He was never charged with most of that so he didn't have an opportunity to defend against it. I personally found it hard to read as something he believed was real, ... assuming he actually had those conversations at all.
One of these discussions goes something like this:
Crook: Sorry dread pirate, I don't want to extort you but a big bad nasty dealer is demanding money from me.
DPR: Put him on, let me see if I can work it out.
Crook-wearing-nose-and-glasses: This big bad dealer.
DPR: Okay why don't I pay you what the 'other guy' was demanding, and you make him go away forever.
Crook-wearing-nose-and-glasses: Can do.
I can't be the only person that read that as a subtext of "I know I'm just talking to you, but I want to make it clear that you're not going to get to try this stunt multiple times"-- arguably an assault. But I would just assume that getting death threats is just a cost of doing business as an extortionist.
Of course, there is no allegation that anyone actually died at all.
Keep in mind that much of this evidence was collected by a couple of phenomenally corrupt officers who compromised the silkroad systems and robbed it blind (some of whom have now been convicted but it appears there may have been an additional one who wasn't caught). Ulbrecht's defence was denied access to large amounts of potentially exculpatory evidence because the prosecution completely concealed the corrupt officers from the case.
It is absolutely a miscarriage of justice to hold the murder for hire allegations against him when the prosecution dare not have charged any of it because doing so would have forced them to expose that the chain of custody of their evidence went through extremely corrupt LE who had a tens of millions of dollar incentive to keep all the attention on someone else while they lined their pockets.
But I'm just some internet hothead.
Here is what the National Lawyers Guild said:
> “The sentence was based on judicial findings related to allegations of serious crimes that not only were never found by a jury but were not even among the charges leveled at trial.”
Because of this I think we can never know the truth, but it a basic bedrock principle of our legal system that when the prosecution is corrupt and engages in misconduct such that we can't be sure of the truth, we'd rather let a guilty person walk than wrongfully convict or reward unethical and inequitable conduct by the state.
(10) (b) On or about March 29, 2013, ROSS WILLIAM ULBRICHT, a/k/a/ "Dread Pirate Roberts," a/k/a "DPR," a/k/a "Sild Road," the defendant, in connection with operating the Silk Road website, solicited a Silk Road user to execute a murder-for-hire of another Silk Road user, who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users of the site.
Indeed, that was the log I gave a characture of above-- you'll note that there is no mention of the supposed four other ones as they entirely rested on claims made by the now-convicted officers Carl Mark Force IV and Shaun W. Bridges.
> To date, there have been precisely zero murder charges filed. Instead, the indictment has been changed without explanation, the formal charges omitted, and the broader accusations buried within a lesser drug trafficking charge.
> Of the six murder indictments trumpeted by the U.S. government in the days following Ulbricht’s Oct. 2013 arrest, five have fallen off the table and the sixth sits untouched in a separate indictment (legalese for an unproven allegation) that was purposefully left out of the upcoming trial.
Of course, we know now why they didn't charge-- those charges were impossibly tainted by the involvement of the corrupt officers. But the trial was no less prejudiced just because they skipped charging on the murder-for-hire parts: those corrupt officers had administrative control over the systems, they fabricated evidence to conceal their heist, and so on.
Had the compromise of the investigation not been fatal to the prosecutions case they simply wouldn't have risked concealing it from the defence.
If what you were trying to communicate was that Ross Ulbricht was never charged with ordering a murder, all I'm saying is, the indictment flatly refutes that.
Whatever corruption you say taints the charge, it taints the entire Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy charge as well! The murder-for-hire scheme is a predicate!
Pedantically, you are incorrect. The alleged one of these instances an was admitted of "of his efforts to protect Silk Road and his interests therein.".
It was not a charge and no one was required to believe an ounce of it to convict him. It literally wasn't charged, nor was he convicted of it.
If he was charged it would have been possible for the jury to find him innocent of it, but that was literally impossible here. It was something the trial literally could not have falsified because it was no something it gave a verdict to. All that would be been possible is that the jury could have found him innocent of the broader conspiracy to distribute narcotics-- a charge that was supported by many different pieces of evidence.
