Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon

I see so you accidentally retraced his footsteps from years prior and then realized it as you were reading about it.

> He was being arrested in the article, not IRL.

So the article lied that he was arrested?

> their realization created a vivid mental image of the event unfolding in that space, which made the story feel more immersive.

Glad that ChatGPT, probably like GP themselves, is a visualizer and actually can create a "vivid mental image" of something. For those of us with aphantasia, that is not a thing. Myself, I too was mighty confused by the text, which read literally like a time travel story, and was only missing a cat and tomorrow's newspaper.

Okay, that's actually pretty wild. I totally misunderstood too, but the response from the "AI" does indeed "clear it up" for me. A bit surprised actually, but then again, I suppose I shouldn't be, since language is what those "large language models" are all about after all... :)

> Yes, I thought it was an interesting blend of past and present.

Surprise: OP time traveled.

I have read at least 1000 European and American novels, play, poetry etc. and never had a single issue.

The comment you refer to is just poorly written.

Agreed. It was well written.

The focus wasn't on the exact timeline and facts of the situation. It was on what it felt like as he read the piece.

Why is he describing emotionally a factual event? He is leaving facts up to assumptions. I suppose sure, his intent was to confuse people. It worked.

Do you mean fiction books?

Exactly, that was my point about then being a word that can be interpreted in two ways, and the following sentence does not error correct this assumption.

If you read it one way, it's almost impossible to not be misdirected, because the following sentence works with both meanings.

If you include the had this would be enough of a clue to correct the incorrect assumption. Although it still might make for slightly bumpy reading.

[flagged]

Boo! Don't blame the audience!

> Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.

Alternately:

> Ulbricht had walked into the public library

gives the game away.

If you still want to play around a bit:

> I could see where Ulbricht walked into the public library. The table he sat at. I looked up and saw where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.

That way you are leaving some ambiguity, but are not directly lying with the tenses.

I think you could have told it as experiencing the events without making your post confusing, but you'd have to redo your first paragraph. Your first paragraph is external, meta, and places his arrest in your past, which throws off the effect when that suddenly changes in the next sentence. It's not the audience's fault that that is hard to parse.

> it seems I overestimated my audience

I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, somebody who aspires to be a better writer. But, no, this clarifies that you're just pretentious.

Can you form vivid mental images in your head?

Many of us can't. Personally, for nearly three decades I thought the ability to vividly experience a book this way was just some overused and extremely exaggerated metaphor - and then I discovered aphantasia is a thing, and I score close to top of its severity scale.

So perhaps it's less about your starting point, and more about describing a frame of mind some in the audience don't have, and can't relate to.

Curiously, I don't recall ever seeing this particular style of writing before, in any of the books I ever read.

I found it interesting and could visualize you as you were visualizing it while reading. The only part that made me go back was I thought he sat down to your table until I reread you could see the table he sat down at years ago.

> I overestimated my audience

How many languages do you speak? A large part of this site speaks at least two, and usually English is not the first one of them.

I've seen this type of thing recently and also have been told some comments were "obviously" meaning something else. I think people must've stopped reading books and lost interpretation skills.

I enjoyed it, personally.

You're not a physicist, are you?

You met some tanuki, 100%.

Is that why they never prosecuted the attempted murder? It sounds like entrapment.

That's the point people don't seem to be getting about anonymous reviews- if the review is more costly than the value it provides the seller, they won't do it, and it's fairly easy to make that the case. A separate enthusiast forum where the reviews are from people with a long history of high effort engagement is a good example of that. That's basically the idea behind crypto as well- making false transactions is more expensive than the value it could return.

Built on naive yet admirable ideals? Special community? It was the world’s largest drug market, selling things like fentanyl in large quantities. What admirable ideal is this?!

I think you're advocating for better mental health care and rehabilitation of addicts, which I agree with. However, the idea that addicts will destroy their lives regardless of whether they stop using, or are forced to stop using, their drug of choice is an extremely dangerous statement. Many addicts get better by changing their environment and quitting/going to rehab/etc.

Furthermore, heroin != vodka in terms of how addictive it is for the average user, and that's partly why only one of them is legal for recreational use.

Controversies about decriminalization aside, harm reduction exists as a studied component in addiction, public health, and psychology circles for a reason.

Yeah, I don't know. There's certainly people that are just broken, but reading other examples, I think there are plenty of people who just happen on to a perfect addiction(, or maybe an imperfect one that fills the spot). The manifest destiny stuff is kind of a mix that soothes a lot of people with various motives whether or not it is representative of the median case.

> Silk Road didn't actually facilitate any selling/buying of weapons or any items "whose purpose was to "harm or defraud"

There was definitely a fake ID tab on it. Isn't fraud one of the main purposes of having a fake ID?

