Murder Accusations Hang Over Silk Road Boss Ulbricht's Sentencing 82
Patrick O'Neill writes: Ross Ulbricht has never been tried for murder. But tomorrow, when the convicted Silk Road creator is sentenced to prison, murder will be on the mind of the judge. Despite never filing murder-for-hire charges, New York federal prosecutors have repeatedly pushed for harsh sentencing because they say Ulbricht solicited multiple murders. The judge herself recently referred to Ulbricht's "commission of murders-for-hire" in a letter about the sentencing, painting an even grimmer picture of Ulbricht's sentencing prospects.
Sounds like good grounds for an appeal, (Score:5, Insightful)
if the sentence is in any way based on an assumption of guilt for a crime he wasn't actually tried for.
Re:Sounds like good grounds for an appeal, (Score:4, Interesting)
New York federal prosecutors have urged Forrester to "send a message" with a long prison sentence for Ulbricht.
And yes, IANAL, but this should not be a fairly easy appeal case:
With less than 24 hours until the sentencing takes place, however, it seems increasingly clear that Judge Forrester is taking the accusation that Ulbricht tried to orchestrate five murder-for-hire as truth in the New York case.
Re:Sounds like good grounds for an appeal, (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
You missed a word, "because he wanted to murder 3 million babies."
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All they can sentence him is the minimum, maximum, or something in between, for the crime he has been found guilty of. But it's the job of prosecution to press for the maximum and defense to press for the minimum.
The overall character of the person being sentenced is relevant during these proceedings. That's why there are Judges, and not just an automaton machine to behead the defendant.
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But it's the job of prosecution to press for the maximum
No. It's the job of the prosecution to help the judge understand the context, facts and details of the crime so that the judge can dispense justice.
I'd fucking sack any prosecutor that felt their job was to press for the maximum punishment.
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If your taking into consideration crimes he is accused of and not convicted of then your not sentencing him for the crimes he's been convicted of as the accusations are impacting the sentence. Trying to suggest otherwise is silly. Obviously if they are mere accusations they shouldn't be usable by the prosecutor to argue for a harsher sentence. It's one thing for the judge to take into consideration what the defence argues here as it's the prosecutor who has to disprove it. That's how the system is suppose t
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By doing this the judge and prosecution are effectively sentencing him for crimes which Ulbricht was not charged with and the jury did not find a verdict for. I understand that until recently that sentences could be based on the charges rather than the convictions so I assume this is the workaround for that. This encouraged prosecutors to overcharge simple to generate harsher sentences
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if a prosecutor doesn't prosecute the "murders for hire" then how in the fuck it's just for him to use those as reasons for giving a harsher sentence? he didn't charge him with those crimes.
it's not usual in europe for prosecutor to say that the accused is guilty of crimes he is not being charged for, as if being guilty of those crimes was a proven fact. a separate probably going through case would be grounds for lesser sentence in the one case(since the total would grow up - also, in europe in general sta
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if a prosecutor doesn't prosecute the "murders for hire" then how in the fuck it's just for him to use those as reasons for giving a harsher sentence? he didn't charge him with those crimes.
The prosecutor will NOT ask for "harsher sentence" -on the base that the convict is/was suspect for some other crime ("murders for hire")-, but he will just INFORM the judge deciding the sentence (for the NON-"murders for hire" crime(s)) that the convict (for the NON-"murders for hire" crime(s))... IsNoGood! In other words, he will do the opposite of what the defence lawyer will do, who will claim something unrelated to the crimes of the convict (e.g., he feeds stray dogs!) so the judge must show some mercy
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There are federal sentencing guidelines. There are criteria for things like past offenses, cooperation with the investigation, among other things. The judge is not bound to strictly follow them, but if the judge just hands out maximum sentences with little explanation, that could be grounds for an appellate court to reduce the sentence. Also, I am not a lawyer either.
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There are federal sentencing guidelines. There are criteria for things like past offenses, cooperation with the investigation, among other things.
I take it as a confirmation of what i wrote - i also add the (subjective) convict's personality/character criterias.
The judge is not bound to strictly follow them, but if the judge just hands out maximum sentences with little explanation, that could be grounds for an appellate court to reduce the sentence.
That is why a judge does the sentencing, so a human subjective filter exist - keep in mind that (at least in Greece/Europe) a prosecutor can also ask for an appeal if the sentence is too low/minimum without good explanation/reasons.
Also, I am not a lawyer either.
Slashdot: too many G[r]eeks, not enough lawyers!
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I think the prosecution in this case could request an upward departure from the sentencing guidelines because the pending charges mean that his criminal record inadequately shows the seriousness of his past behavior. What I'm saying is that there are rules and formulas that the judge is supposed to follow.
