried to give the world free access to information for no personal gain.
Ross ran an online marketplace for drugs and other illegal materials for personal profit.
The life sentence was ridiculous, but they're not he same at all.
It's the difference between Chelsea Manning or Snowden leaking state secrets and someone who sells on state secrets to the Russians or Chinese.
Not going to try and sway you here but to learn more, read or listen to "American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road".
Truly fascinating story and good story telling.
Is SBF next in line for a pardon?
SBF lost a lot of money for a lot of rich people; he's not getting off so easy as someone selling illegal drugs and ordering hits on competitors
Hope he goes on Dark Net Diaries.
I wonder if he is going to be able to launder and cash out whatever crypto he squirreled away. His finances are probably going to be closely watched.
Starting a business that accepts crypto payments is going to be a tell.
He has admitted his wrong doings and made efforts to change whilst in prison. I doubt he will go straight back to a life even remotely close to before. He was doing good in prison for other inmates and I imagine he will continue doing the same now he has this second chance.
What the future holds for someone who was pardoned is likely decided based on very different rationalization compared to how one acts while serving a lifetime prison sentence.
Whilst I understand your point of view that the change in circumstances can change how someone decides to act, I don't believe there is much history to show someone who gained a surprising second chance outside of prison has gone back to their previous life.
> I don't believe there is much history to show someone who gained a surprising second chance outside of prison has gone back to their previous life.
Didnt have to look far, from dec 9:
https://lawandcrime.com/crime/exonerated-man-heading-back-to...
Of course, there will be an outlier. I didn't state no history. One person doing wrong after being released shouldn't mean no one gets released.
No but recidivism should be factored into such a decision.
It's vindication of political violence that's the problem. If political violence is sanctioned, then there is no law.
I'm wondering that too. I think there's three options: he either has secret money hidden away, is going to get a cushy job in tech by some fan, or he's going to be working as a walmart greeter in 3 years.
Honestly I'm hoping he gets an X account so I can follow him and see which it is lol
If he’s smart he’ll go Jordan Belfort style and make money with book, speaking, and movie deals.
That's the old way of doing things.
Now it's all about podcasts, energy drinks and crypto coin rug-pulls.
does he even need to launder it ? The pardon may cover any proceeds given Trump described it as "a full and unconditional pardon"
Pardoned from the crimes convicted of? Or pardoned from any crime. I found the Biden pardon to be particular egregious because of how vague it was.
The sympathy for this guy from so many of you makes me sad.
The messages show he wanted and thought he was getting people murdered. But that's perfectly OK because it was actually the evil FBI he was talking to!
Surely you must understand that he was also white and solid middle class.
And he was able to code sloppy LAMP code.
Ah I hadn't seen his photo. Could have been me after a night of drinking, lets not ruin the poor guys life just because of a few callous decisions.
Trump refused to pardon Assange and Snowden. I suppose he has priorities.
In 2021, presumably during SBF's (big Democrat donor) FTX scam, Trump thought that Bitcoin was a scam:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57392734
Now he is best friends with the "crypto", AI, and H1B bros.
> “All my Republican donations were dark,” [SBF] said, referring to political donations that are not publicly disclosed in FEC filings. “The reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the f—k out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.”
> Given that he donated nearly $40 million to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle—and he admitted to giving an equal amount to Republicans—his total political contributions may have actually been around $80 million.
https://time.com/6241262/sam-bankman-fried-political-donatio...
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Yep. He's not opposed to a scam so long as he's on the money-receiving side of it.
To wit his wife just launched one.
I am surprised Trump pardoned him, not unhappy bout it tho!
This is a rare Trump win. There are many things to criticize him for, but this pardon isn't one of them. I don't think anyone, after researching this case, would be okay with the life sentence handed down to Ross.
Most people in real life don’t even know who this guy is. This is a guy that online people know. I will agree it’s a win, he was unfairly sentenced. I just wish I would have been able to buy from SR. I did get to browse it before it was seized.
Life no but probably more than he did in the end. He was really turning into a syndicate boss. The deep ars technica article was pretty depressing.
Obligatory "This is good for bitcoin"
Among other things this guy was trying to have people murdered.
I guess this is why he was upset about Mexico sending drug dealers and murderers - he didn't want competition for our homegrown drug dealers and murderers.
Trump freed him because libertarians voted for him - he openly said so. Meanwhile, he's waging a war on fentanyl! He should've freed Snowden instead.
Now that I didn’t expect
Let’s do some crimes
I really wonder who benefits from this. Trump only does things that are good for him, or those close to him. I realize he's been making connections to the crypto world, and has his own meme coins. Does pardoning Ross somehow make crypto more valuable?
Partisan caricature is not a reliable starting point for logical inference or deduction. To answer your question - on the campaign trail he attended a convention of libertarian organizers and promised them that if he won he would free Ross, and has followed through on that promise today.