Guns were definitely for sale on Silk Road. Ulbricht stopped selling them because it wasn't lucrative enough.

I can't find the original post, but this post quotes his comments at the time when he closed the gun forum:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66587.msg1079466#msg...

I saw guns on it when I joined years ago.

Facebook doesn’t make the comments that will kill people

There are many Christians who would happily to get in long arguments over which values are “clearly Christian.”

If you really want to understand, it’s not hard. It just requires making an honest effort to try, without judging. And that’s what stops people who don’t understand it. Try chatting with an LLM sometime about what it looks like from their perspective. Knowing it’s not a human makes it easier to avoid getting upset.

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have significant influence on staffing.

Vivek Ramaswamy is a partner at a16z

Well, he just did an executive order to label cartels as foreign terrorists, and has spoken at length about drugs in many of his speeches. Not sure why you think such a statement is controversial.

I'm no Trump fan and won't go to bat for him, but being anti-drug and anti-cartel is literally one of his schticks.

>he signed an executive order forcing prosecutors to seek the death penalty when police are killed

He also pardoned a drug dealing cop killer at the end of his last term. Said cop killer has since been arrested for attempting to strangle his wife to death.

https://www.wesh.com/article/cop-killer-pardoned-by-trump-co...

You think Trump is involved with drug selling organized crime, and this guy somehow was on “his side”?

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> Historically, many anti-drug / anti-cartel leaders are actually members of a rival cartel, and want to use law enforcement to fight their wars for them.

For reference, Rudy Giuliani was lauded as the anti-organized mayor that brought down the Italian mob in New York, but ultimately was flagged as actually being an upper echelon of Russian organized crime who worked to establish it by eliminating competiton.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Giuliani

Trump is pro-Trump. That's it.

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There was deliberately no mention of the alleged murders-for-hire during the trial.

The judge said during sentencing that she was giving Ulbricht an incredibly harsh sentence to make an example of him to others who think that facilitating selling drugs is a victimless crime, and she was also angry at the huge stack of nice letters that people sent to the court in support of Ulbricht.

And even if he did screw up the paper work, he could just write another pardon anyway. He can write infinite pardons (for federal charges, anyway).

<citation needed>

It's the scale of the crime (he facilitated 10s of thousands of transactions), the judge clearly stated she wanted to make an example of him and give pause to anyone thinking about doing something similar in the future, and she was angry at the many of the letters of support Ulbricht's fans family and friends sent the court.

My memory is she started the sentencing hearing by disdainfully reading a few of them from a pile of them she brought to the court that day.

Nah, it's more that you do not fuck with the money system. SBF is learning that same lesson.

Jeff Skilling (Enron) served 12 years in jail for insider trading and securities.

Not saying that Skilling, Maddoff or SBF shouldn't have gone to jail. They deserved it. But I do find it interesting that financial crimes can tend to be the most harshly judged, likely because of who they impact (the people with money) and because they cause distrust of the financial system as a whole.

> Madoff stole $20-35B

Not to defend Madoff, but it's not like he made off with that money himself, so I'm not sure "stole" is the correct term. Most of that money went to investors -- it just went to a different set of investors than the ones who had put that money in (the nature of a Ponzi scheme).

If someone robs a bank, or steals a wallet, they're probably hoping to get as much money as they can. If that wallet happened to $1B in it, I don't think it makes the thief more heinous. If we sentence people based on the amount of money they manage to steal, we're sentencing them largely based on luck.

On the same principle, noting that someone who punched someone got one day in jail is not a good justification for why someone shouldn't get two days in jail for smoking weed.

I wasn't implying that either Ulbricht or Madoff's sentences were unjust.

Your math is wrong at least for Biden, I didn't recheck the others. Biden has 1736 pardons commuted or granted in 46.5 months or 37 pardons per month. I suspect all your other ones are wrong since Biden was so off. The recent trend is Biden and Obama being "off the charts" compared to the republican presidents. From my understanding this is due to weed related charges where they did mass pardonings. It's besides the point ones feelings about it, just commenting on the math.

The charges, sure. The ethical and moral implications, no.

This is silly whataboutism. They have plenty of evidence, including PST/PDT timestamps and proof he logged out of other personal accounts when he logged into that account, that suggested it was him. Despite his claims, they watched him extensively and found no indication that anyone else was posing as DPR.

I think he's referring to the NY state case, which is difficult to dispute that it was done for political purposes. Although I'm sure Trump would say it applies to the federal classified documents case, as well.

This is a very interesting standpoint.