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The United States is a shit hole.
It is exactly the way the people that run this place want it. I am puzzled though as to why they would even care about murder, to my experience they don't really give a shit even if you give the cops evidence.
Re:Sounds like good grounds for an appeal, (Score:5, Informative)
Did Ulbricht Pay a Hitman to Kill A Silkroad Employee?
A 'murder for hire' indictment was brought against Ulbricht but the prosecution declined to bring charges.
Indictments that aren't brought as charges infer nothing more than prosecutorial strategy, and it doesn't indicate the existence or not of a criminal action. Prosecutors typically have many more indictments than charges, and as the case proceeds they trade off indictments for the good of their case (e.g. plea bargains, shedding weaker parts, or simply the prosecutor merging indictments to bolster charges, as seems to be the case here).
The government say,
1. Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) was the operator of Silkroad, an illegal drug-related website. ... but what's done is done,I just can't believe he was so stupid. I just wish more people had some integrity",
2. DPR was Ulbricht which now no one disputes (even Ulbricht now admits it, now that he's lost the case),
3. The Silkroad DPR account wanted the murder of a Silkroad employee for $80k which no one disputes,
4. A DEA agent posed as a hitman
4. Someone paid $40k to the hitman before it was done,
5. A DEA agent posed as a hitman and received $40k.
6. The DEA Agent sent the DPR account doctored photos of a dead body. DPR was told the person was tortured to death, and responded "I'm pissed I had to kill him
7. Another $40k was paid immediately afterwards,
8. No one was actually murdered.
9. Ulbrichts recovered laptop had his journal with an April 6 entry that says "gave [Hells Angels] go ahead to find tony76," and "sent payment to angels for hit on tony76 and his 3 associates.", and finally
10. When Ulbricht was caught in the library his computer was logged into the adminstration page of Silkroad under the DPR account.
(source: 1 [archive.org], 2 [vice.com])
Then at trial the `murder for hire` wasn't brought as a charge, but it was allowed to be used to describe the character of Ulbricht [arstechnica.com].
Character witnesses, and character evidence is allowed in trials.
As Judge Forrest said "the prejudicial effect is reduced by the Government’s stipulation that no actual murders were carried out". Apparently the judge considered that prosecutors might be worried a jury in this landmark case might be convinced that Ulbricht was non-violent, detached from reality behind a computer, and that his operation was quite different to a conventional drug ring. The murder for hire charge was unnecessary, and it might be a better prosecutorial strategy to use the murder for hire to attack Ulbricht's character as a backdrop for all other charges, to brand him as a violent drug dealer.
Of course there's no visibility to the prosecutorial strategy process but that strategy seems possible, and so I don't think much of the fact that the murder for hire charges were dropped and instead used elsewhere.
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if the sentence is in any way based on an assumption of guilt for a crime he wasn't actually tried for.
I don't think so. The jury has to decide based on evidence whether he is guilty of crimes beyond reasonable doubt. However, the same doesn't apply to sentencing. Sentencing can take your good behaviour into account, and it can take your bad but not criminal behaviour into account. If you have a history of harrassing your neighbour in a non-criminal way, and then you beat him up, your sentence for the beating may very well be higher because of that history.
Could be worse (Score:5, Informative)
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Ground for appeal? (Score:5, Interesting)
IANAL & IANA (I am not American) but aren't you meant to be sentenced based on what crime you are convicted of? Seriously the QLD Chief Justice (Highest Judge in QLD) withdrew from an appeals hearing of a convicted child abuser & murderer because he had had a meeting with someone who lobbied for harsher sentences for child molesters.
If the sentencing judge references other non-case related matters surely that would affect the standing of the ruling and open up appeals?
Re:Ground for appeal? (Score:4, Interesting)
Normally if a prosecutor were to infer additional crimes not discussed during trial, the defense attorney would say 'Objection!' and the judge would immediately reply 'Sustained.'
As an earlier poster said, if the sentence is out of bounds for what he was tried for, he'll have a strong case for an appeal.
Re:Ground for appeal? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you've convicted the guy of hiring hit men, by all means, throw the book at him for that. But this sounds incredibly sketchy.
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I think you are correct, though I am not American either.
"United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), is a United States Supreme Court decision concerning criminal sentencing. The Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment right to jury trial requires that, other than a prior conviction, only facts admitted by a defendant or proved beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury may be used to calculate a sentence, whether the defendant has pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial. The maximum sentence a judge may impose
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No. US v. Booker is about "enhanced sentencing," that is, a judge giving a defendant a sentence greater than set by statute. Normally, a prosecutor can use almost anything to push for the maximum sentence. Simply put, if crime X has a statutory sentence of 3-5 years a prosecutor can bring in uncharged crimes to get 5 years. US v. Booker is about going above the 5 years (in my example). In Booker, Federal guidelines only allowed a 21 year sentence but the judge gave 30 years due to additional evidence given
Dear Mr Judge (Score:1)
We can't actually prove anything, so we wont bring it to trial, but Dave knows a guy whose brother said Ulbricht totally asked a this other guy to murder someone. With this in mind could you please slap another 15 years on the sentence.
