Topic: What do you think about Ross Ulbricht, the SilkRoad and the drugwars in general? - page 2. (Read 539 times)

People don't realize the strength of the word "property" in law. Neither do they realize the power of the jury in jury nullification.

The jury has the right to nullify any law. If people understood this, they would be challenging the laws and the lawmakers any time they did not like a law... right at the time that the law was set in place. If the jury agreed with the challenger(s), the law would be nullified for the particular person that brought the suit against the particular law.

Then, when others who didn't like the law saw it, they would bring suit, as well. Soon the law would have to be repealed for the whole country.

Interesting thought that touches the notion of authority. Your neighbor is an authority in his own home so you're supposed to obey his laws when you visit him. He's not an authority state wise or country wise.

I don't agree with the system of crime and punishment as it is and I see the flaws that you point out, however it has a very long history. The Negroes in the 19th century did not sign any document that gave white farmers an authority over them, but somehow they needed a signed document from these farmers when they were being set free.
Gunslingers did not sign any paperwork that made them respect the sheriff's authority, yet they were being shot if they did not comply.
How come the police have the right to enter your property without your consent and kill your guard dog if it growls? There were numerous cases of the police killing unarmed citizens only because they refused to follow orders. Those dead people did not sign any papers either.
The world is a strange place indeed.


Are you implying that the distributor is fully responsible for any harm his product may cause? Let's make alcohol distributors responsible for every alcohol overdose, painkiller distributors responsible for pill overdose, and cigarette companies for every case of lung cancer.

Great post, well my take on this matter will be discussed below.

What do you think about Ross Ulbricht, the SilkRoad and the war on drugs in general?

I am with Ross when it comes to the idea of giving a better platform for trading such as Silkroad. I also like the principle. For the drug war for me really depends on the authority's loyalty to their job. If they will implement it legally then I will support it but if not then it should be stop.

Do you think the trial was fair?

For me yes, if Ross really did commit selling of illegal drugs then he is really countable for it

Should Ross be free?
Hmm, his idea is really good and why not instead we should allow him to improve his idea in a more legal ways? If he can then I guess he can really bring a huge help in terms of economy. Probably giving another chance is not that hard

Should drugs be legalized? When yes, all or certain?
Illegal drugs should really not be legalized. Execpt for the organic ones. Distributing such goods for me is equivalent to killing that person who the goods were sold and obviously is a crime

^^^ And the point is, he admitted that he was under the law, and thereby condemn himself to the mercy of the court... which didn't execute him... so the court was merciful.

Where is the document that I signed that obligates me to be under a law. If your neighbor makes a new law for you to obey, do you have to obey it? Don't you only have to obey it if you sign the paperwork accepting it?

Where is the paperwork that you signed that shows that you are required to obey the laws that a bunch of people in Washington, D.C., made? Or are you being forced into it by dictatorial force of the courts? Remember. 13th Amendment. No involuntary servitude. If they force you to do something - like obeying a law - you should be paid.

Ross volunteered by signing up with an attorney. Prior to that, where did he sign that drug and money laws applied to him? I'll bet it was nowhere. And I'd bet that if average people looked the laws that they are supposed to obey, they would find dozens or hundreds of them that were against what they believed in their free living of life.

It's not the drugs that make them turn to crime, and it's not the person who allows other to sell drugs that makes people addicted.
Your logic of blaming the drug for people resorting to crime is a fairytale pushed by the mainstream media.
If you get addicted to eating pastry, and get overweight and unable to walk due to this addiction, who is to blame? The pastry, the bakers, or you?

Ross broke the law, a stupid law but still a law, got sloppy, got caught. He should be punished, but not like this. He was a businessman, not some crime lord. Another farce by the justice system after TPB. How can a murderer get 20 years and a young man who made a website gets life?

As i read, many people are fine by people doing drugs but are worried about healthcare. I don't think, that the cost for healthcare will increase. First, who is paying for them now? Second, many harm is created by extender. If drugs would be legal, there wouldn't be extender in the drugs and they don't harm you (unless you're taking too much).

I'm fine with people doing whatever they want as long as they don't harm others. I'm just uncertain about drug use though coz once these people get addicted and sick they could resort to crime and we'd be paying for them through healthcare and prison.

Whne people talk about Ross Ulbricht I always remember that thread where bitcointalk helped him to restore his BTC wallet and one of the helpers got 100 BTC or something. Was a funny one.