I personally believe that having lots of parties founded on concise, coherent principles would be very nice from a voter point of view (to express preferences), but those would be completely unable to actually govern-- because there are a lot of decisions to make and compromises to find, and trying to do this solely based on a small set of principles is just not possible, because you would need to abstain from all decisions that your founding principles can not answer clearly (and no current democracy is set up in a way that enables this).

I can picture a system where this could work in theory (lots of parties forming the government, but most parties abstain from voting on any single decision), but I can see no way of preventing scope creep/consolidation...

Regarding the "both main parties equally bad" aspect:

What are your main pain points with the previous administration? As an outsider, to me it appears that despite getting dealt a rather bad hand (Covid/Ukraine/Middle East chaos), they made a lot of correct decisions (in hindsight).

Post-trump republicans, on the other hand, appear irresponsibly selfcentered to me in many ways (climate/emissions, Covid policies, foreign/trade, anti-pluralism). I also think that (2016) Trump poisoned political discourse in a insidiously harmful way, by basically forgoing any form of factual debate in favor of spewing insults at every opportunit (lying Hillary, sleepy Joe, ...)-- this alone I feel almost requires opposition...

What issue would your ideal party tackle first?

Calling him a non-violent first time offender is very odd given the magnitude of what his crimes were. He created a very large scale marketplace for all things illegal. Independent of his own hiring of hit men (hello non-violent?), selling substances that lead to overdoses, guns, bomb making materials, etc is certainly my definition of violent. Then add the scale; I fully agree with life sentence without chance of parole. This pardon is shameful.

On the one hand you say we should retain judges making sentencing adjustments where appropriate, but who judges the appropriateness of the adjustments?

It sounds like if an extenuating circumstance resonates with a judge, then the sentence will get modified. Sentencing shouldn't be based on a single person's "feelings."

And in Singapore drug dealers get death penalty. Wherever your from seems extremely lenient.

> Seeing it first hand with a with a family member in public school flipped me.

Why is this an either or?

SF spends about $1 billion dollars on schools [1] and while the program ran it had around a $40 million dollar budget [2]. For an area that houses huge tech companies, this doesn't seem like an extreme budget to be working with.

> Not to mention the tents.

Ok? And what options would you give these people, just be homeless somewhere else where you can't see them?

[1] https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/...

[2] https://sfstandard.com/2021/11/17/supervisors-approve-6-5m-i...

While I think anecdotes are valuable and should not be easily dismissed, we have decades of research and evidence supporting the benefit of harm reduction centers. They reduce risk of overdose morbidity and mortality while not increasing crime or public nuisance to the surrounding community.

E.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8541900/

I never did any drugs but when I was growing up, it was understood that you needed to keep your drug use somewhat secret, behind closed doors, hidden from the public, I expected there would be consequences from the police if I decided to do drugs out in the open.

Now I see guys doing extremely hard drugs out in the open on the street and on buses. it is a jarring. They're usually not trying to inject or exhale on me ( though the meth smoke guys on some buses don't seem to care ).

Honestly, it's because SF didn't actually do anything

Having harm reduction sites doesn't mean you get to shoot whenever and whatever

SF's governance is delirious honestly

Yeah although this is more a consequence of how SF decided to handle it. Rather than decriminalising they're just enabling users.

Look towards other countries with similar policies (Portugal, Netherlands, etc.) in their cases they saw a decrease in drug usage and fatalities. The difference is they decided to not encourage their behaviour by allowing open air drug markets to flourish, with kiosks just down the street handing out the necessary paraphernalia.

How does that make any sense? So you could never pass a law to reduce risk because in most cases, breaking it won’t create a victim?

Speed limits are done to reduce the risk of you killing someone. Do you really think you should be able to drive however you want and until you actually have an accident, it’s fine?

>no victim means no crime

If you feel entitled to redefine the word "crime", that is.

Where has that strategy been effective? Do you have any numbers? Does it have any side effects?

Next up: The final solution for littering. And traffic violations. And adultery. Utopia awaits the bold!

I sincerely didn't mean to minimize the harm to sex workers, which is devastating.

My point is rather that an online marketplace in the absence of decriminalization and reform can only provide a marginal increase in safety. Sex workers marketing on Backpage, Craigslist, Onlyfans, and IG still face a great deal of risk of violence, pressure from pimps, and prosecution by law enforcement. It's a deeply complex systematic issue which can't be fixed by a website.

For drugs in particular, darknet marketplaces primarily rely on unspeakably violent criminal enterprises upstream. The consumers, sellers, and communities implicated in this supply chain are all losers in this system. The cartels are the winners and the global "war on drugs" establishment are a close second place.

If the liquor store owner knows that some of those bottles might contain pure methanol, and people end up dying from drinking said methanol...then, yes, I do think the store owner should do some serious jailtime.

