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.
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.
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)
> so he could still be charged with murder related ones if they were not dropped with prejudice
They were dismissed with prejudice.
> “We are pleased that the prosecutors in the District of Maryland, after almost five years, have dismissed their indictment against Ross. Holding this over Ross’ head, without taking it to trial where he could defend himself, has been very damaging to Ross and his case, especially because it contained the only charge of murder-for-hire. Of course, this charge was never proven or convicted, but was very effective in smearing Ross’s reputation and hurting him in the legal process”.
> She said, “We had some good news recently. The indictment and superseding indictment against Ross in the District of Maryland were dismissed ‘with prejudice,’ meaning they can never be re-filed. This is especially good because those indictments contained the only charge ever made that Ross engaged in murder-for-hire. This was a serious allegation that Ross denies. It was never prosecuted or ruled on by a jury but was trumpeted by the government and the media as if it were proven fact”.
> Following his arrest in 2013, prosecutors also alleged that he planned murder-for-hire although, curiously, he was never charged or prosecuted for it at trial (and the allegations were dismissed with prejudice by a U.S. District Judge in 2018).
> The allegations were never charged at trial, never proven, never submitted to, or ruled on by, a jury, and eventually dismissed with prejudice. Ross consistently denied the allegations (which relied on anonymous online chats never proven to have been authored by him) and those who know him never believed them. The only alleged victim ever identified, Curtis Green, is a fervent supporter of Ross’s clemency.
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.
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.
> 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.
How is that not a massive violation of due process? Imagine you are at trial for something and get convicted. Then during the sentencing, some other unrelated case's evidence gets used by the Judge which was never introduced during trial and defendant never had any opportunity to defend or cross-examine. Judge uses that to sentence you to 2+ life sentences. After that, the other unrelated case gets dismissed WITH prejudice. Huh??? So the evidence which got used to sentence you was never ever cross-examined or tested in court. "preponderance of the evidence" is not what's used in criminal trials but just because it was introduced in sentencing, it's somehow okay?
Though an article by CBS (transcript is an interview) has this:
“THE HUNT FOR DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS
In 2011 there was a new bad guy in cyberspace behind the website Silk Road. He oversaw more than $200 million in illegal transactions on the dark web, involving the sale of drugs, weapons and illicit services such as computer hacking. Even murders for hire were discussed on the site.”
“Milan Patel: We saw murder-for-hire postings, hacking-for-hire postings, which was, "hey, pay me two bitcoin, and I'll hack into your ex-wife or ex-husband's email account." … and I suspect people were using it because it made a lot of sense. It was totally anonymous. And you could never trace it back to the person who asked for it.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/ross-ulbricht-dread-pirate-...
It stands to reason that given criminals buying and selling drugs online that the adjacent work of hacking or even murder for hire would be sought or facilitated given the fact that folks on the platform thought they were anonymous as they were transacting in bitcoin.
So someone should call the FBIs bluff and given this pardon either Ross himself or one of you — his fans — could go spin up a server and restart silk road. Trump’s basically saying it’s legal. As he’s got the power to enforce or not enforce the laws this pardon basically is saying start selling drugs online. Let your libertarian freak flag fly.
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.
It was not entrapment. There is mention of undercover purchases and a controlled delivery by law enforcement, but these are not entrapment. Most of the evidence came from his own laptop.
It was entrapment because federal agents posing as crime bosses were threatening Ross that if he didn't hire the hitman there would be serious consequences. He was manipulated and forced into the position he was in.
This is not necessarily true. In Burdick v. United States it does say "an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it" but there is debate about whether it is binding of not.
Apparently, there is something in Lorance v. Commandant, U.S. Disciplinary Barracks that indicates that accepting a pardon does not imply guilt, but I am not very knowledge on that.
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.
Not sure I follow. Are you referring to the contributors behaviour as bullying? If so, I would agree to a certain extent. Although its not the typical kind that one would come across.
Yes, the asshat is a bully. I have to be transparent and express that I have been an asshat as well, but hurt people hurt people (it is absolutely not an excuse). You have to recognize it.
All sins are done together, but I’ll try not to use such language as its inflammatory. We make the mistakes together, and we have to fix them together.