We all use the money system. But the money system is now known to be a big Ponzi. And a bunch of bankers who use the money for all kinds of immoral things - especially to start and maintain wars - are being enriched by our use of their money. So, are we all guilty for their crimes, since like Ross, we support them?

Let one harmed or directly threatened person come forward and show his injury. Then let him show the proof that it was Ross that did it. If this proof was shown, great. But not a double life sentence for it. If it wasn't shown, free him.

The alleged hiring of "hitmen" by Ulbricht makes it difficult to defend him.

It is very difficult to ascertain the credibility of these allegations because of the dirty agents involved. I don't think you can dispute that Ulbricht sent the money to what is alleged to be what he believed to be hitmen to kill the guy in Maryland, however the question is if Ulbricht was entrapped in doing so, and if so, how much pressure did law enforcement put on him to pay this money. Ulbricht's PGP key is still encrypted, so law enforcement cannot review all of his communications.

There is a second alleged hiring of hitmen in Canada, however it appears the "hitman" was actually a scammer who may have been the same person as who Ulbricht was trying to have killed. There does not appear to be any evidence of entrapment by law enforcement in this case, although the fact Ulbricht was apparently scammed would likely mean he couldn't be charged with as serious of a crime in this particular case, so charges were not filed in relation to this.

One other thing that is not often discussed is the fact that SR was apparently insolvent when Ulbricht was arrested, based upon the spreadsheet found on Ulbricht's laptop with the expenses and revenues from running SR. IIRC, the insolvency largely steamed from Ulbricht paying extortion payments to stop DDoS attacks on SR.

Is Ross under the control of the legal or the lawful? There is a difference. By his hiring of an attorney, he came under the legal so that nobody had to determine if he was or wasn't, before.

Hitman - I am also remembering that they didn't let him say much or anything at his trial. So he might have disagreed with them all over the place.

People are dying from the legal drugs that the Walmart pharmacy sells.

If a jury thinks that it has to judge according to what the magistrate says, it is not a real jury. It is only an arm of the magistrate. Jury nullification is not allowed to be told to an ignorant jury during any part of the trial, or even the questioning by the attornys when the jury is selected. If a potential jury member is found to have knowledge of jury nullification, he is usually disqualified.

Well there's no crime about shooting yourself in the foot, only if you were the person who had owned gun legally and had done it in your home. You also must not put anyone else in danger while doing this. It would have to be 100 percent accidental.

Didn't Ross also hire a hitman or something along those lines -- I'm not sure if I'm misremembering.

You're trying to compare TWO VERY DIFFERENT THINGS. You're attempting to compare Walmart, a public company that is at the whims of lawsuits and prosecution for their crimes. They're a company which must follow the letter of the law, and if they don't they will face the consequences (there is subjectivity to if the consequences are enough, but they do face them) You're comparing Walmart with Ross, someone who facilitated the drug sales to tens of thousands of people. Does Walmart sell drugs to people? No.
 
Oops, slip of the tongue by myself. But I was asking if Ross either had a bench trial or a jury trial.

I agree, it will affect healthcare. But the drug market is a multi billion dollar market. Tax the drugs sold and use that money to help the addicts. If the government made and sold the drugs themselves then they would reap all of the profit.

As for Ross, I did a bit of research on his trial. Some people say it was unfair, it seems the trial was fair but the investigation was unfair. So what when you have bitcoin wallets that point to silk road there isn't really much one can say in defense of that.

Here is a paragraph from that article.
"The only 11th hour surprise to the defense involved tracking the Bitcoins. Apparently nobody realized that Bitcoins were trivial to trace. After the defense’s opening, the prosecution scrambled to analyze the wallet.dat files, not only discovering a huge amount of Bitcoins directly from Silk Road to Ulbricht (apparently Ulbricht’s wallets were also the Silk Road “cold” storage) but even sourcing the “hitman” payments as coming from Ulbricht’s wallet!"

Article here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/op-ed-ross-ulbricht-got-a-fair-trial-but-not-a-fair-investigation/

Current State legislation doesn't legalize the amount of shoe polish you have on your shoes, either. Get the State out of it altogether... except for warnings about the dangers.

If a person wants to shoot himself in the foot, is there a law against it? If so, that law is taking away freedom. The State should warn, only. If there is a claim of harm or damage, it should be taken to the courts, and the jury should rule on harm being done. As it is, it is harm being done by the State in taking away freedom through certain of the laws that the State makes.