Which is what this boils down to. Ross didn't know what people were selling. Could be pure high-quality stuff, could be contaminated stuff, could be stuff that was cut up with fent. He made money either way.

Why not incarcerate all car makers and doctors then too?

You are hopelessly lost my friend, unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.

The comment you replied to referenced "multiple teenagers" - the very people that liquor stores cannot sell alcohol to since they're not recognized as mature enough to be freely allowed to drink.

SR allowed children to buy addictive poison without any regulation whatsoever, and Ross profited off of those transactions.

These are not comparable institutions.

The law recognizes that a bottle of beer generally cannot be used to murder someone else.

Charles Manson never murdered anyone. Should his sentence been commuted?

Russians must have become experts at geocaching with all their experience chasing dead-drops.

I don't think those types of hypotheticals are taken very seriously in court rooms. One, they are effectively unfalsifiable, because it's a about harm that could have happened but didn't. Two, they can be applied universally. Any action might have prevented a catastrophe, after all. Courts persecute based on laws broken and harm done.

Ironically our justice system sometimes does persecute based on hypotheticals. For example persecution for driving recklessly, which is inconsistent with the principle above.

An 18 year old lad from my village, who had just started a job programming, bought a drug from an online “pharmacy” and it turned out to be spiked with a synthetic opioid (N-pyrrolidino-etonitazene) and he died in his sleep at home, alone.

On your point about spiked products - it’s clearly a problem for online illegal drugs as well as those bought on the street.

The problem is, you don’t get to leave a bad review if you’re dead.

If you knowingly operate a marketplace where unsafe products are being sold, you very much bear some responsibility of those injuries.

If Ross let drug dealers sell fentanyl-laced drugs, which ended up killing someone, he absolutely should be charged.

Those deals wouldn't have been possible without his platform. Sure, maybe the same drug dealer would have sold the bad stuff to some other poor user outside silk road, but those dealings that ended up happening on silk road are his (Ross) to own.

I think there is some difference between running a marketplace which you intend for people to sell products legally on, and a marketplace which you intend and know people will sell products illegally on.

Whether I agree with it or not, the law often recognises differences like this. It's not illegal to lie, but it is illegal to lie in the aid a murder. The lier themselves might not be a murderer, but the lier is knowingly facilitating murder.

Ulbricht was knowingly facilitating crime in the case, and sometimes this crime would result in the deaths of people. And despite knowing all this he took no action to address it.

Perhaps your point was he just didn't deserve the sentence he receive, which is fair, but he clearly did something that most people would consider very wrong.

I also wonder how people would feel if Silkroad was associated more with the trading of humans, CSAM, biological weapons or more serious things rather than just drugs. I doubt the "he's just running a marketplace" reasoning would hold in most people's eyes then.

This is why people only blame the DZOQBX brands that sell on Amazon for review fraud and not Amazon themselves, who are blamelessly hosting all those fraudulent sellers.

He tried to have people murdered for his own benefit.

Do these smart people you speak of think things that are different are entirely unrelated?

Smart people can differentiate between a transparent marketplace which provides a net economic benefit to society from an obfuscated one which by design enables illicit activity.

your argument is actually quite dumb, because they have messages from Ross giving the OK to sell most of these things.

He wasnt some hands off executive who had no idea. Smart people should be able to not equate an illegal market place with a legal market place

Intent matters!! For all he knew, Ulbricht had killed those guys and he was fine with that

I think they were dropped because in 1 out of the 6 cases, the investigation was tainted because the associated government agents committed their own crimes, and also maybe but I can't prove it everyone thought that prosecuting someone who has been sentenced to 2 life sentences + 40 years is a waste of time.

You can convict for murder for hire in that circumstance.

This doesn’t sound like an imaginary person

https://www.vice.com/en/article/murdered-silk-road-employee-...

The state hates more than anything someone who operates on first principles that the empire is wrong.

A serial rapist, even one that would happily do it again, will often repent and quickly admit guilt. They have no interest in undermining the philosophical basis of the state. They will posture themselves as bound but imperfect citizens under the law.

Ross violated the only remaining national holy religion, the rule of law. He was sentenced for being a heretic.

Pretty sure Silk Road enabled loads of pedophiles to go about their activities. This is a false equivalence

Yes, but so are a lot of sentences in the US. I've heard of people being put away for decades for mere drug possession.

That said, rapists surprisingly often get just a slap on the wrist, or not even that. The US absolutely needs some balance and consistency in its sentencing, but pardoning this one guy sends a really weird message in that regard. At the very least, just commute the sentence so at least the conviction still stands.

Pretty much all criminal laws are like that since only a fraction of crimes will ever lead to an arrest we make examples out of those are caught to make others less likely to commit crimes in the future when they see the punishment. The deterrence effect is basically "risk of getting caught" * "punishment if you get caught".