It’s also just good politics. There are a vocal group of voters that are in favor of this, so it gets those people on his side. And no reason not to (politically), as most people just don’t care about this topic, or if they do and disagree with the decision, this isn’t going to be the action that moves the needle for them on how they feel about Trump or the Republican Party.
A video from Reason magazine a few days ago[0] mentioned a deal between the Libertarian Party leadership and Trump in which they selectively didn't run their candidate in several states in order to help Trump. If this is true, Trump could have reneged, but evidently decided whatever political blowback for pardoning Ulbricht (which is probably small potatoes at this rate) wasn't worth the credibility cost.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhDKYYdD2vY
Trump made the deal at the Libertarian National Convention to garner their support.
Interesting. I wonder who pushed Trump to do this. Gotta be Musk. Who else?
The LP presumably
I am happy to see that Trump is a man of his word. I voted for him just because of this campaign promise. I would have voted for almost anyone who promised this.
How could that possibly be the most important political issue?
I am very sympathetic to the idea of voting just for Ross. It is unclear to me which candidate would be better, since neither of them are close to my political beliefs at all. It is a deadlock and I seem completely unrepresented. The consequences of voting based on any big issues I care about seems completely unpredictable; politics is a game of lies, smoke and mirrors. So I would perhaps rather vote for the candidate that would definitely save one person's life that is important to me.
Unless it's your day job: never try to unpack the priorities of a voter. You'll just get sad.
(For consideration on this topic: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138732/th...)
What were your number 2 and 3 issues, out of curiosity?
Were there any accompanying policies that you would say, "despite promising to free Ross Ulbricht, I don't think accompanying Policy X would be worth it?"
This one act was more important than the Paris agreement?
Immensely more important than an ineffective agreement on an overblown problem.
Not OP, but yes, immensely. Two different galaxies.
The Paris Agreement is a joke; it has done nothing. It's just a bunch of big-ass politicians and a few celebrities bloviating about not solving the problem.
Look, I'm not disputing at all that global warming is an issue, or that we need to solve it, or that humans cause it, or whatever. But the Paris Agreement and those all other agreements are all about big idiots pretending to do stuff.
Probably the most effective thing we have done globally to combat warming is changing to electric cars, and that's NOT the Paris Agreement. Not even close.
The Paris Agreement is the ultimate politician's move. Global warming is a technical problem and must be solved by technical means.
Ironically, the one person who is doing more than all the politicians combined to solve this is backing the current administration. Twitter is nuts over if he did a Nazi salute, while doing nothing to focus on solving what they believe is the biggest issue in our lifetimes.
Yes. The Paris Agreement is a bunch of virtue signaling WEF nonsense. The biggest polluter is not reducing CO2 emissions, and the United States is reducing them, both in absolute terms and per capita, at a great cost to its industrial capacity: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=CHN~USA
You're right. I guess we just shouldn't do anything. And somehow it's virtue signaling and reduces output?
Yes. If you stop producing steel (which we kinda did), and just buy it from China instead, you haven't "eliminated emissions". You've merely moved them to a country which is currently not subject to the environmental limits. We are on the same planet - in the long run it doesn't matter where you burn coal.
How do you feel about him backing down on H1B visas, price of groceries, peace in Ukraine...
It's baffling to me that there are actually comments on Hacker Gosh Darn News of all places suggesting that Ross justly belonged in prison.
He successfully created a tool to undermine one of the most unjust and predatory policies of the US State - the policy of drug prohibition.
He's a damn hero. I don't understand why Trump, who most of the time seems like a simply awful human being with no end of appetite for state power, has chosen to do this, but I'll certainly take it.
It's beyond obvious that voting and other mechanics of representative rule have not succeeded at simple policy change such as ending prohibition. I look forward to several decades of truth trumping power in the form of the internet undermining states, until the asinine mode of political organization known as the nation state is deprecated entirely.
Just a reminder: the condition for accepting a pardon is acknowledging that you did commit the crime in question and accept the court's finding of guilt.
In contrast: Biden didn't pardon Leonard Peltier, the president commuted his sentence. Peltier maintains his innocence.
Do you have a source for that condition? How does that work for Biden pardoning Fauci for crimes that havent been revealed yet?
Can you share more about your first point? A brief search shows the 1915 Burdick supreme court case said that accepting a pardon can imply guilt. However, it doesn't seem to say that acknowledgement or acceptance of guilt is a requirement by the recipient of the pardon.
The latest string of pardons are blatant political power moves. He pardoned _all_ of the January 6 insurrectionists. Many of these people have been filmed attacking police and literally raiding the nations capitol to overturn 2020 election. Violent folks being released back into the public is not good.
Now he’s just getting favors with crypto bros and “libertarians”. Man is building his personal army filled with angry racists, poor men that can be easily manipulated.
Sends a clear message - do this illegal thing for me, I’ll sign away any consequences.
Since no one is posting it, here's Trump Truth Social post on the matter:
"I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross. The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
I have nothing in particular to say about the dead comments in this very young thread, but they're sort-of-interesting comments to have been killed so quickly!
