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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

I think the people constantly repeating this line don't understand how prosecutions actually work. Since all crimes have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to get a conviction, and some take more work/paper trail to do this than others, if someone is up on a bunch of charges, prosecutors will order them by easiest-to-hardest to prove, and then if the easiest ones are sufficient to put the person away for life, they'll focus on those and discard the rest.

This happens all the time. It is not unique to Ulbricht, and does not really imply anything about whether the contract killing request did or didn't happen.

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Ross was convicted on the generic conspiracy (which does not depend on violent acts) and then sentenced on preponderance of the evidence of the individual possible overt act that one of the conspiracy acts was murder for hire. Not sentenced based on beyond reasonable doubt he did the murder for hire.

The fact is the way "prosecution actually works" is you accuse someone of a generic conspiracy, show some element of the conspiracy was beyond a reasonable doubt true (like drug distribution), and then go to sentencing considering any element by preponderance of the evidence. It's a chilling short-circuiting of justice. Ross wasn't convicted of violent acts beyond a reasonable doubt, he was convicted of a continuing criminal enterprise where a judge thought it was more likely than not involved murder-for-hire.

But that's exactly the point: Ulbricht was not convicted of a violent crime (regardless of what people here believe or don't believe he actually did), and yet he was sentenced as if he had been.

That is literally the only point the ancestor poster was making: that if you have the means to run, it might not be so cushy a plan to turn yourself in for a non-violent crime, if you're assuming you'll get a sentence of less than 10 years at a reasonably safe low-security prison.

And in this particular case, the interesting point is: even if the prosecution didn't believe they could get a conviction for possible murder-for-hire charges, they somehow still got the desired final outcome: a sentence seemingly harsher than what would fit the crime he actually was convicted of.

(Then again, if your "only" crimes are non-violent/white-collar, maybe it is safe to assume you'll get a cushy prison sentence.)

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