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.
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.
https://freeross.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Doc_14_Dismi...
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.
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.
But why were the charges dismissed with prejudice? That's not the normal way to dismiss charges.
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.
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...