Is it due to HN policy? I guess they're subjective and ideological, and prone to starting arguments rather than debates.
Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
I'm honestly just curious as a conscientious internet citizen lol
> I have nothing in particular to say about the dead comments in this very young thread, but they're sort-of-interesting comments to have been killed so quickly!
[dead] is different than [flagged][dead]. [dead]-only (no [flagged]) means they're auto-dead, they aren't killed by someone reviewing the comments (moderator or users flagging). One of the two commenters was shadow banned years ago but still gets vouched for occasionally (including by me at times). The other one was shadow banned (looked through their history) 11 days ago, with a comment from dang at the time stating as much. They also get vouched for on occasion, based on their comment history.
> Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
dang does usually respond to people with something like that first, then for people who get repeatedly flagged or repeatedly engage in certain kinds of behavior, he bans them.
Jtsummers is correct.
Just to add one point, flagged comments are mostly flagged by users (as opposed to mods). We can only guess why users flag things, but from looking at a sample in the current thread it's probably because they're mostly flamewar-style comments and/or political-battle style comments (or both). Those aren't good for HN because what we want here is curious, thoughtful conversation.
Nothing wrong with HN in particular. Every polarising discussion on a platform with moderation or up/down voting system ends up this way. This structure is fantastic for technical discussions just not amazing for politics
Removing moderation or voting systems (simple chronological comment sorting) creates another set of issues so this problem can't be solved without entirely changing discussion formats
> This structure is fantastic for technical discussions just not amazing for politics
No, it's not. Because the same magnification effect causes the causal, simple and correct sounding to float to the top and the nuanced "<signs deeply> so I dealt with this for 20yr and here's the deal" takes that nobody wants to hear because they're not simple and easy wind up at the bottom but above the flagrantly wrong crap and the trolls.
There's a reason that nothing with real stakes adopts this format and technical discussions that matter still mostly happen in some sort of threaded format that doesn't allow voting or any sort of drive-by low effort interaction to effect much.
Format like this is good for driving interaction, which is why public facing websites use it for their comment sections.
Interesting -- what other system could you possibly have, other than votes...? I'm not sure I understand what you're suggesting. I guess traditional forum threads (sometimes with votes, a-la GitHub) are nice, but ultimately that's just trading "correct sounding" for "early commenter".
Otherwise, the only thing that comes to mind is StackOverflow functionality where OP can mark a single answer as "accepted" and push it to the top instantly (which obv. wouldn't translate well to general discussions).
At the same time he is threatening to tariff China 10% due to their responsibility for fentanyl, lol
Fentanyl wasn't big yet when Silk Road was around. And besides, people were buying straight from China off the clearnet
I think serious jail for running an illegal drug marketplace is good, even if he used lots of neat tech to do so..
I knew people who were wringing it out of medicated patches and sniffing it out of Afrin bottles during high school in the 90s. I also knew someone who ODd and died from tainted/fake pills they bought from one of The Silk Road's (immediate) successors.
Some number of people also OD on "traditional" street drugs every day. So, this is really not a sound argument.
I think they're pointing out the hypocrisy of wanting to crack down on drugs while doing this.
I see so many Trump adjacent folks demanding we lock up drug dealers, deport them, whatever. But they want to let this one go.
Orange man is a classic tough-on-crime guy, very selective what crimes and what demographics of criminals he is tough on.
I see those people in my personal life, too. Ironically, they're also the ones who regularly drive drunk and do a little cocaine now and again because _it doesn't really count_.
Mr. Trump isn't exactly known for making distinctions like that.
Paraphrasing an aphorism I saw elsewhere: "Crime is legal now".
Providing online forums is legal now.
Given there are at least thousands if not millions of people who "provide online forums," and pretty much this single one is in prison, I have to wonder if there's something unique about this case?
I don't know anything about this guy. Is there really nothing unique about his case?
Dread Pirate Roberts is legend, look up the silk road marketplace.
Theres probably a movie or two about it too
Oh so it was a marketplace, not a forum. Like one that allowed people to openly transact illegal goods? That makes more sense.
It's weird that GP seemed to purposely obscure that.
Yes, it was the biggest drug market on the dark web at that time, and the 50,676 bitcoins seized by the feds from then is today worth 5,3 billion dollars to give you an idea.
Also there was a long side story with disappeared bitcoins, presumably stolen by federal investigators.
American Kingpin by Nick Bilton is an excellent book covering Silk Road and what makes this unique
Silk Road was, at its height, uniquely successful and making an absolute mockery of the United States government's capacity to regulate drug trafficking. In addition, he fashioned himself an anti-establishment persona, going by the handle "Dread Pirate Roberts" online.
He was unique in his magnitude of success. Governments can successfully magnify their enforcement ability by making an example of outliers.
It was a forum that mocked the government's ability to regulate drug trafficking and therefore he was prosecuted?
I find that hard to believe.