Your's Faithfully
-The State
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Well no -- in this case, it was the state that first of all posed as a resource that had carried out hits in the past, and then later responded to his request, first to "send a message" and later to "take him out". They instead staged the whole thing (the guy who was supposed to be killed actually being held by the state at the time the hit was arranged). So at least in one of the five cases, they knew exactly what he had said/done, because they were involved in setting it all up.
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And that was sworn in the trial testimony? Or did they say that everywhere except where they had to swear that was the truth?
Re: Dear Mr Judge (Score:2)
That's pretty damming - why was he not prosecuted for soliciting murder as well? It seems a message that the trafficking of drugs is worse than murder.
Ross Ulbricht: More Reason to End The War on Drugs (Score:2)
Most of us have learned a lot about drugs in the last two decades, but sadly not our government.
Re:This was a 'Show Trial' at best... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you get a hold of the accused laptop which is logged in and has ample evidence of being an administrator of the site in question... what exculpatory evidence do you think existed that could have gotten him off that he was denied?
Tor is secure if you use it right... many do not. Bitcoin however we did find is far from anonymous and the evidence in the blockchain could be used against you years or even decades after your illicit purchase.
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First off, even getting that laptop was fruit of the poisoned tree because they got it using evidence the NSA gathered through illegal wiretapping programs.
Even then, Ulbreit admitted he built the site. He just didn't run it during the period in question. The entire point of the name "Dread Pirate Roberts" is that anyone can use it.
Besides, the site did use Tor correctly. It didn't help because the NSA has infiltrated Tor, which should surprise no one, because it was originally built by the US DOD anyway.
Re:This was a 'Show Trial' at best... (Score:5, Insightful)
Citation?
So he admitted buying the gun and evidence puts him at the murder scene... but you are still going to fight the idea that he pulled the trigger? You can be an accessory to a crime without directly taking part.
But then lets just ignore the other evidence on his laptop which did show him being a more active runner of the site than you suggest.
Really? So you've personally audited it and certified that in your capacity as an AC Tor expert?
FYI: Posting to Stackoverflow with your own name when trying to learn how to setup a Tor hidden service isn't the brightest thing when you are trying to not have the site tied to you.
Like many, I'm still waiting to see/hear of these secret backdoors in Tor that were somehow inserted not through rouge check-ins... but through large checks to the Tor foundation.
Lemme guess... 9/11 was an inside job?
You seem to talk much like the Prosecutor... (Score:1)
So, is the NSA making it easier for Brandon to pay off his student loans?
Paid shill is pretty cheap these days...
At least Cold Ford got paid salary.
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So your best/only response is to accuse me of being a paid shill?
Truly now we see the depth of your intellect... though I doubt even a new born could drown in such waters if one were to try.
Never can it be that someone on their own might had a different opinion, no, never that.
Or would you like to cite specific and tangible EVIDENCE of what you claimed? I hear lots of claims of the NSA being involved yet so little to back it up... that must be part of why the judge (another NSA shill?) rejected those claims
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So you've personally audited it and certified that in your capacity as an AC Tor expert?
Actually, the configuration and logs of the site was made publicly available during the trial. People recreating the configuration the government claimed the server had do not get a public IP address when they connect to the server in the way the government claims they connected to the server, they get a MySQL admin page. DPR screwed up the configuration, but the government lied -- sorry, misspoke -- about how they loc [erratasec.com]
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They KNEW he was DPR because he solicited advertisements for the site in various places including USENET using traceable accounts when he set it up. How they found the server is an open question but not really an issue given the other evidence they already had including the seized laptop. They probably had him under surveillance for months.
They had a lot of evidence he was DPR and he's admitted it in filing since. Regardless of his trial arguments that he wasn't running the site anymore there was plenty of
jury duty and double jeopardy (Score:2, Informative)
This reminds me of the last time I had jury duty. The prosecutor spent a huge amount of time explaining how if we were selected for the jury and were to find the defendant guilty, then at sentencing time there would be a free-for-all where they'd present information about other past alleged crimes that weren't part of this case (and I think for which the defendant had previously been tried unsuccessfully, my memory is foggy), and we'd be expected to set the punishment in the context of the full list of all
Re:jury duty and double jeopardy (Score:4, Informative)
The one time I was on jury duty, after we found the guy guilty (of robbery), the prosecutor tried to bring up a history of similar crimes in a different state in the 1970s. The defense attorney objected, we were kicked out of the room for 4 hours, and when we were brought back in, we were told that the old records of supposed past crimes were incomplete and had been rejected as evidence.