Right, and not everyone is perfect :) . As a manager myself, I find it difficult to background check (if you will) potential hires for this. 90% + of candidates have never contributed to an open source project to the extent of creating a PR.
This is “Copy-Pasta Driven Development” [0] and it’s not even related to makefiles. It’s related to the entire industry copying code from here to there without even knowing what they are copying.
TBH I think copilot has made this even worse, as we are blindly accepting chucks of code into our code bases.
Blame the business people. I tried becoming an expert in `make` probably at least 7 times in a row, was never given time to work with it daily until I fully memorized it.
At one point I simply gave up; you can never build the muscle memory and it becomes a cryptic arcane knowledge you have to relearn from scratch every time you need it. So I moved to simpler tools.
The loss of deep work is not the good programmers' fault. It's the fault of the business people.
I wouldn't say so. Make is very simple and you can grasp the basis within an hour or so, if you're familiar with shell scripting (as it's basically a superset of shell scripts, with the dependency graph on top). Then all you have to do is just in time learning which is mostly searching for a simpler pattern that what you're currently doing.
I worked in a place where we took XP very seriously. The culture supported it. And I can say that place was one of the best places to work and learn in.
Fast forward a couple years and I land in a full remote team as a tech lead/manager role. I try to bring XP into the team, and the pain was real. Not a single person would get behind it. Needless to say, the culture of the entire org plays a huge role in the success of XP.
I can also attest to having a similar experience with scrum. I've seen it thrive in a single company I worked with, coupled with sharp product managers that know their shit better than any of us developers but at the same time take feedback to heart.
Never experienced it since... Each following employer has abused scrum to a/ say in front of stakeholders that scrum is in use and b/ utterly fail to use purely time-based estimations for tasks as a metric to a team's or a team member's performance. All this coupled with inept PM.
I too have worked at a place that took XP very seriously, and it worked very well.
For us, the way it fell apart was the interface to upper management. Upper management didn't want to hear about story points and picking the most compelling features for a release. They wanted to see normal development plans and progress reports. They felt like we couldn't be under control if we were developing in an XP way.
It's not that we failed to deliver. It's not that we were behind schedule. It's that upper management wasn't comfortable.
By the way, one of the things we did was to hack our own process. (If you're trying to be agile by a rigidly defined process, you're not agile.) So a couple of the leaders would talk for a bit, and then they would say, "For the next two sprints, we're going to try changing the process in X way. After two sprints, we'll reevaluate." Drive toward a process that fits your team.
I would have thought the exact opposite to your statement, they are big enough that they should afford it. Seems like the ability to forgo the app store on mac allows apple to get away with stuff like high friction review process and monetization rules. Without the big players pushing back, why would they change?
Doesn't apple charge app store apps 30% all their transactions/subscriptions? What company in their right mind would want to opt into that if they don't have to?
A smaller to a medium sized company. Due to several reasons:
- Setting up payment with a third party provider isn't that simple, and their fees are far from zero.
- Getting users. Popular queries in Google are full of existing results, and getting into there isn't easy and isn't cheap. Also, search engines aren't the most popular way to get apps to your devices, usually people search directly in app stores. Apple takes care of it, i.e. I guess that popular app with good ratings get to higher position in search results.
- Trust. I install apps on the computer without Apple only if I trust the supplier of the software (or have to have it there). Apple solves it with their sandboxing.
Yep, 30% are a lot, but for these kinds of businesses it might be well worth it (especially with reduced commission of 15% for smaller revenue).
Anecdata: I have no issues with my simple git workflow that I’ve used at the previous 3 companies I’ve worked for. As long as communication is solid across teams/people, merge conflicts and rebasing isn’t that big of a pain to introduce an un proven tool to an org.
My thought would be that most people are happy and it’s the <5% of people who complain the loudest that are heard.
Your org doesn’t have to adopt the tool. Nobody on my team needs to know or care that I use jj instead of git. The only people who do know or care have themselves switched when I showed it off to them.