Hiring a hitman is legal now.
The seven offenses in question: distributing narcotics, distributing narcotics by means of the Internet, conspiring to distribute narcotics, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiring to commit computer hacking, conspiring to traffic in false identity documents, and conspiring to commit money laundering
A judge bypassed the jury and prosecutor and sentenced him as if he hired hit men and admitted doing so. The sentence upgrade was based on a preponderance of evidence, whereas they would have had to proven beyond a reasonable doubt had he been charged.
Framing this as judicial activism is false. Many sentencing arrangements include - with the agreement of the defendant (since it is their rights in this case) - to have other related activities factored in exactly this manner.
It happens all the time in pleas and diversion agreements, so don’t frame it as a reckless lone judge going off the reservation.
To be fair - he was not pardoned for that, he could still be charged for it. He was only pardoned for crimes related to drugs.
do you know that is actually the case ? i've been trying to find the text of the pardon and haven't been able to yet. can only find Trump's description of it as "full and unconditional"
edit: i see your other comment with the context
They unfortunately have not released the text yet.
It should eventually pop up here: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-recipients
(among other places)
He was never tried for that. Don't believe the disinformation.
blatant entrapment and gaslighting for more than a year by law enforcement dedicating 24h to it.
the real criminals for that prank were never even tried.
Looks like the "real criminal" was charged.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/silk-road-drug-vendor-w...
Running an elicit drug and whatever else you want to sell market is legal now.
This was a pandering to get Libertarians' votes. It has nothing to do with the crime itself. I wouldn't commit any crimes and expect to get away with them unless I anticipated becoming the pawn in someone's scheme to get elected.
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“If a law is unjust a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so” - Thomas Jefferson
1. There is no evidence jefferson ever said this
2. There is no evidence anyone else ever said this, either
The closest you get is MLK.
See https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
But MLK also talks about moral obligation and not other forms of obligation.
He was not trying to create a free for all where everyone gets to decide which laws are okay or not, because he (and jefferson) were not complete morons.
Touche, however there is plenty of evidence of people throughout history making this assertion, including MLK.
He was trying to create a more just, egalitarian society. I don't understand how you can consider acting in accordance with leading research on successful drug policy "moronic"?
Successful drug policy meaning what here?
Least amount of harm to both the individual and society as a whole whilst recognizing people's fundamental right to bodily autonomy.
MLK was himself referencing Saint Augustine:
>Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."
Considering that his rhetoric was very much based on Christianity, it's clear what standard of "unjust" he was applying.
> Considering that his rhetoric was very much based on Christianity, it's clear what standard of "unjust" he was applying.
Considering the diversity of standards of justice within the history of Christianity (which, in just the US, includes—relevant to this topic—MLK, sure, but also the Southern Baptist Convention, founded explicitly in support of slavery), I don't know that having rhetoric grounded in Christian theology tells much of substance about the standard of justice one is appealing to.
Is it unjust to prohibit the sale of illegal drugs, weapons, etc.? Society has good reasons for regulating certain goods. I regularly see people in my community who are enslaved by fentanyl and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. The society I live in decided to make selling it illegal. What is unjust about that?
As I recall weapons weren't permitted on the platform.
The society didn't decide, the ruling class decided to use drug policy to attack their own citizens.
History shows that prohibition is an abject failure. The fent epidemic is symptomatic of this failed policy.
If they actually cared about the epidemic, addicts would have access to regulated, pharmaceutical grade heroin whilst also having ready access to treatment.
But then we'd have empty prisons and the police would be free to solve real crimes so we can't have that.
> addicts would have access to regulated, pharmaceutical grade heroin
We tried that, it was called the opioid epidemic and Purdue was the pharmacist. We had readily available, doctor-prescribed, high quality narcotics available to anyone who wanted them and the result was an epic disaster that cost thousands of lives.
> weapons weren't permitted on the platform
My mistake.
>We tried that, it was called the opioid epidemic and Purdue was the pharmacist.
Not really, this was a case of a private company deliberately pushing narcotics for profit without oversight or any associated increase in access to treatment options.
Now the "opioid epidemic" has been replaced with a "fentanyl epidemic" which is objectively a much more dangerous drug with absolutely no regulation and murderous cartels instead of doctors - and we're still throwing people in prison for the crime of being addicts rather than treating it as a medical issue.
I don't know the stats (or if it's even possible to accurately collect statistics due to prohibition) but I'm fairly certain this costs more lives than the short lived opioid epidemic.
Is Trump pushing for broad drug decriminalisation? I feel like that would be necessary for this pardon to make sense on the basis of current drug laws being unjust.
Last I heard he was promising to make drug dealers eligible for the death penalty: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-wants-e...
Not exactly, fentanyl epidemic was specifically started by one family seek profit and ousted doctors to over prescribe it while claiming it was mildly addictive.
The war on drugs have caused immeasurable harm due to failure to understand most people use drugs either as escapism or as a tendency.
That's why it has failed.