Common law jury trial is 12 jurors. The question should always be about who was harmed. Show us the injury. Prove who did the injury. Ross was simply moving money in the same way any business person does. When you spend money at Walmart, some of that money is going to be used by some people to harm others. They don't hold you or Walmart responsible because somebody else did harm or damage with money that was yours at one time. In Ross's case, was there any harm or damage even shown, or was he found guilty because some money he handled might have harmed someone? What a legal joke!

But this would be new legislation would have to be passed in order to have something like, the current legislative state doesn't have these sort of provisions (at least to the best of my knowledge)

Well there is harm being done, and that is the harm caused by continuing to purchase drugs from the illegal marketplace and the damage that is caused by the health damage of using these drugs.

I don't know if anyone knows this off the top of his head, but was the case of Ross a bench trial or a jury trial? Because if I was him, I would without a doubt pick a bench trial to ensure that the letter of the law is used to charge me of my crimes by an expert instead of 9 people who don't really understand the law.

Their family foots the bill, or, they make an agreement to pay the bill off and are forced to work it off from prison if necessary, or the bill is limited to their shallow grave when they die.

Having fines if there is no harm or damage done is against the law, really. After all, if you want to commit suicide, let friends and family warn you... but nobody can really stop you without taking your freedom away... and nobody has the right to stop you when you are serious about it and have been firmly warned.

Ross should have gotten a fair trial. But the fairness should have started with his attorney telling him that he was contracting into the court and throwing himself on their mercy, simply by hiring an attorney.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread691102/pg1
http://www.gemworld.com/US--AttorneyClient.htm
http://understandcontractlawandyouwin.com/attorney-client-relationship/

Then again, if people can put whatever drugs into their body that they want -- who's going to be footing the bill on their medical treatments and such. I don't think it's fair to force Americans to pay for all of this extra stuff. There's no way in my mind that this is going to be a popular policy.

I think it's completely fair to decriminalize and to only have fines for drugs (at least non-lethal ones) as a way to pay for the medical treatments necessary for drug usage.

Ross should have gotten a fair trial, that's what should be afforded to EVERY single American. Though people shouldn't give him sympathy for his sentence, he ran a drug cartel online that he reaped the rewards from and NOW he must reap the consequences of such acts. I do think that his case should really be looked over again though, as it is still your right to have a fair trial.

Ross's problem in court is the same as the problem of most people.

The fundamental problem is this: the word "persons" in the 4th Amendment. The 4th Amendment:
What is the big deal about "persons?" Your persons are your agreements. You have your electric bill person, a different person for each of your bank accounts, car loan person, school attendance person, and loads of other persons. Why are they your persons? Because they have a name just like yours, they are associated with you, you are their boss, they exist (live) at your address, BUT THEY ARE NOT YOU.

What does this have to do with Ross? He was named in the court paperwork... or was he? The name looked like his name. But was it him? Or was it simply a person like one of the above, listed persons? And, up until he accepted it as such, was it really his person? Or was it a person named by the court in ways that he named himself, just to trick him into agreeing that he was the person named in the indictment?

You see. Ross had many "persons" living at his place of residence. But none of them were Ross, just like the person on the court docs wasn't Ross. How do we know that it wasn't Ross named on the indictment? It didn't say Ross, the man. If it doesn't say "man" or "woman" in the indictment, then it is only a person, and not the human being... at least not until the human accepts that person as himself.

Why do the courts trick you with fake court persons? Because a man or woman falls under a different class of entity. If it is a man or woman, the court is REQUIRED to show some injury done to another man/woman, and then prove that Ross did the injury. They couldn't do this injury thing in Ross's case. There was no injury, and there would be no proof that Ross did it. So they played on his ignorance of the law to get him to agree that he was a person that he really wasn't, and that he was under the jurisdiction of the court no matter what they decided.

You all really need to get into Karl Lentz at https://www.youtube.com/user/765736.

As long as i know, there was no person who came forward with an injury. He agreed with the prosecution that he did wrong. It was part of his strategic in court. Nobody thought that the punishment would be that hard for hosting a website.

It's good, that out there are more "SilkRoads". This brings me to another point: The judge wanted to state an example on him, but now there are more and more of this sites. That means the example was pointless, so the case should be rolled up again. But this time fair.

I too think that prohibition should be illegal. It breaks the freedom. Many People who do drugs need them, because else they have no joy in life, not because they want to take drugs. Why take them peoples their joy away?

Yes, Ross knew the consequences, but don't you think everyone has a right on a fair trial, even if they have done something wrong?