In the UK, serial child rapists are being given 3 year sentences

He operated a site that allowed you to hire hitmen.

[dead]

[flagged]

> Many criminal gangs from biker groups to foreign cartels are doing the same thing and reaping profits in the $100Bs scale annually.

That comparison does not flatter Ross Ulbricht.

"Society would massively benefit"

Yes. Just like San Francisco and Seattle did when they legalized drugs

Bailing him out comes at no cost? That's one way to see it. In my opinion, it sends a message that as long as you can provide value to this new administration, you get preferential treatment - no matter how shady and unethical your business ventures are.

[flagged]

It was a very high RoI. The cost to run it was negligible compared to the income it generated.

It's surprising to me that the prosecutor is allowed to essentially insinuate crimes to influence the jury, without the need to prove them. That seems to undermine the process because it creates a "there's smoke so there must be fire" mentality for the jury.

This opinion (after appeal) also details how they taken into consideration with sentencing. See pages 130-131

https://pbwt2.gjassets.com/content/uploads/2017/05/15-1815_o...

That's a nice end-run around “innocent until proven guilty”: they didn't have to prove anything about those allegations beyond making them, because he wasn't charged with them.

The first person in the murder-for-hire allegations 'FriendlyChemist' was an undercover DEA agent or informant, and it's strongly possible none of the other people existed. It's also conjectured the hitman account 'Redandwhite' was being operated by the same DEA agent [*]. Moreover the bitcoin DPR sent the supposed hitman 'Redandwhite' sat in the wallet from 3/2013 till 8/2013, "which alone should have tipped out DPR about a possible scam" ie. that the killing never happened [0]. DPR never requested any confirmation pictures of at least 5 of the (fictitious) killings, nor was there any Canadian media coverage to suggest anyone got assassinated on the supposed dates.

The US Attorneys made a lot of publicity out of the murder-for-hire conspiracy allegations against Ulbricht in their indictments and in pre-trial media ("although there is no evidence that these murders were actually carried out." as the indictment itself obliquely says).

Ulbricht's defense could have come up with a plausible alternative explanations that he knew redandwhite was a scammer trying to extort him with a story involving nonexistent people, and was just playing along with him for whatever reasons.

[*] If the prosecution had not actually dropped those charges at trial, it would have been confirmed at trial which of the six identities were fictitious/nonexistent and whether all the accounts were managed by the same DEA agents. Hard to imagine that at least one juror wouldn't have formed a skeptical opinion about government agents extorting a person to conspire to kill fictitious people (why didn't the indictment just focus on nailing him on the lesser charges?). If this wasn't a Turing Test on when is an alleged conspiracy not a real conspiracy, then someday soon we'll see one.

ArsTechnica covered these facts in 2015:

[0]: "The hitman scam: Dread Pirate Roberts’ bizarre murder-for-hire attempts. On the darkweb, no one is who they seem." 2/2015 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/the-hitman-scam-...

[1]: Silk Road’s alleged hitman, “redandwhite,” arrested in Vancouver https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/silk-roads-alleg...

That isn't fair, the point of the trial is to test whether something is to be acted on. To act on something that wasn't directly part of the trial is a bit off. I'm sure the judge is acting in the clear legally, but if someone is going to be sentenced for attempted murder then that should be after a trial that formally accuses them of the crime.

> a higher standard than most apply in public discourse

Is it? Preponderance of the evidence is basically “more likely than not”

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There are murderers who hardly do more than a few years in prison. He was jailed for much longer than what violent criminals get.

> But given that no-one seems to seriously dispute that he did try to pay to have the guy killed

If there was enough evidence to demonstrate that he attempted to murder someone, why wasn't he charged and convicted of it?

Also, 2 of the DEA agents involved in his investigation were convicted of fraud in relation to the case.

I do believe he probably did attempt to have someone killed, but I'm far from certain of it, and think it should have no bearing on the case if there's not enough evidence to convict him.

> But given that no-one seems to seriously dispute that he did try to pay to have the guy killed,

It’s my understanding in the US that you are innocent until proven guilty, right? Therefore, he is indeed innocent of those crimes, since he was not proven guilty. Unless I’m missing something on how the US justice system works.

You say the rule of law is important, but also we should impose extra-legal long sentences even if the rule of law doesn't allow us to? How do you reconcile this perspective?

> The rule of law is important,

The rule of law says innocent until proven guilty.

The reason they didn't go after him for murder for hire allegations isn't because they felt bad for him or that they didn't want to waste tax payer's money.

The reason they didn't go after him for 'murder for hire' was that they knew there was no merit in it.

This is self evident.

So you think people should be sentenced based on charges that were not proven in court?