I think you have fentanyl and oxycodone mixed up
So we like drug markets now ?
How are cartels terrorist organizations?
I like free markets.
There are healthier middle grounds we could explore where e.g. advertisements are banned and individuals could register themselves as being banned from participating in certain addictive vices because they don't consistently have the willpower to quit or don't want to tempt fate trying it (and make it a crime to sell to an individual who has voluntarily banned themselves), but it's hard to argue that The War on Drugs has been in any way just.
I expect in such a society, certain groups (e.g. Mormons) would normalize banning yourself from vices the day you turn 18.
What is just is decided both by an individual and the society they exist in. "It is one's moral obligation to fight injustice" is a pretty common tenent to hold. Injustice can be city laws encouraging anti-homeless spikes. Injustice can also be genocide in a remote country. Those injustices get fought in very different ways. One can be handled by individual vigilanteeism and peacefully petitioning local governance. The other might require global war.
In my personal belief, everyone[0] has the right and moral obligation to fight the injustice they care about at the level they can manage. If that's handing out water at the protest or inventing penicillin, do what you personally can do to improve the world.
[0]the average layperson, obvious exceptions for power/money apply
Sure, but the facts matter. Making millions of dollars by operating a marketplace for illegal drugs is not even close to the same ballpark as protesting a draconian anti-homeless law, let alone resisting genocide!
The only reasonable argument for drug legalization, in my opinion, is the libertarian one - the idea that you should be free to take the drugs you want to take. I am sympathetic to this argument. I am someone who is able to make wise decisions about the drugs I take. But I also recognize that millions of my fellow citizens are not. The harm to society from drug addiction and overdoses outweighs the benefit to me getting high whenever I want.
so we all individually can just decide a law is unjust? that'll be fun
Don't worry - jefferson never actually said this because he wasn't a complete idiot.
Don't take my word for it though, the monticello folks looked into it too - https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
It is a fun quote though, because it's one of those quotes that people want to use to justify their own dumb behavior.
"If you don't like the law, feel free to ignore it" - Albert Einstein
If you come to disagree with the justice of a law, your options are to conform or, yes, decide that the law is unjust.
I mean strictly speaking the people voted for Trump, so collectively they're all okay with this.
Of course Trump's platform was enormously based on law & order and combatting the drug trade, which he seems to think should still be actually illegal and is not ending the war on drugs so, I don't know - make of that what you will.
Maybe Thoreau? That's more authentic and gets at similar themes. On more than one level considering his circumstances and run-ins with law enforcement.
”Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
I wonder how this sentiment is going to play out in Luigi Mangione's trial.
Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner.
So were most aristocrats of the time. Applying presentism doesn't invalidate the idea.
But there were also abolitionists at the time, even amongst that class. Jefferson not being among them does, actually, diminish his standing and his views on justice. This quote, for example, does not acknowledge that there are also laws which are unjust to obey; such as the owning of human beings in chattel slavery.
I don’t think suggesting that his quote would imply his slaves would be justified in violating their own enslavement is any kind of presentism.
It is just hypocritical: even his time most people knew slavery was unjust.
He never actually said it, either.
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… in a society where slavery was legal, widespread, and rarely questioned.
Murder has never been legal.
He tried to have multiple people murdered.
Jefferson did, certainly. He was instrumental in starting a war from what I understand.
Ross though? The government alleged it but never bothered to prove it. Furthermore the government agents involved were laughably corrupt, so anything they alleged needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. For all anybody here know, they fabricated the entire assassination story to distract the public from their plot to loot Ross's money (which unlike the assassination stuff, has been proven in court.)
lol
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This conversation is presently flagged. Why? When Ross was sentenced HN had a discussion about it with more than 600 comments. His conviction has been discussed numerous additional times in other threads throughout the years. His pardon is plainly on-topic for HN, and this discussion is a necessary followup to those previous discussions.
Of course it's on topic. Why did users flag it? Probably some combination of not liking the event itself and fatigue with political stories. But that's just a guess.
In any case, we turned the flags off when we saw it.
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I don't see how this benefits the American economy, jobs, or national security. I do see that for a cohort of people in the Libertarian community this was held to be a central Tenet: Ulbricht was their "hostage" just as the Proud Boys thought their leader was.
But, I can't see how this becomes net beneficial in Congress, or in the wider economy. At best it's providing lower friction movement of goods and services. They tend not to go to Federal Tax collecting exchanges, so I cannot for the life of me see how this helps the exchequer, but maybe thats the point?
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A possible line of reasoning is that drugs should be legal, but the property and violent crimes committed around them shouldn't be, in the same way that adults are legally permitted to drink alcohol, but they're not legally permitted to drive drunk. The "ruining cities" is about the crimes, not the drugs themselves.
(I think.)
Yea, shooting up in itself is a victimless crime. If you can do that in your home and not affect others you shouldn’t be harassed by the state.
If however you shoot up and become violent, harass people, or commit properly crime you should go to jail.
