Very striking to see how the sentiment has drastically shifted, while the facts of the case did not. There is a really cultural shift visible in how this issue is seen on here.
The attraction for people to post on Hacker News is mainly to complain, and so in the first you get complaints the sentencing is too harsh, and in this one you get complaints that he shouldn't have been pardoned. Its not necessarily a cultural shift, just an artifact of the types of discussions people have online.
I'm not sure. I have two questions on that. Is there the appearance of a sentiment shift? I see plenty of people arguing both against and for incarcerating him in both this thread and that old one.
And then if there is an appearance of a sentiment change (which I'm not sure about) is that evidence of a sentiment change or just selection bias? People who are okay with an outcome are much less likely to write a comment than people who are upset. That alone would change the bias of the comments.
at the time, the murder for hire accusations seemed legitimate and they still do today. hopefully they charge him with attempted murder if the statute of limitations isnt up.
I mean, I won't admit it openly but something like that yeah. It doesn't help either that the way to show you disagree is by sharing what you disagree with (which is great) but the way you show you agree is by upvoting (which others don't see).
So one comment with three complaints in the replies but 100 upvotes might look like "people wholeheartedly disagree with this person" but in reality, most readers actually agreed. Comments that are just "I agree" are kind of pointless, so I prefer how things are, but useful to not read too much into "X people said Y" on HN.
Most illegal drugs by far go through regular border crossings, but he hasn’t obsessed about them in the same way.
https://freeross.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Doc_14_Dismi...
They idolize Ross for creating a drug market because they view it as freedom of speech.
And he does this to distract from the fact that he will not stop the Ukraine war, not stop H1B etc.
Many of the same people also complain about the Biden laptop and Biden's pardons.
edit: this section of reasons’ article summarizes the situation nicely.
“Now that Ulbricht has no chance of having his initial conviction and sentencing overturned or adjusted, it's likely the feds out of Maryland decided the indictment no longer was needed to make sure the government had some further means in their back pocket to punish Ulbricht for showing a safer, saner way around their insanely damaging drug war.”
the reason the charges were dismissed is similar to the reason he wasnt charged initially: because attempted murder charge was unnecessary from the prosecutors point if view. not because he is innocent of the charge. the article also notes that torture was an element in those murders. this guy should not be walking free
It's absurd. Even the non-Silk-Road charges look as if they were tacked on so that people like us weren't sympathetic about what were only non-violent drug trafficking charges ("look, he also hired a killer to murder an enemy!").
EDIT: I'm not being sarcastic, either, BTW. But, I do love the irony of writing a positive reply to your comment.
Has to be something else going on here, none of the explanations in this thread are hitting it on the head for me.
But surely it's just that people love to complain, right? Can't possibly be that they thought something like 25yr was more reasonable?
You can also hold both positions simultaneously without contradiction. That is to say that you can think that his sentence was too harsh while at the same time being of the opinion that what he did was a crime (and should be a crime) and that he should remain convicted and un-pardoned, just with a different sentence than the one he was given.
I don't really have an opinion on this case because I'm not completely familiar with all the details. It's certainly going to be contentious.
> “Ross Ulbricht has been a libertarian political prisoner for more than a decade,” said a statement from Libertarian National Committee Chair Angela McArdle. “I’m proud to say that saving his life has been one of our top priorities and that has finally paid off.”
Seems the US-version of libertarians is that group.
There was the free Ross movement, they promised to vote for him if he pardons Ross and he did.
He apparently tweeted about how much Ross's mum supported him during the campaign.
But my source for all this info is reddit
> life in prison was too harsh, but a full pardon is too lenient.
I think you should compare it as: life in prison was too harsh, but 10 years is too lenient.
But why were the charges dismissed with prejudice? That's not the normal way to dismiss charges.
(I do think there's probably an element of deliberate disrespect to federal law enforcement and the justice system, but that alone doesn't answer the question why Ross specifically?)
I wouldn't argue that both sides have gotten more extreme, rather the political spectrum curve has flattened. There is much less rational discourse in general.