At the same time, though, the defendant had waived his right to jury sentencing, so we didn't have to mentally exclude those while contemplating his sentence. Instead the judge just gave him the maximum allowed time and we went home for dinner.
So, in the one situation where I have first-hand experience, the judge wouldn't let the prosecutor allege and allude to past crimes - even arrests and convictions - if the paperwork wasn't in order.
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The one time I was on jury duty for attempted murder, we were constantly leaving the room while they discussed what could be allowed to be said in court. Both the victim and the attacker had ties to organized crime, and prety much everything they said and did had links to other court cases that had either already happened or were pending. It was pretty easy to figure out what we weren't hearing from the direction the questioning was going each time the judge called a halt and asked us to step out. At lea
Re: jury duty and double jeopardy (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know the legality, but it seems shitty. Think about how it could be easily abused.
"The defendant has a history of abusing children and assaulting police officers. He has cheated on his wife and hadn't paid his bills. Consider all of this when you determine how he should be sentenced."
Utterly reprehensible if this is legal. This is what children do. If I were on a jury, I'd be inclined to give the most lenient sentence possible.
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That doesn't sound like any of my several jury duties. However, mine all went like this. We come in, sit down, a judge comes in, explains to us how the whole purpose of a jury pool is to scare people into settling cases.
Then a couple of hours later, they return, announce that all of the cases today have settled, and send everyone home.
They sure to imprison a lot of people and call up a lot of jurors for the number of cases that actually ever see a jury; which is sad, I don't think this type of system makes
end-run around constitutional protections (Score:5, Funny)
or is it an end-run around constitutional protections that everybody in the legal system has just collectively agreed on?
The Constitution isn't perfect, but it is better than what we have now.
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It's not an end-run. Crimes have a range of punishments. The punishment is to serve as a deterrent to both the offender in the future and society at large, to serve as rehabilitation for the offender, to isolate the offender from society, to hurt the offender to the degree to which the offender hurt society The last one have no relation previous offenses, but the first t
This cannot have been legal??? (Score:2, Insightful)
As I recall, the reference llines from Law & Order are "Objection, hearsay your honor" and "Objection, if the prosecution has any evidence of these claims why hasn't my client been charged?"
It's standard procedure to have other defame or stand up for the defendant personally ("Goes to character, your honor") during a trial but I'm pretty sure there's a line drawn at explicitly accusing someone of a heinous felony to this end. In fact it needn't even be a felony I bet: You cannot accuse the defendant of
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It's not hearsay when the prosecution were the ones (under false pretenses) who were asked by the defendant to arrange the hit.
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It's still an unproven allegation at that point. The judicial system may have decided that bringing that stuff up at sentencing is not forbidden, but it's still a dick move in my opinion.
Now, since such charges are pending in a different venue I don't expect it to make a practical difference in the long run; he's still likely to be in for life. But effectively he's going to get sentenced twice for the same crime.
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I think the idea here (although it'd be hard to prove one way or the other) is that this is an indication of his character, which will influence how likely he is to re-offend in the future, AND what his actual intent was in setting up and running the site. Setting up a black market and using it yourself to obtain some marijuana is a far cry from setting up a blat market and attempting to use it to kill people. It colors his intent for use.
But it's still not a good move on both the prosecution's part and t
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It's not hearsay when the prosecution were the ones (under false pretenses) who were asked by the defendant to arrange the hit.
Police officer says: "He told me that he had hired a hitman" - hearsay.
Police officer says: "He asked me to kill the guy" - not hearsay.
Actually, a bit more complicated. If someone is accused of intimidating witnesses. and the police officer says "I heard him telling Mr. X that he had hired hitmen to kill people giving evidence against him before". That's hearsay as far as hiring hitmen and killing people is concerned, but it is perfectly acceptable evidence for witness intimidation.
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Yeah; in this case it gets trickier than that.
Prosecution has a police plant who was contacted by DPR to perform a hit. So in order for it not to be hearsay, they have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that DPR is in fact Ulbricht. This is the trial that decides if DPR == Ulbricht is fact. If it IS fact, then the prosecution can substitute that their plant was contacted by Ulbricht to perform a hit. Which means it doesn't move from hearsay to fact until the finding of fact in this trial. After the fin
RICO (Score:2)
So charming. (Score:3)
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Before long they'll realize how silly it is and dispense with the whole trial and conviction theatre altogether.
Malware Accusations Hang Over Slashdot Media Head (Score:5, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/submission... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/submission... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/submission... [slashdot.org]