That's the logically consistent line of thought, yes. Which is one I don't particularly disagree with, because of the harm the war on drugs has caused.
But the inconsistency comes from people advocating for a black market drug site and bending towards the far right. The same people who in the same breath also further criminalize drugs, reduce access to things that help addicts while arguing that drug dealers should be deported and our streets swept.
The logical inconsistency is that 'their' drug dealers are conducted by people of virtue therefore they did nothing to break the law. And not being willing to deal with the actual fallout of said illegal drug empire.
> But it seems they don't have a problem with someone running an illegal underground drug smuggling network because...?
People have a soft spot for enterprising wunderkinds of certain demographics, even if he wasn't actually a kid when he start SR.
A good boy like Ross doesn't belong in prison, but the person arrested for smoking crack does, is a common sentiment.
Most libertarians considered the Silk Road a place to buy psychedelics like LSD or mushrooms or experimental synthetic drugs (not that these don’t come with numerous risks). Not a bulk heroin warehouse. So the perception is different from that of a wholesale fentanyl clearing house.
Well for one, Libertarians are not far right in the way you are describing...
Just because the far right complains about 'drugged out zombies' ruining cities thanks to drug smugglers from Mexico, doesn't mean libertarians think that. Libertarians have been opposed to the "war on drugs" for decades.
They've gone full doublethink, like when Trump claimed Jan 6 was done by antifas, but then pardoned them all and no one seemed to remember.
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Do you think it's possible the 11 years he spent in prison could have had any rehabilitation effect? Or should we jail anyone who ever commits a crime to a life sentence?
Whether Ulbricht is a changed man is somewhat immaterial to the signaling to other young would-be drug kingpins that the President thinks you shouldn't be punished so harshly for setting up online black markets.
I agree: online black markets should be free trade. If drugs were legalized, even fewer issues would exist, and it would be easier to isolate the actual crime which imposes negative, third party externalities like traffiking or violence.
A) yes, probably
B) I don’t see this sort of leniency being offered to other drug dealers, in fact, the Trump administration wants to designate Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations.
C) a day 1 pardon communicates that it’s a top priority of the administration that drug dealers and cop killers (Jan 6) get freed.
D) he was convicted by a jury of his peers who know full well what a judge would sentence him to. Now Trump comes out to overrule that.
The time to change sentencing would have been pre-trial. We tried doing that, but that was a massive loser electorally.
Who were the cop killers from Jan 6?
E) it wasn't merely commutation, it was a pardon. A pardon means that President is declaring the defendant not guilty. A commutation merely reduces the sentence.
Drug dealers, cop killers and family members. America's institutions continue to devolve into a cruel joke.
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Crypto oligarchs calling the shots in The Bronzer Strikes Back.
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I don't understand how she's not in prison and SBF is
Pretty sure she is currently in jail.. if not, she's finished doing the time she was sentenced.
Her husband took the fall, whatever the facts actually are, and got a longer sentence.
SBF - well the scale, number of laws violated, duration, number of victims, profile of victims, complete lack of contrition, etc would be why he got a much longer sentence.
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two wrongs don't make a right
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Disclosure - I immensely dislike Trump and think Ross Ublricht deserved to be convicted.
That said - There is no evidence that anyone was ever killed, there is pretty thin evidence that he actually ever intended to hire any hitmen (though he may have defrauded people who thought they were hiring hitmen), and a life sentence for non-violent drug trafficking seems draconian. I certainly don't think this should have been one of Trump's priorities (I'm guessing it came through Vance, Musk, or someone else in the crypto community), but I don't have a big problem with it.
I regret not voting for Trump. Hopefully most of his BS will be contested and the good stuff he does sticks.
A. His prison sentence was totalitarian and three letters stole his crypto and illegally convicted him.
B. Orange is not a hero. I don't bow down to Kim Jong Un/Hitler wannabees.
C. Tor is a three letter honeypot.
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For all his many defects and cloudy motives for doing it, Trump deserves applause for this. It's with actions such as this that he also shows why he's a genuine maverick of a president, with who it's genuinely possible to expect deeply unexpected actions (for better or worse).
For all his talk of being progressive and cultivation of a youthful maverick image of his own, you would have never seen such a move from Obama and forget about it under the mealy mouthed Biden or a hypothetical Hillary administration. With Trump, rather uniquely and singularly, it happened.
Ulbricht made many mistakes, less so morally but definitely legally, of the kind with which he could have expected to cause punishment to rain down upon him, but the way in which his case was managed and the way in which he was sentenced truly were both disgusting in numerous ways.
They were classic examples of prosecutorial and political vengeance and give much truth to Trump's own description of the same as "The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”
If you in any way mistrust heavy-handed government prosecutions and persecutions, it's hard to disagree much, even if it's also not hard to imagine Trump being just as abusive in other contexts where prosecution of enemies would suit his interests and personal vengeance.
Now if we see him pardon Snowden too, i'd happily give a standing ovation.
