Do you have a journal proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have been written by Ross Ulbricht that includes them discussing how they paid to have a person killed? Because a jury has yet to decide whether the government has such a thing, too.
My point is, we haven't seen the evidence, a jury hasn't decided about the evidence, why are we talking about this? We can't pretend that Ulbricht's sentence for drug trafficking was fair because of his charges for violent crimes, because the charges for violent crimes have yet to complete. This sentencing happened in a court of law, where speculation about the result of different court cases is as valuable as some dude on the internet saying icelander killed people.
> Do you have a journal proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have been written by Ross Ulbricht that includes them discussing how they paid to have a person killed?
Yes. That was literally a critical piece of evidence at the trial. The defense tried to claim that it wasn't Ulbricht's and failed.
Take a look at the post I'm responding to here. A lot of people in this thread are acting like the murder for hire thing is just some crazy rumor when there is a really compelling body of evidence behind it. Reasonable people can disagree on whether it should be a factor in the sentencing in the drug trial, but to act like there isn't a very high probability of Ross having attempted murder is.. Well it's not reasonable.
I don't need to look at the post you're responding to, I wrote the post you're responding to.
In the court of law where Ulbricht was tried for drug trafficking, the murder for hire thing is a crazy rumor. The murder-for-hire case is a separate case, which remains untried. The evidence in the murder-for-hire case is probably compelling, otherwise the government probably wouldn't bring the case. But that's utterly unrelated to the sentencing for drug trafficking.
If Ulbricht was sentenced to life for hiring hit-men, we wouldn't be having this discussion--I have no objection to people being sentenced to life in prison for violent crimes. But he wasn't sentenced to life in prison for violent crimes, he hasn't even been tried for violent crimes yet. He was sentenced to life in prison for drug trafficking. And that's not justice.
> I don't need to look at the post you're responding to, I wrote the post you're responding to
You do because that's the context of the point I am making. Right now you're having an argument with some point I didn't make, and it's coming off as a bit silly.
>In the court of law where Ulbricht was tried for drug trafficking, the murder for hire thing is a crazy rumor.
First of all, I'm talking about HN here and the persistent need for posters to pretend like the specific evidence we have of Ross being violent was shaky. It's not. We have very good evidence that Ross was a violent person. I wasn't making claims about whether that should have been used in sentencing, so the fact that you keep harping on that is weird.
Second, the fact that he tried to hire murderers was material to the criminal conspiracy charges. So it's not just "a crazy rumor" from the courts point of view. The current way sentencing works is that evidence introduced in the trial can be used for sentencing as long as it meets some burden of proof , and this evidence was there and met that burden.
My gut reaction here is that the burden of proof should be higher (ie an actual conviction) and that the sentencing in question was highly inappropriate from a social standpoint, but I don't have background in law to understand why the rules are the way they are.
At the same time I'm not going to rally behind a guy who incompetently tried to murder people as a way to express my distaste for the American justice system and the drug war. There is such a thing as picking your battles and this is not the hill I want to die on. I am aggrevated that people who share these views seem to be stuck on Ross and are trying to retconn away the evidence rather than pick a better battle to fight. There are myriads of drug war victims and avenues of tackling the problem, but we're going to try to bang a square peg into a round hole here because the guy is a white upper-middle class programmer and we think Bitcoins and Dark Webs are cool? Right.
The strongest statement I will make is that the life sentence is clearly unjust. People should be given second chances with very very few exceptions. Ross should be one of these people.
> My gut reaction here is that the burden of proof should be higher (ie an actual conviction) and that the sentencing in question was highly inappropriate from a social standpoint
My point is, we haven't seen the evidence, a jury hasn't decided about the evidence, why are we talking about this? We can't pretend that Ulbricht's sentence for drug trafficking was fair because of his charges for violent crimes, because the charges for violent crimes have yet to complete. This sentencing happened in a court of law, where speculation about the result of different court cases is as valuable as some dude on the internet saying icelander killed people.