Every single government actor involved in this case is far more guilty than Ross and, frankly, they are the ones that deserve prison.
Yes, Ross should have realized you can't massively break the law and get away with it. He made a big mistake.
But the mistake he made was assuming that other people were more benevolent than they really are.
This young man viewed the world with a child-like, rosy-eyed perspective, and for that, he gets crushed by the boot of government brutality.
Disclaimer: I have no involvement with any dark nets or online drug trade.
edit: I don't know if he hired hitmen and if he did, I suspect it was in his own defense.
Rights are what you get if a bunch of rational, self-interested people get together and say, "What ought we be allowed to do without interference?"
There is a single, correct, rational answer to that: you ought to be allowed to do anything that doesn't initiate force against someone else. All rights are a function of that single fundamental observation.
Every rational, fully self-interested person (who has studied the topic a lot) will agree on this.
So that's where rights come from... they are a human construct, but there's also a single, objectively correct answer.
So they don't come from "Laws of Nature" or the Founding Fathers.