Silk Road Admin Ross Ulbricht (DPR) Sentenced to Life in Prison
Posted by: DeepDotWeb
May 30, 2015
The Silk road saga came to an end when Ross Ulbricht, the convicted founder of Silk Road, has been sentenced to life in prison for running the underground online drug bazaar Silk Road (1), signaling the government’s seriousness in combating Dark net markets.
Before the sentencing the parents of the victims of drug overdoses addressed the court. Ulbricht broke down in tears. “I never wanted that to happen,” he said. “I wish I could go back and convince myself to take a different path.”
The Judge about DoctorX & harm reduction:
Judge called the harm reduction argument nonsense, called Dr. X "particularly despicable" and "irresponsible"
— Patrick O'Neill (@HowellONeill) May 29, 2015
Judge about keeping a journal:
Forrest took a jab at Ulbricht for keeping a journal. The audience laughed in the overflow court room where I was watching. #SilkRoadTrial
— Fran Berkman (@FranBerkman) May 29, 2015
“Good work LE!”
Forrest: If not for the "creative work of law enforcement," Silk Road might still be running today. #SilkRoadTrial
— Fran Berkman (@FranBerkman) May 29, 2015
The 31-year-old physics graduate and former boy scout was handed five sentences: one for 20 years, one for 15 years, one for five and two for life. All are to be served concurrently with no chance of parole.
Judge said – “The stated purpose [of the Silk Road] was to be beyond the law. In the world you created over time, democracy didn’t exist. You were captain of the ship, the Dread Pirate Roberts,” she told Ulbricht as she read the sentence, referring to his pseudonym as the Silk Road’s leader. “Silk Road’s birth and presence asserted that its…creator was better than the laws of this country. This is deeply troubling, terribly misguided, and very dangerous.”
The Judge also made it clear that she is going to make an example out of him: “What you did was unprecedented,” she told Mr. Ulbricht, “and in breaking that ground as the first person,” he had to pay the consequences. Anyone who might consider doing something similar, the judge added, needed to understand clearly “and without equivocation that if you break the law this way, there will be very serious consequences.”
In addition to his prison sentence, Ulbricht was also ordered to pay a massive restitution of more than $183 million, what the prosecution had estimated to be the total sales of illegal drugs and counterfeit IDs through the Silk Road—at a certain bitcoin exchange rate—over the course of its time online. Any revenue from the government sale of the bitcoins seized from the Silk Road server and Ulbricht’s laptop will be applied to that debt.
“I wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives…to have privacy and anonymity,” Ulbricht told the judge. “I’m not a sociopathic person trying to express some inner badness.”
Ulbricht’s defense team has already said it will seek an appeal in his case. That call for a new trial will be based in part on recent revelations that two Secret Service and Drug Enforcement Administration agents involved in the investigation of the Silk Road allegedly stole millions of dollars of bitcoin from the site. One of the agents is even accused of blackmailing Ulbricht, and of allegedly selling him law enforcement information as a mole inside the DEA. But the judge in Ulbricht’s case ruled that those Baltimore-based agents weren’t involved in the New York FBI-led investigation that eventually took down the Silk Road, preventing their alleged corruption from affecting Ulbricht’s fate.
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Updated: 2015-05-30