SLIK ROAD FOUNDER TRIAL

“The idea that it is harm-reducing is so narrow, and aimed at such a privileged group of people who are using drugs in the privacy of their own homes using their personal internet connections”, she said. “Silk Road created who hadn’t tried drugs before,” Forrest said, adding that Silk Road “expands the market” and places demand on drug-producing (and violent) areas in Afghanistan and Mexico that grow the poppies used for heroin. Forrest found none of the arguments convincing. He was logged in to the Silk Road master account, according to the agents who arrested him, and investigators found chat logs and other evidence on the hard drive that implicated him.įorrest said she had taken special care to read the reams of documents sent to her in Ulbricht’s support, and that while it was unusual to do so, she wanted to address them at the sentencing, particularly those who’d said that an online drug marketplace reduced the violence of the drug trade.Īfter his conviction, Ulbricht’s defense argued that the Silk Road was in fact a boon to the health of its clients, especially those who habitually used drugs. Ulbricht was arrested in the science fiction section of his public library, “literally caught with his fingers at the keyboard, running Silk Road”, said the prosecution in its opening statement. Given the evidence presented against Ulbricht, the pitch proved a hard sell to the jury. Throughout the trial, the defense suggested that Ulbricht was the victim of a complex hacking attack that left him looking like the fall guy. Prosecutors said that he had gone so far as to solicit six murders for hire, although no charges were ever brought.

SLIK ROAD FOUNDER TRIAL

Ulbricht was convicted in February after a four-week trial on all seven counts, from selling narcotics and money laundering to maintaining an “ongoing criminal enterprise”, a charge usually reserved for mob kingpins. Prosecutors said Silk Road had generated nearly $213.9m (£140m) in sales and $13.2m in commissions before police shut it down. In March 2013 the secret site listed 10,000 items for sale, 7,000 of which were drugs including cannabis, MDMA and heroin. Silk Road was once the largest “dark web” marketplace for illegal drugs and other services. It’s a privileged argument and it’s an argument made by one of the privileged,” she said. “No drug dealer from the Bronx has ever made this argument to the court. A little more mature and much more humble,” Ulbricht pled in court.įorrest rejected arguments that Silk Road had reduced harm among drug users by taking illegal activities off the street.

I’m not the man I was when I created Silk Road. Prosecutors wrote Forrest a 16-page letter requesting the opposite: “ lengthy sentence, one substantially above the mandatory minimum is appropriate in this case.” “I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age,” he wrote to Forrest this week. Ulbrict had begged the judge to “leave a light at the end of the tunnel” ahead of his sentence.

You made your own laws,” Forrest told Ulbricht as she read the sentence. You were captain of the ship, the dread Pirate Roberts.

In the world you created over time, democracy didn’t exist. “The stated purpose was to be beyond the law. The judge handed out the most severe sentence available to the man US authorities identified as “Dread Pirate Roberts”, pseudonymous founder of an Amazon-like online market for illegal goods. All are to be served concurrently with no chance of parole. The 31-year-old physics graduate and former boy scout was handed five sentences: one for 20 years, one for 15 years, one for five and two for life.

Slik road founder