Before someone here smugly chimes in about how Ulbricht also tried to hire out a murder by contract, bear in mind that this accusation was riddled with holes, suspicions of entrapment and in any case wasn't formally used for his sentencing, AND still wouldn't justify the kind of onerously grotesque sentence that was dumped on him. Pedophiles who committed child murders have been sentenced to less than Ulbricht was.
the fact that he will never pardon Snowden tells you all you need to know: this pardon was pandering and suits his own purposes. there are no higher principles here besides quid pro quo.
> you would have never seen such a move from Obama
you forgot Chelsea Manning; so I stopped reading there
>For all his talk of being progressive and cultivation of a youthful maverick image of his own, you would have never seen such a move from Obama
he pardoned Chelsea Manning I think you're forgetting.
Absolute no brainer, he should be celebrated. Countless lives were saved via the harm reduction effect of a peer reviewed, reputation based platform. Of course if we had less draconian drug policy, it wouldn't be necessary but here we are.
> Countless lives were saved via the harm reduction effect of a peer reviewed, reputation based platform.
The basic immorality/pointlessness of the war on drugs aside, I don't know how you can assert this: it's not like there's a chain of provenance, and there's no particular guarantee that whatever grade of pure drugs was sold on Silk Road is the same purity that ended up in peoples' bodies.
My understanding of the Silk Road case is that, at its peak, it was servicing a significant portion of the international drug market. The dimensions of that market include adulteration; Silk Road almost certainly didn't change that.
The overwhelming majority of listings on the site were for personal use quantities.
The overwhelming majority of drug sales are for personal use. That doesn't mean that large sales weren't made, or that those weren't in fact a significant portion of the site's revenue.
>it's not like there's a chain of provenance, and there's no particular guarantee that whatever grade of pure drugs was sold on Silk Road is the same purity that ended up in peoples' bodies.
The fact that the majority of listings on the site were for personal use quantities suggests that the majority of sales were to end users rather than traffickers.
It's hard to dispute that this saved lives and I would speculate that it saved many lives.
>That doesn't mean that large sales weren't made, or that those weren't in fact a significant portion of the site's revenue.
Nobody made any claim that large sales weren't made, of course they were.
> It's hard to dispute that this saved lives and I would speculate that it saved many lives.
See below; the observation is that the people who were buying individual quantities of drugs from SR were not at serious risk of harm in the first place, relative to typical at-risk populations. Anecdotally, the people I know who bought drugs from SR during its heydey were very much test-everything-twice types.
By contrast, the large sales that SR facilitated almost certainly ended up in street drug markets, where harm reduction would have made a difference. But those people didn't benefit from SR's community standards, insofar as they existed: they got whatever adulterated product made it to them.
This is the basic error in saying "most sales were small": the big sales are what matter, socially speaking.
Anecdotally, Planet Money looked into this years ago and their reporting was that as far as they could tell, drugs on Silk Road weren't less safe than street drugs. Most of them were likely "fell off the truck" samples from the original manufacturers being sold by people with an in on the supply, but no otherwise-easy access to an out on the demand.
Their observation was that reputation mattered on SR a lot and a well-kept reputation was valuable at scale in a way that it isn't for being a street-corner pusher looking to stretch your buck by cutting your supply with adulterants. The smart play was to provide a high-quality product at a reasonable price (the latter being the easiest part since they were bypassing the obscene markup of official channels).
> Anecdotally, Planet Money looked into this years ago and their reporting was that as far as they could tell, drugs on Silk Road weren't less safe than street drugs.
Yeah, I'm not saying they're less safe. In fact, on average, I'm willing to bet that the drugs sold on Silk Road were much safer than their street equivalents.
My point was about large sales: Silk Road moved not just personal drug sales, but also industrial quantities of drugs that were almost certainly re-sold. Those latter sales are impossible to track and (by volume) almost certainly represent the majority of "doses" sold through SR. Given that, I doubt the OP's assertion that SR itself represents a particularly effective form of harm reduction.
Or as another framing: SR gave tech dorks a way to buy cheap, clean drugs. But those aren't the people who really need harm reduction techniques; the ones who do are still buying adulterated drugs, which are derived from the cheap, clean drugs on SR.
You shouldn't assume that all "street transfers" of drugs are peaceful or have a positive outcome for those involved. Harm reduction comes in many forms.
I'm pretty sure my comment says the exact opposite. I'm saying that SR was a massive operation that fueled street traffic, which in turn lacked any of the harm reduction virtues that SR is being assigned.
No no no, he is right. Its safe because if you receive a bad batch of drugs you can leave a negative review on the page of the drug cartel that has your name and address, no chance of that having any repercussions for you at all.
I haven't seen anything to suggest that anyone was harmed for leaving a bad review.
Do you know many people who'd be willing to risk their life to give the Sinaloa cartel a bad yelp review?
Sinaola cartel sells lsd, dmt and mushrooms in personal quantities?
