Ulbricht Murder-for-Hire Debate

The idea that Ross Ulbricht attempted to kill anyone is entirely based on the word of an agent who was charged with embezzling money, and never entered into his trial.The prosecution decided to hide the fact that the agent was on the take during the investigation until Ulbricht’s trial was over. It helped them to have a cloud of shaky and unprovable allegations of murder floating around.It would have been too risky to their case to put the accusations of murder under the scrutiny of a tria

congratulations, you found one of the many troubles with this case.they used things he wasn't on trial for, to sway the jury and influence his sentencing.they also withheld that the murder-for-hire theatre was done by corrupt federal agents who were already captured and on trial for doing that amongst other things with silk road.it also worked.

I quoted someone who was intimately involved in the trial saying there was ample and unambiguous evidence. Your theory on why those charges were not included is one of a number of possible explanations. Another possible explanation was that they felt they had enough to nail him sufficiently on the other charges, and didn't want to bother to prove unnecessary additional offenses.

Here is exactly what you said, kicking off this long and unproductive subthread:There was no such thing introduced for the trial. It was in the original press release, then it was withdrawn. Maybe it was because of Mark Force's transgressions, or maybe it was just for effect. Regardless, he never got the chance to defend himself against those particular allegations.By "no such thing", you were referring to the words

My understanding is they never brought the charges in the first place. The supposed online hitman and the victim were both FBI informants. They never filed any charges because it was clearly entrapment and no one was ever in any danger.The prosecutors later used that evidence as support for their sentencing request after Ross was convicted of only non-violent offenses, which has a much lower standard of evidence. The allegations of murder-for-hire were never tested at trial. They may have eva

He was not charged with murder because the attempt was intercepted by the police and did not occur.The messages he wrote soliciting the contract murder were submitted as evidence as facts in the case against him and weighed heavily in his sentencing.I don't understand why people want this guy free besides early-crypto-nostalgia.

The evidence in question, Ross's journals and chat logs, were presented in trial and subject to rebuttal. He wasn't being tried for those crimes; those charges are still pending, but they were material to the case and the defense failed to dispute them. At the present moment, it is highly probable that he intended to have 6 people, including the innocent roomates of his targets, murdered.

>Things like "due process" and "innocent until proven guilty" exist for a reason.In a court of law, yes. However we are currently not in a court of law so I don't need to pretend that there's no evidence of the fact that he tried to get multiple people killed even though it never formally made it onto the list of charges. And if you think 'a few chat logs' are the only thing connecting him to the murders, I suggest you familiarise yourself with the a

> if he really did order people's murders, wouldn't the prosecution indict him for it?No, that's a non sequitur.For example, imagine that the prosecution knows that Alice killed Bob, but only because they were illegally tapping Alice's phone lines and the evidence would get thrown out. Or imagine that Alice is in the mafia, and your only witness, Charlie, suddenly went missing.> he's some tech kid with really poor judgementHistory is littered with peop

This isn’t a murder case, it’s a fraud case. There’s zero chance of conviction on murder.