> In order to aid or abet another to commit a crime, it is
necessary that the Government prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knowingly and intentionally associated himself in some way with the crime, and that he knowingly and intentionally sought, by some act, to help make the crime succeed.
To further emphasize this, the appellate court wrote (emphasis mine):
> Here, the six drug-related deaths (and more importantly, Ulbricht's attempted murders for hire) were uncharged facts
But I do also agree with you on the rest:
I am of the opinion that almost the entire investigation was tainted, unfortunately-- because the corrupt officers had administrative access to the systems and tampered with the evidence. And not only did this potentially spoil almost all of their material evidence, but the defence was prejudicially denied knowledge of this spoliation.
[Aside, I want to thank you for your replies, it's been years since I looked at any of this. Your responses made mine more accurate in context.]
No need for proof or to mention that that the "User" was 1 of 2 corrupt FBI agents involved who is also now in jail for stealing millions in BTC during the case when you don't actually try to charge someone with the Murder-for-hire. The charge is conspiracy, there are several overt acts listed, not all of them need to be proven to be convicted of conspiracy.
In fact, the opposite is true, the burden of proof was in fact on the DOJ to prove the murder-for-hire scheme, which was, as you can see, charged, and they met that burden at trial.
Are you not familiar with how things work in the US? The burden is to prove one overt act in a conspiracy charge, you can list all the bullshit you want and there is no need to prove it all beyond reasonable doubt.
Why were all the actual murder for hire charges dropped and instead included in a side notes of a conspiracy sentencing? Seems obvious to me that it was because there is no way they would get a conviction.
There was an irc chat log and nothing more offered as evidence. Later the agent involved was convicted of stealing BTC from defendant. You could say the relevant fact is that an irc log on a compromised computer had a questionable chain of evidence. The logical error of assuming something quoted in a sentencing as fact is "appeal to authority" if you want to look it up.
The government expressly disclaimed any such burden. See Ulbricht’s (unsuccessful) petition for certiorari [1] linked elsewhere in this thread:
> The sentence was based on judicial findings related to allegations of serious crimes that not only were never found by a jury but were not even among the charges leveled at trial. During closing argument, the U.S. attorney explicitly advised the jury: “[T]o be clear, the defendant has not been charged for these attempted murders here. You’re not required to make any findings about them. And the government does not contend that those murders actually occurred.”
One of these discussions goes something like this:
Crook: Sorry dread pirate, I don't want to extort you but a big bad nasty dealer is demanding money from me.
DPR: Put him on, let me see if I can work it out.
Crook-wearing-nose-and-glasses: This big bad dealer.
DPR: Okay why don't I pay you what the 'other guy' was demanding, and you make him go away forever.
Crook-wearing-nose-and-glasses: Can do.
I can't be the only person that read that as a subtext of "I know I'm just talking to you, but I want to make it clear that you're not going to get to try this stunt multiple times"-- arguably an assault. But I would just assume that getting death threats is just a cost of doing business as an extortionist.
Of course, there is no allegation that anyone actually died at all.
Keep in mind that much of this evidence was collected by a couple of phenomenally corrupt officers who compromised the silkroad systems and robbed it blind (some of whom have now been convicted but it appears there may have been an additional one who wasn't caught). Ulbrecht's defence was denied access to large amounts of potentially exculpatory evidence because the prosecution completely concealed the corrupt officers from the case.
It is absolutely a miscarriage of justice to hold the murder for hire allegations against him when the prosecution dare not have charged any of it because doing so would have forced them to expose that the chain of custody of their evidence went through extremely corrupt LE who had a tens of millions of dollar incentive to keep all the attention on someone else while they lined their pockets.
But I'm just some internet hothead.
Here is what the National Lawyers Guild said:
> “The sentence was based on judicial findings related to allegations of serious crimes that not only were never found by a jury but were not even among the charges leveled at trial.”
Because of this I think we can never know the truth, but it a basic bedrock principle of our legal system that when the prosecution is corrupt and engages in misconduct such that we can't be sure of the truth, we'd rather let a guilty person walk than wrongfully convict or reward unethical and inequitable conduct by the state.