The case for this was dropped because he was sentenced for it in the other case.

> Just because the charge was dropped doesn't mean he's innocent of it

That’s exactly what it means under the presumption of innocence.

Advocating for the continued imprisonment of someone for something they are legally considered innocent of, is quite literally vigilantism.

> Just because the charge was dropped doesn't mean he's innocent of it.

If you had a trial and they can't prove that, then yes it means you are innocent of this charge in the eyes of the law

He had a jury trial.

You can buy sugar at the grocery store which can ruin your life. What's your point? People can get addicted to anything.

>if they demonstrate exceptional rehabilitation and remorse, as Ross has

He seems to be denying that he hired hitmen:

https://youtu.be/zHMVyr5NjEY?si=GC1RhHhgLxe8gUOL&t=801

Life imprisonment – with or without parole – for a non-violent crime still seems excessive. If they'd convicted him of conspiracy to murder for hiring the hitman then that's a different matter.

> It's always struck me as odd that the United States - a nation that is packed with far more Christians than Canada - doesn't shape its system of incarceration to be more inline with Christian values and the teachings of Jesus.

Canada didn't have Prohibition to the extent that the US did, which in turn led to the rise and financing of organized crime. All the rest of it fell out of that: Organized crime was violent and ruthless, so people started demanding oppressive laws and harsh penalties to deal with it.

One of the major problems with this is that the cycle is reinforced by law enforcement. You sensibly get rid of prohibition, but then the mob is still around and starts looking for a new source of funding, so you get more extortion rackets etc. Then a law enforcement bureaucracy is created to deal with it, but long-term the mob was going to die out without prohibition anyway and the law enforcement efforts just speed it up a bit. Except now you have a law enforcement bureaucracy with nothing to do, so they lobby to recreate Prohibition in the form of the Controlled Substances Act, which reconstitutes the mob in the form of the drug cartels.

But now instead of saying "prohibition failed, let's repeal it" they say "we need more resources" -- institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are they solution. So the Feds fight any attempts to legalize drugs because it would put them out of a job, but as long as there is prohibition there is organized crime, and organized crime is violent and terrible and a ratchet to ever-harsher penalties.

> As an aside, in Canada, a sentence of life without parole is considered unlawful because it conflicts with Section 12 of the Charter guarantees that individuals have the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Courts have ruled that life without the possibility of parole deprives offenders of any hope of rehabilitation or reintegration into society, which could amount to cruel and unusual treatment.

Germany's highest court has held the same thing.

This is right and proper. We need to defend these principles, now more than ever.

On the surface but then they label you a dangerous offender and they keep you in jail. Paul Bernardino is a good example.

The differences in the system probably have more to do with electing vs appointing. Electing is more likely to send someone tougher on crime vs well balance.If officials were elected in Canada you would see the same outcome.

Not to mention private vs public prisons and when you make it a business you have to find new customers vs a cost center you want to limit.

It's very rare to see someone commenting on a HN from a orthodox (small o) Christian perspective. Thank you - some good points. But I'm very suspect that Trump made his decision on Ulbricht based on Jesus teachings, and even more suspect that the people who vote for him based their decision on Jesus teachings, despite any religious affiliation they may have. I think Paul Graham's recent article on the original of wokeness is very instructive here - there's always someone or some group to look down on, to make ourselves feel better, whatever side of the fence we are on. Cancel culture of the far left or progressive Christians, look them up and throw away the key, lack of grace by conservative Christians, it amounts to the same thing. (I'm a British Christian)

9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

It took a bit of tracking down, but I finally found an apparently egregious example of this sort of thing I had vaguely remembered: Iraqi citizen and legal US resident Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab was sentenced last February to 14 years in prison for his role in an alleged plot to murder George W. Bush, and his involvement in smuggling terrorists into the United States. [1] But his sentencing (after his guilty plea) contains an interesting caveat: lifetime supervised release.

Why is a terrorist and would-be assassin of a former President getting lifetime supervised release? None of the media coverage of the case, going back years, makes that clear. However, a footnote in the original criminal complaint against[2] him offers a likely explanation:

"In or around the end of March 2022, United States immigration officials conducted an asylum interview with SHIHAB. After the interview was conducted United States immigration officials advised the FBI that SHIHAB may have information regarding an ISIS member that was recently smuggled into the United States."

With a little reading between the lines of the criminal complaint, a very different story emerges: Shihab never dealt with any terrorists. He was a paid middleman between two government informants or agents pretending to be terrorists. He took their money, played along, and ratted them out to INS during an asylum interview. After that, once they realized the jig was up, the FBI arrested and charged him at its earliest opportunity - for the plot they had created and paid him to participate in, and which he in turn had informed the government about.

1. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/columbus-man-sentenced-...

2. https://truthout.org/app/uploads/2022/06/Shihab-complaint.pd...

Agreed. He willingly engaged with the alleged hitman (which ended up being the FBI contact). He didn't need to do anything or not have the thought to murder others cross his mind.

Many people, including myself, do not believe that he really did any of the activity related to the assassination attempts. Demonstrably corrupt law enforcement agents had the opportunity to do it all themselves and it would be typical behaviour for those agencies. He is (and was) politically passionate about non-violence and it would go against everything he stood for. I cannot believe he would do it. What do you mean "openly"?

He never admitted to the attempted murder. So it's not a leap to assume that might of been tainted

> openly tried to assassinate a competitor.

Unmitigated nonsense. The evidence that he was involved in this is somewhere between unreliable and nonexistent, and he (and the supposed victim) have disputed it since day one. WTF do you mean "openly"?

> The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar is that DPR was running his drug business in the 2010s instead of the 1980s.

Asserting moral equivalence between someone who ordered dozens of innocent women and children not just killed but dismembered - solely as a lesson for others. Orders which were actually carried out multiple times and DPR who was never charged, tried or convicted of conspiring with a supposed online hitman to kill a competitor (who both were actually FBI informants - clearly making it entrapment). Yeah, that's quite a reach.

Sure, DPR was no saint but why push for the absolute maximally extreme interpretation? Even asserting he "organized and operated a global criminal drug ring" is a stretch. My understanding is he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers. I'm not aware that Ross ever bought or sold drugs as a business or hired others to do so. There is more than a little nuance between 1) buying drugs from distributors, delivering drugs to buyers and collecting the money, and 2) running online forums and messaging for people who do those things. At most, #2 is being an accessory to #1.

DPR dabbled with the idea of violence.

Pablo Escobar revelled in it.

PE put bombed newspapers and killed hundreds, if not thousands of people unrelated to any criminal enterprise or to arresting him. I mean, actual innocent, minding their own business civilians. Over 4000 murders have been directly attributed to the actions and orders of Escobar. Estimates to the actual count range closer to 8000.

DPR went over to the dark side a bit in that entrapment racket, or at least it seems so.

Thinking that someone needs to be murdered isn’t necessarily a character flaw, imho.

It depends on what DPR was led to believe about this fictional person. It is reasonable to imagine that the FBI took every possible measure to make their fake victim seem as murder worthy as possible. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that the “victim” may have been painted as a purveyor of child trafficking, CSAM, or other things repugnant. My point is we don’t know. And if we don’t know, we should reserve judgment.

I don't think anyone in here is making the case that Ulbricht is a "good person", but comparing Escobar to Ulbricht is next-level delusional.

One of these people attempted to place hits on 3-4 individuals, the other one planted a bomb on a passenger plane that resulted in the deaths of over a hundred people.

Get some perspective and/or learn your history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_203

> The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar

The only difference?

Was he ever convicted on conspiracy to murder?

Because in my opinion the ethics of operating a drug ring is not as black as white as you state.

The existence of drug rings is an inevitable outcome from the war on drugs and I would argue the blame lands on the politicians who maintain the status quo that incentivises the creation of the black market for drugs.

wait what? Escobar was responsible for conservatively 4,000 people killed, some at his own hand

DPR conspired but didn't actually directly kill anyone

Not saying DPR was a good person, but a little perspective is in order

> A heartbreaking story is currently unfolding that’s sure to have devastating ramifications for years to come. Just moments ago, without any warning, the worst person you know just made a great point.

https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...

You shouldn't necessarily change your negative opinion of someone, just because they're right about something. To invoke Godwin's law: Adolf Hitler was a staunch opponent of smoking, in a time when many Allied cultures thought smoking was great, but that doesn't mean you're wrong about him.

Yeah, I'm pleased that Ross is out after serving over 10 years, but I wish it had been a commutation. He was guilty. The problem is the judge wildly over sentencing. Ten years served is about right for what he was convicted of.

Appeal to emotions stands on the trustworthiness/track record of the pleader. The opposition, full of public/private office musical chair players, has been in the pocket of lobbyists/corporate interests - they don't have any standing to plead to emotions (not saying the incumbents do but they have been successful in harnessing their already enraged supporters).

To add, conservatives voters often claim they vote they way they do because "the other side" makes no attempt to understand them. I think GP is asking an honest question. If nothing else, I had the same question because I want to understand what the conservative voters want in this case, if not the surface level racism.

To anyone who voted for Trump because he said he'd be hard on drug dealers: how do you feel about him pardoning a top level drug dealer?

In America? Not for a while.