As far as I remember, those weren't the only drugs sold there, nor was there any rule enforced regarding "personal quantities".
Not that it matters, as it was an illustrative example.
even if its not perfect for every situation it was a lot better then what existed.
negative reviews aren't the only review, absence of positive reviews is a signal, along with a lot of other positive reviews. later markets at least had reviews outside the markets too
if you are in the bulk and resale drug market you probably aren't getting package with your name on it to your home.
Yup. Drugs and the accompanying business disputes (there's a reason street dealers are armed or have armed people around) that would be normal in any other industry are sooo many people's (who would other wise not be violent criminals) entry point to violence. Letting parties remain at arms length yet transact successfully is such a huge step forward compared the prior status quo. Anything that gets buyers and sellers (either at the retail or distribution level) in illegal industries farther from each other is a win as far as I care.
Does trump also support needle exchanges and safe consumption sites?
As well as online drug marketplaces? Or would running one without legal trouble require a campaign-contribution booster pack?
What a beautiful political anschluss between people who just want to ban contraceptives and abortifacients, and people who just want to shoot up heroin. Not sure how you square that circle[1], but it's 2025, and here we are.
It's very telling about libertarian priorities when a cryptobro running an online drug marketplace who tried to hire a hitman gets amnesty, while hundreds of thousands of people who have been convicted of drug possession[1] do not. Likewise, somehow reproductive rights are just not a libertarian issue, either. It's not a party of freedom, it's a party of freedom for wealthy men.
[1] Biden gave a blanket pardon for people convicted of marijuana posession, but that's far less important for libertarians than Ulbricht.
I think most libertarians are against the war on drugs and would happily pardon or commute the sentences of non violent drug offenders, but the DPR probably takes priority for them because of the free trade issue compounded with the popularization of a non state-backed currency.
He has both drugs + crypto vs just drugs. *Ignoring the accusations of hit ordering, which I would imagine all librarians cannot excuse.
If they are actually trying to maximize any kind of public welfare utility function, surely commutations and pardons and decriminalization and harm reduction for hundreds of thousands of people mean a wee bit more than this entirely transactional act.
He tried to hire multiple hitmen.
There is absolutely no way harm reduction was the reason Trump pardoned him.
It's absolutely one of the reasons why it was politically beneficial for him to enact the pardon.
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Presidents and governors should NOT have the power to pardon people. And if they do it should be ONE pardon per term.
Until you can prove to me that all courts, judges, attorneys, and juries are above reproach and no innocent people are imprisoned there absolutely should be a method for someone to pardon. Sometimes a pardon will be issued for people you disagree with, but that’s part of it. Just like somebody will say something that pisses you off, but that’s the cost of free speech
A single person should never have the sole power to undo an unlimited number of lawful convictions. It seems like a power designed for corruption.
you say lawful convictions, but yet have not provided any evidence of all convictions being lawful. we absolutely know that people have been wrongly imprisoned. but at this point i feel like i'm talking to a 3month old bot
is the power to put people in prison designed for corruption? And if so, should it be limited to a max of 1 person / judge / term?
The authority to pardon is one of the most direct indicators we have for the moral character of an executive.
So?
So I'd prefer to give a good person the power to do good things by pardoning those worthy of liberty, and a bad person the power to make their corruption evident for the world to see.
Words can't describe how happy I am.
Genuinely thought we’d never see the day. My feelings on Ulbricht are mixed and have evolved over the decade he’s been in prison.
However, the Silk Road allowed me to try LSD as an 18 year old in a safe(r) way than those that came before me.* It was those experiences that revealed I’d been depressed most of my life, and that it also didn’t have to be that way, by way of experiencing what that would feel like. I went on to seek new experiences, make new friends for the first time in my life, engage with professional mental health support, went to university, and started multiple businesses. It also introduced my staunchly-atheist self to the experience of spiritual/transcendental experiences, and how those can exist separately from, and don’t require, belief in deities or religion.
It can’t be said where I’d have wound up without those experiences, but my own understanding of myself feels pivotally tied to something I couldn’t have gone through without Ross’ actions. Still, I acknowledge it appears more likely that not he tried to have people killed, and regardless of the circumstances surrounding this, that is condemnable.
*Had it not been for an anonymous group at the time, The LSD Avengers, posting reviews using gas chromatography mass-spectrometry and reagent tests of suppliers on the site, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to take the risk of trying what I’d received. LSD is physiologically safe, not to say anything of any psychological risks, but knowing the dose allowed me to enter into the shallow end of the pool, so to speak. Common substitutes however cannot have the same said of them.
If I’d lived in a time and place that allowed for state-funded drug testing (something my own state has in fact recently abolished despite wildly successful trials), perhaps things would’ve not required a Ross Ulbricht to exist in my case, but I see this as a failure of the system and of drug prohibition as a whole.
Ross would’ve existed one way or another I believe, for better or worse, by another name, had he chosen another path. Now he gets the chance to try his life again. I felt the same way.