Reminder: Donald Trump Promised To Free Ross Ulbricht on ‘Day One’
Lord knows it’s probably not smart to hold politicians accountable to their campaign promises. But President-elect Donald Trump is no typical politician and at least one of his campaign promises was both uniquely specific and uncontroversial enough to expect—or demand, really—follow-through.
“If you vote for me, on day one, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht,” proclaimed Trump last May while addressing the Libertarian National Convention. The request was on a list of 10 demands the Libertarian Party shared with Trump before he spoke. If Trump has failed to follow through on his other memorable promise from the convention—he said he would “put a Libertarian in my cabinet“—this one is still in play. It would right a small but potent wrong when it comes to the carceral state, the deep state, the drug war, and a host of related bastions of state overreach. By most accounts a model prisoner who has been behind bars for almost a dozen years, Ulbricht deserves his freedom.
As readers of this site—along with crypto people, drug policy mavens, and others interested in the intersection of tech and social freedoms—know, Ulbricht is the founder of Silk Road, the pioneering dark web site that allowed people to buy and sell illegal drugs, mostly using bitcoin (indeed, Silk Road was arguably the first real test of bitcoin being used as a payment system on a regular basis). In a 2015 federal trial in the Southern District of New York, he was convicted of money laundering, computer hacking, and narcotics trafficking and sentenced to life in prison by Judge Katherine B. Forrest, who excoriated the former Eagle Scout for daring to step outside of the law:
“The stated purpose [of the Silk Road] was to be beyond the law. In the world you created over time, democracy didn’t exist. You were captain of the ship, the Dread Pirate Roberts,” she told Ulbricht as she read the sentence, referring to his pseudonym as the Silk Road’s leader. “Silk Road’s birth and presence asserted that its…creator was better than the laws of this country. This is deeply troubling, terribly misguided, and very dangerous.”
Ulbricht was in federal custody for over a year before his trial started. In the run-up to the proceedings, the feds frequently asserted that Ulbricht not only operated the Silk Road as a freewheeling illegal marketplace (bad enough!) but that he had engaged in various plans to kill or physically harm people who had stolen money from or threatene
Article from Reason.com
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