Why would Coinbase and Gemini and A16z care about an obviously shady person who reportedly tried to hire a person to kill someone? surely they could find a more legitimate hero to advance the legal crypto case? i mean, it's kind of like them - companies trying to do legit crypto - rallying today around SBF when they already have image problems from other exchanges?

So it's much safer for customers and will likely reduce drug violence?

My understanding is that it’s more Trump generally attempts to keep campaign promises, he doesn’t always succeed, but when all it takes is an executive order, he generally does it pretty quickly.

In instances where it takes more than his signature (e.g. the wall) he has failed to make good on many promises but he definitely put in effort to trying to make them happen.

Ross founded a nonviolent way to sell drugs that competes with the narco traffickers responsible for millions (?) of deaths.

Commutation is not considered during sentencing or mandatory minimums or anything like that. It's only an option for very popular cases and even then it's rare.

The people he "tried to kill" were fabrications of two FBI agents in an entrapment scheme who both ended up in prison shortly after Ross.

I'm curious why you think we're close to an amendment being passable? 2/3rds Senate and 3/4th of the states does feel impossible for anything with even a slightly partisan angle to it?

> Constitutional stasis

Tickles me to see “stasis” so used - not incorrectly, ofc, but nonetheless as a perfect contranym of the original Greek.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasis_(ancient_Greece)]

> not the fact that twitter is hostile to unauthenticated user agents.

Yep, Twitter has had aggressive authentication gating for almost 2yrs now and HN frequently has Twitter links

Pretty much every politician has done the same "nazi" salute. If that is actually the reason that is ridiculous.

> The main reason all the subs made this change today is because of the elon nazi salute

You need to be a radical far leftist to even believe that. But then this is Reddit.

What far left sources do you consider “trusted”?

if its on front page of HN already w/ hundreds of votes, i think its fair to assume its legitimate regardless of the source.

No, it's worse now.

Back in 2017, I could still read public profiles, their tweets, and look at the replies, all without logging in.

Now I can't even look at an account page without logging in.

The pardon can restore certain rights in some cases, I'm not entirely familiar with the Stone shenanigans, but knowing the parties involved I can't assume that Stone was legally entitled to do what he did after the pardon, and maybe he was.

That said, the recovery of assets after transfer to Treasury is settled law. [1]

> More broadly, the Court ruled in several cases during this period that pardons entitled their recipients to recover property forfeited or seized on the basis of the underlying offenses, so long as vested third-party rights would not be affected and money had not already been paid into the Treasury (except as authorized by statute).

Was covered in Osborne v. United States, Knote v. United States, In re: Armstrong's Foundry, Cent. R.R. v. Bosworth and Jenkins v. Collard

Subsequent cases make it clear that the offense is not in fact "gone."

> ... the Court in Burdick stated that a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it."

> ... then, in Carlesi v. New York, the Court determined that a pardoned offense could still be considered “as a circumstance of aggravation” under a state habitual-offender law, reflecting that although a pardon may obviate the punishment for a federal crime, it does not erase the facts associated with the crime or preclude all collateral effects arising from those facts.

The court holds that it is not in fact as if it never happened.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...

Your example doesn't seem to involve restoring property / funds due to a pardon that were already confiscated / already paid.

Is there some example of someone getting such money back?

Part of getting pardoned is admitting guilt - ask joe arpaio ...

It is easy to look up the cases against the agents. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-federal-agents-charged...

Both served time.

Well the American Government auctioned the bitcoin, and the two FBI agents were tried and sentenced for theft. I don't need evidence.

I am curious how the American government can reimburse those pardoned.

That's not how it works. The money can still be guilty of a crime outside of the Defendant's acquittal in civil cases like this.

source: hundreds of hours in forfeiture court

A pardon results in the relief from the consequences of a crime. There being a pardon doesn't necessarily mean there was no crime.

“A pardon is an expression of the president's forgiveness and ordinarily is granted in recognition of the applicant's acceptance of responsibility for the crime and established good conduct for a significant period of time after conviction or completion of sentence. It does not signify innocence.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_pardons_in_the_Unite...

Pardons are forgiveness. They don’t roll back the clock, although the Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that acceptance of a pardon is not an assumption of guilt.

I don’t believe that’s true. A pardon does not excuse a crime.

That would arguably create some of the worst perverse incentives, as far as financial crimes go.

Any two-bit governor could team up with some criminal, and make enough money to be set up for life against a pardon. Even worse if it's a president, as they could likely get off scot-free.

Trump could literally scam everyone and everyone, step down, receive a pardon from the VP, and happy days.

Hard to agree here. A jury of his peers convicted him of the crime.

> a lot of known best practices were not followed in 2013.

like Secret Service and DEA agents getting immediately caught trying to steal Bitcoin from Silk Road?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/03/30/federal-agent...