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Comment by blake1 | Hacker News Reader

His sentence seems fair according to the standards of the US justice system, at least from my non-lawyer’s perspective. He profited enormously from drug trafficking, and received a sentence in line with other convicted cartel leaders. Is this site advocating for freeing all such similar cartel leaders? If not, why not?

And yes, he was not convicted of the solicitation for murder, but in the US justice system considering this secondary behavior is perfectly legal. I don’t even think it’s all that uncommon or unethical. It’s just the more converse of giving someone a lighter sentence for an otherwise unblemished life.

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That seems a bit harsh given that he wasn't directly involved in the trafficking. Was he a facilitator? Sure, but most drug trafficking is facilitated through systems that are considered legal: post office, google searches, emails, medicine labs, etc. Yet, why is the moderator of a platform the one who has to pay the biggest price?

So considering that, yes, his punishment far exceeds his involvement in the illegal activity. The punishment should've been shared by the dozen, if not hundreds, of other parties/groups/dynamics involved. History has proved that killing the platform doesn't fix the problem.

Ironically the platform was fixing the problem.

In other words, isn't a knowingly facilitator directly involved in the illegal activity he's facilitating?

This discussion is clouded because it's was an online platform and it was pretending to be a beacon of user privacy and civil liberties (which it was not).

Imagine a situation where you're renting rooms in your house for criminals to conduct crimes (and that's your main selling point, nobody is pretending you're renting those rooms because you want simply to help people), would we be discussing whether you deserve a harsh sentence or not? I don't think so.

The difference between the Silk Road website and Google/Postal Office is that they take reasonable measures against illegal activity on their platform when they are informed of that.

> He profited enormously from drug trafficking

Honest question: How much profit did pharma execs make fully knowing their drugs were abused and sold illegally en masse? I'm interested in how people think they aren't culpable? Oxycodone is a household name in drug abuse, it kills thousands every year. All those people seem to live very good lives off it's sales.

Attempts to make less addictive pain killers is an uphill battle for profitablity in the existing environment.

Not defending Ross Ulbright here either, these people should be in jail too.

Some state government is finally taking on the Sackler family (opiod kingpins)

I think part of this is a perception issue. Since he did everything basically through his computer, to many people it doesn't feel much different than playing an elaborate online game. So many people can envision themselves getting into a similar situation.

This case has often been compared to Breaking Bad, where main protagonist starts off with someone that many people can identify with, and it is only through some twisted sequences of fate that leads him to getting deeper and deeper into the criminal world. And it is only really in the last season or two where it finally sinks in that he really is the bad guy.

> but in the US justice system considering this secondary behavior is perfectly legal

Out of interest, do you know if that's a fact in the Ulbricht case i.e. the judge said she was taking it into account?

I'm not sure it matters hugely in the sense that the mandatory minimum for Continuing Criminal Enterprise is life and he was well within the bounds of that. Just curious.

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