zlacker

>>Ozarki+(OP)
I know he wasn't convicted of hiring a hitman, and I know the attempt didn't succeed, but he still tried to kill other people. Moreover, during a Bitcoin conference, he gave a live talk from prison via phone and still lied, claiming they planted the log on his laptop. A full pardon is ridiculous. It's unfair to so many people, including his partners like Variety Jones, also known as Thomas Clark. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure he won't do anything like this again.

>>I_am_t+km1
He did kill people. That factored into his sentencing[0]: the multiple overdose deaths from heroin and other things Ulbricht sold/facilitated/took a cut of the proceeds of.

He killed children.

- "During the sentencing hearing, Forrest heard from the father of a 25-year-old Boston man who died of a heroin overdose and the mother of a 16-year-old Australian who took a drug designed to mimic LSD at a post-prom party and then jumped off a balcony to his death. Prosecutors said the two victims were among at least six who died after taking drugs that were bought through Silk Road."

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-29/silk-road... ("Silk Road Mastermind Handed Life in Prison for Drug Bazaar" (2015))

It's squarely within the Overton window to impose extremely harsh sentences for people who sell heroin*. Most (?) Asian countries *execute* people who sell heroin. Trump himself has proposed, multiple times over the years, executing US heroin dealers[1,2]—which underscores the incredible degree of hypocrisy behind this pardon.

*(It's also within some people's Overton windows to contemplate the opposite of this, in a framework of harm minimization. I can't steelman this argument in the specific case of Ulbricht. Is it harm reduction to sell heroin? Is it harm reduction to sell fatal drugs to high-school age kids?)

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43465229 ("Trump urges death penalty for drug dealers" (2018))

[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/05/10/1152847242/trump-campaign-exe... ("Trump wants the death penalty for drug dealers. Here's why that probably won't happen" (2023))

>>perihe+4r1
"He killed children" is a pretty massive leap- he didn't sell heroin, he sold shrooms. Other vendors on the site sold heroin. And there is the matter of personal responsibility to consider- nobody forced those people to take heroin, and if they hadn't gotten it from the silk road they'd have gotten it elsewhere. The Sacklers are responsible for far more human misery in that regard, to an almost inconceivable degree, and they never have and never will see the inside of a cell

>>cheese+jt1
- "and if they hadn't gotten it from the silk road they'd have gotten it elsewhere"

That's very unlikely to be true in the case of the high-school kid who died buying a synthetic drug off the internet. They almost certainly did not have a dealer connection sophisticated enough to sell that. They almost certainly would have lived, if Silk Road were not available to them at that point in their life.

You're advancing an argument about drug markets and personal autonomy in the general case, but it's a very poor fit to the concrete facts in the specific situation we're looking at.

>>perihe+Yv1
IMO these are circumstances too far removed from Ulbricht to hold him directly responsible. How many people bought drugs from the Silk Road, used them safely and responsibly, and in doing so avoided contact with violent criminals who they'd otherwise have to buy from, potentially saving them from the violence/misery/blackmail/overdoses that so commonly accompanies association with drug dealers IRL?

Though I think this argument is tangential to the point on proportionality- Ross's sentence is an affront to justice when considered in the context of the Sackler's treatment