Ross Ulbricht got 2xLife+40 for a Harmless Website

[David Barrett]

On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 6:08 PM Karl <gmkarl at gmail.com> wrote:

> My understanding is the crime is *attempting* to have someone killed,
>> whether or not it's carried out.  Everything seems to suggest he felt Blake
>> Krokoff was a real person, and wanted him killed, and was offering payment
>> to do so.  Thankfully whoever "Blake Krokoff" actually is did a good job
>> covering his tracks, but there's no reason to think that Ulbricht didn't
>> genuinely want him dead.
>>
>
> ... except that ulbricht was sentenced to longer than life, and his site
> would have had to have been compromised to find him, so it's highly
> possible the evidence was planted by whoever didn't like him.
>

Well yes, this is what we have courts for: to investigate this.  And unless
you feel he had an incompetent lawyer, that's the job of his counsel to
defend him.

I'm just saying that the chat log was evidence that he made a genuine
attempt to hire a killer to murder someone he believed he knew the identity
of.  However, if you are willing to basically throw out all evidence you
are suspicious of *without evidence it's fake*, then you can sorta believe
anything.  But clearly you aren't advocating that our court system just
consult your personal judgement on what is valid evidence?



> To be clear here, the person in prison did not sell narcotics, right?
>>> They provided a platform for general trade, where others sold narcotics.
>>>
>>
>> He profited from them by taking a transaction fee, so yes, he was selling
>> narcotics in every legal, moral, and semantic sense.
>>
>
> That's not the meaning of "selling" in an online anonymous marketplace, to
> me.  You have different experience?
>

I think it's pretty common to say "Amazon sells stuff", in the same way
that "Silk Road sells stuff".  If Amazon started selling hard narcotics,
and Jeff Bezos had a chat log of trying to solicit the assassination of
someone, surely you wouldn't come to his defense?  Regardless, this sounds
like a semantic debate.  From a legal perspective, do you agree that online
stores do in fact sell things, and are liable for the products they sell?
If nothing else: the fact that Ulbricht was arrested for the sale of hard
narcotics on his website *should be proof he was liable*, tautologically so.

(Fun fact: did you know that grocery stores just rent out shelf space to
vendors, the physical equivalent of Amazon / Silk Road?  So even in the
physical world, stores are just marketplaces for a wide variety of vendors
to sell products side by side on the shelf.)

I find it frustrating that you seem wholly willing to defend the theory of
our government, but then completely disregard every practical
implementation of that theory.  You cannot seriously believe that justice
would be better served if we had a process that applied your nonexistent
level of rigor to evidence gathering and legal proceedings.

-david

>
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