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Comment by draugadrotten | Hacker News Reader

"This trial will not stop anything" may or may not be true, but the trial is also about bringing justice for what was done, and punish for the crime that was committed. If a murder was committed, a trial may not stop future murders, but surely you agree that we must bring the murderer to trial. By selling drugs and conspiring to murder, Ulbricht must stand trial, even if there will be another drug dealer tomorrow.

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If we follow that logic there are a few large players that are missing from your line of thought-

Ulbrich is a small fish in huge pond when compared to the large unnamed players who get of with small reprimands and fines.

How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-...

This is an interesting perspective on just "how much of a crime" that was:

http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/06/some-notes-about-ulbricht-...

I haven't followed this too closely, and maybe he is guilty of attempting to murder people and such, but it does look like the government/judge wanted to punish him with a life sentence mostly for the the fact that he created a "drug market outside the reach of the law" (or whatever).

Ars covered this much better than did Wired [1]. That's what you want to read to get a decent picture of the factors that went into his sentence (assuming you don't get a copy of the court transcript and read that).

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/ulbricht-at-sente...

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