You do because that's the context of the point I am making. Right now you're having an argument with some point I didn't make, and it's coming off as a bit silly.
>In the court of law where Ulbricht was tried for drug trafficking, the murder for hire thing is a crazy rumor.
First of all, I'm talking about HN here and the persistent need for posters to pretend like the specific evidence we have of Ross being violent was shaky. It's not. We have very good evidence that Ross was a violent person. I wasn't making claims about whether that should have been used in sentencing, so the fact that you keep harping on that is weird.
Second, the fact that he tried to hire murderers was material to the criminal conspiracy charges. So it's not just "a crazy rumor" from the courts point of view. The current way sentencing works is that evidence introduced in the trial can be used for sentencing as long as it meets some burden of proof , and this evidence was there and met that burden.
My gut reaction here is that the burden of proof should be higher (ie an actual conviction) and that the sentencing in question was highly inappropriate from a social standpoint, but I don't have background in law to understand why the rules are the way they are.
At the same time I'm not going to rally behind a guy who incompetently tried to murder people as a way to express my distaste for the American justice system and the drug war. There is such a thing as picking your battles and this is not the hill I want to die on. I am aggrevated that people who share these views seem to be stuck on Ross and are trying to retconn away the evidence rather than pick a better battle to fight. There are myriads of drug war victims and avenues of tackling the problem, but we're going to try to bang a square peg into a round hole here because the guy is a white upper-middle class programmer and we think Bitcoins and Dark Webs are cool? Right.
The strongest statement I will make is that the life sentence is clearly unjust. People should be given second chances with very very few exceptions. Ross should be one of these people.
This is exactly what I am saying.
I think we're vehemently agreeing.