Reddit is a great example. Even 10 years ago you could have mostly rational discussions. Now its no better than Facebook. I saw a post today about people being upset the government is giving OpenAI half a trillion dollars. They didn't even realize it wasn't government money. They didn't want to be corrected.
%-wise there are just fewer libertarian-minded people here these days.
I think you are thinking of a commutation. That ends the punishment while not absolving the person of the crime.
So the January 6th criminals who got pardons no longer have a criminal record (on this count at least). The 14 people who were only granted commutations are still counted as felons.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Robert Hur has filed a motion to dismiss the pending charges filed against Ross Ulbricht
Last week, Hur sought “to dismiss with prejudice the indictment and superseding indictment” pending against Ulbricht
in the motion that he filed, which is linked above, the reason he provides is that ross had already been sentenced and all his appeals had been denied. the motion never mentions lack of evidence or the corrupt investigators. this isnt mentioned in the freeross page
https://freeross.org/false-allegations/
the idea that chat logs were forged or that someone else was using his account are plausible but just barely. its much more plausible that a powerful drug lord ordered hits. its practically unavoidable in the course of running a large, high volume illegal drug operation. its routine. and the feds didnt need a murder charge to screw him, not even a little bit. i havent seen enough evidence to dismiss either camp but i think it should go to trial so the public can see all the evidence and the matter can be settled. there certainly is grounds for further investigation.
1. Votes are not shown, but they affect the rank of posts.
2. Every post regardless of rank is shown beneath its parent, as in a tree.
3. Only highly downvoted posts are grayed out or hidden.
4. The community considers simple agreement to be low value noise.
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/opinions/200...
> As these opinions confirm, a presidential pardon removes, either conditionally or unconditionally, the punitive legal consequences that would otherwise flow from conviction for the pardoned offense. A pardon, however, does not erase the conviction as a historical fact or justify the fiction that the pardoned individual did not engage in criminal conduct. A pardon, therefore, does not by its own force expunge judicial or administrative records of the conviction or underlying offense.
This is the point. HN readership has changed dramatically in the intervening years. I don't buy at all that the difference is solely due to comments tending to contradict the article.
But there were in total six murder-for-hire allegations against Ross Ulbricht. That Maryland case in your link [0] was only one of them.
That Maryland one was also a case in which Carl Force, a corrupt federal agent, was deeply involved. The New York trial which incarcerated Ulbricht avoided considering that single allegation, specifically because of the corrupt agent's involvement. [1]
(Confusingly, there were also six allegations of drug-related deaths. These were completely unrelated with the six murder allegations.)
It's notable that, in that Maryland document you linked, the US Attorney could have moved to dismiss the charge without prejudice, meaning that it could be retried, but he chose not to do that.
But he then continues, to say, without explaining why, that Ulbricht was already serving a life sentence which had been affirmed on appeal in New York. The implication is that the US Attorney is hinting that there's no point ever pursuing the 'attempted murder' angle, because Ulbricht is already locked up for life (Narrator: he was wrong).
Here's a summary
* One murder-for-hire allegation (Maryland): Indicted, but dismissed with prejudice by US Attorney
* Five murder-for-hire allegations (New York): Not indicted/charged, not decided by jury, but included in sentencing decision
* Six drug-related death allegations (New York): Not indicted/charged, not decided by jury, but included in sentencing decision
*
What I understand is that the New York jury was allowed to know about the attempted murder-for-hire and the drug-related death claims, but not about the corrupt federal agents.
The murder-for-hire allegations, meanwhile, were allowed to influence his sentencing (and the rejection of his appeal) due to "a preponderance of evidence" as decided by the judge, which would not be sufficient grounds for criminal convictions such as murder, which require evidence "beyond reasonable doubt".
This was not justice's finest hour.
*
[0] Maryland dismissal: https://freeross.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Doc_14_Dismi...
[1] New York's appeal rejection decision: https://web.archive.org/web/20221213001237/https://pdfserver...
Maybe they make good allies, after the presidency somebody needs to protect him if he commits too many crimes.