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
>It's squarely within the Overton window to impose extremely harsh sentences for people who sell heroin.

Some of us see a major difference between selling heroin to someone, and building the marketplace from which these victim's freely bought drugs.

I think he is owed some responsibility, but he didn't kill them.

>>itsokt+0t1
Yeah, that’s the part the legal system has a hard time with. We don’t have definitions or suitable penalties for these things

I mean, I’m not sure Pablo Escobar ever sold drugs or murdered anybody with his own hands. Metaphorically though there was a ton of blood on his hands. Charles Manson allegedly never killed anybody himself either. But we generally agree these guys were bad for society.

I’m generally lasseiz-faire about drugs, and I generally put the onus of responsibility on the person choosing to ingest them.

But there are some drugs, like opioids, that kind of transcend that. They cannot reasonably be safely used in a recreational manner, and are objectively a cancer to society.