I’ve worked too many places where I’ve helped fix too many coworkers’ broken git repos to believe in a simple git workflow. Basically everyone uses the same fetch/branch/commit/merge-to-main approach and people still constantly run into problems. None of the people with some claimed simple workflow are doing anything meaningfully different than what everyone else is doing.
It’s just astonishingly easy to internalize all the fixes and band aids we’ve adopted to smooth the sharp edges and forget how often we have to work around them.
But I don’t see the complaints that were claimed. I help people as well. They learn, and we move on. If they don’t learn then we have another problem to solve.
I will admit there is occasional call where I have to get someone out of a twisted pretzel, but that is few and far between.
You don’t deal with rebase conflicts? You don’t ever unstash to the wrong branch? Or to the right branch, but it was changed and now it’s applied uncleanly? You don’t ever want to go fix a previous commit? You don’t ever need to do linear work that gets merged one piece at a time into the trunk?
All of these things (and others) can be worked around with varying levels of annoyance ranging from just living with it to new commands that help out to changing your workflow to completely avoiding some workflows. But in my experience nearly everyone deals with those annoyances on a semi-regular basis.
With a proper workflow and communication, only the first one (rebase conflicts) is a semi-regular occurrence (once a month). The others I have never had to do while working on a team. We establish a clear way of working and everyone abides by it.
And before you say well this doesn’t work with a bigger team, my team is 8 and the org is 50 on the same codebase. At “google scale”, I understand this might not be the same case.
If someone has to go out of that workflow to fix a previous commit on main, they submit a pr on top of latest.
Again, I don’t see the major complications here. It seems to me to be fixing a communication issue in an org more than anything.
I get what you are saying about the nicer workflows for those cases.
However, why would the contributors to jj not just try to make git better by addressing these weaknesses?
I’m not being glib, just that it puzzzles me when a new oss comes out that does the same thing as another tool but a a bit different. I would have though that there is a way to have a git plug-in or even a way to contribute to git to enhance the issues outlined.
Yes, I know that some code bases are too far gone for major enhancements…
> However, why would the contributors to jj not just try to make git better by addressing these weaknesses?
Because the git workflow causes a lot of the difficulty and fixing it involves making a new concept: mutable changesets with a unique id which are built on top of immutable commits.
jj isn’t just some bugfixes or a few porcelain improvements, it deeply changes the way you approach things. And there’s a pretty decent amount of unlearning of subtly-broken concepts you need to do.
In some sense they already are making git better since that’s the data format that the tool supports.
Also, some of the UI improvements or even protocol improvements might make it into git eventually.
I’m skeptical about it being worthwhile to switch to a new backend. Maybe it would work if it’s just local, but a lot of IDE plugins and other tools would need to be written, and git has lots of inertia.
> why would the contributors to jj not just try to make git better by addressing these weaknesses?
Because jj isn't being built to improve git, but to allow using git at Google to work on Piper-backed code instead of hg/fig, and adding support for the abstractions that are needed to support git and piper was probably seen as free complexity on git's side.
This is slightly incorrect. I started it because I believed in the idea of modeling the working copy as a commit, but it's true that I made the storage pluggable from the beginning because I wanted to be able to convince my team at Google that we should use it internally too.
I thought it was simply a response to git5/git-multi getting deprecated once fig became popular.
I'm a bit surprised then, that's one of the things that has kept me from trying it as it feels weird to not have that much control over what gets into the commit. Using magit doesn't help as it's just way too good once you get used to it.
Think of it this way: they are trying to make git better by addressing fundamental weaknesses in git, but some of those weaknesses require a fundamentally different UI paradigm and as such aren’t practical to upstream, hence a new project.
> I’m not being glib, just that it puzzzles me when a new oss comes out that does the same thing as another tool but a a bit different. I would have though that there is a way to have a git plug-in or even a way to contribute to git to enhance the issues outlined.
You would have thought? Plugins? Git doesn’t have plugins to my knowledge. Hooks are not plugins for security reasons. Meaning you can’t distribute hooks, have people install them and call it an extension.
Then, assuming that they could just make Git better. Are they interested in supporting all of Git plus their new work? Why would they be?
If anything, lazygit has shown it is possible to have more natural workflows on top of git as demonstrated by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPLdltN7wgE, so it is indeed possible
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.