That said, I do think he absolutely deserved to be released, not because he didn't deserve to be locked up in the first place, but because he's clearly been rehabilitated and has done great work during his time in prison. All that considered, ten years seems like a not unreasonable prison sentence for what he did. I hope he'll continue to do good when he's released.
He organized and operated a global criminal drug ring and conspired to have people killed. The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar is that DPR was running his drug business in the 2010s instead of the 1980s.
Pablo Escobar revelled in it.
PE put bombed newspapers and killed hundreds, if not thousands of people unrelated to any criminal enterprise or to arresting him. I mean, actual innocent, minding their own business civilians. Over 4000 murders have been directly attributed to the actions and orders of Escobar. Estimates to the actual count range closer to 8000.
DPR went over to the dark side a bit in that entrapment racket, or at least it seems so.
Thinking that someone needs to be murdered isn’t necessarily a character flaw, imho.
It depends on what DPR was led to believe about this fictional person. It is reasonable to imagine that the FBI took every possible measure to make their fake victim seem as murder worthy as possible. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that the “victim” may have been painted as a purveyor of child trafficking, CSAM, or other things repugnant. My point is we don’t know. And if we don’t know, we should reserve judgment.
It has to start somewhere
When having these conversations, it’s easy to stand on the moral high ground and forget that we also live among monsters, and alongside organizations that turn regular people into the instruments of monsters. There are a lot of people in this world that have chosen to be incompatible with coexistence in civil society, or to be part of an organization that has chosen to be so.
These people actively do grave harm to other people. Sometimes, the only way to prevent more harm to innocent people is to remove those individuals from the world.
That said, I don’t know anything of the veracity or motivations behind the allegations brought against DPR in this regard, and for whatever reason, his legal circumstances were crafted so as to make sure that the public would also remain ignorant of the details of those circumstances.
While I do not know any of the details involved, I am deeply suspicious of the manipulations of the FBI in cases such as this, having been in proximity to some of their other shenanigans. It’s definitely inside the realm of reasonable speculation to imagine that they may have created a situation where not only was it convenient for DPR to eliminate his “competitor”, but he would be doing a noble thing in the process.
As an example , one of their “successful anti terrorist operations” a few years back involved a mentally challenged person was manipulated by the FBI into a “terrorist” plot where he thought he was “saving the world”…. So they -definitely-do that kind of thing. The Walmart judiciously wouldn’t sell him a gun (he is obviously and apparently challenged) so they sent him back to buy a bb-gun and arrested him coming out of the store.
Because of this and many other examples of behavior with depraved impunity, I am inclined to give DPR the benefit of the doubt on this, in the absence of much more specific and reliable information.