alt Hacker News> If you're convicted of a crime, let's say selling drugs, that carries a penalty of up to life in prison even though most people get 5-10 years, and then you're sentenced to life in prison
you can appeal the sentence as being "too harsh" or out of the normal bounds. That's fair game and quite common.
However, if you are convicted of drug trafficking, money laundering and criminal enterprise, and you are appealing the length of the sentence, its very difficult to appeal if your system/company organisaiton to which you admit to being the head honcho of, uses a very traceable currency to launder money, and therefore can reasonably prove spectacularly large amount of drug trafficking.
The criminal enterprise charge has a minimum of 20 years, adding in drugs to the mix adds an additional 10.
the whole "judge was biased because of unfounded ordered assassination" is plainly wrong.
Sure you can argue that drugs should be legal (but you need support and money to help people escape, see opioid explosion)
but thats not the same as Roos Ulbricht got the wrong sentence. What he did was really obviously illegal, and at industrial scale. industrial scale illegality is going to get you a long sentence.[1]
[1] yes rich people manage to escape justice, this is an affront to justice, but arguing that Ulbricht was wrongly convicted only enables rich people to get off more, because it wrongly states that the law was wrong in this isntance.
Mark my words, the US legal system is going to get a huge shakeup. most constitutional checks and balances for the executive have been dismantled, because of a failure of congress. You don't want that new legal system, as thats going to be injustice for many, control for the few. A central plank of libertarianism is a fair and equitable legal system, we are straying further from that.
> if you are convicted of drug trafficking, money laundering and criminal enterprise, and you are appealing the length of the sentence, its very difficult to appeal
That's what I'm getting at. The premise is that this guy is Al Capone. But if he was actually guilty of murder then they should have convicted him of murder, whereas if he was only guilty of running a website, those penalties are crazy. Not because they don't ever get handed out or Congress didn't put them in the statute, but because they have within them the assumption that you're a drug cartel. And then because drug cartels are murder factories, the penalties are extreme and inappropriate outside of that specific context.
But the courts are bound to follow the law, which is the problem, because those laws are nuts. They're even nuts in the context of the actual drug cartels, because what they should be doing there is the same thing -- getting severe penalties by charging them with the actual murders, not putting life sentences on the operation of a black market regardless of whether or not there is any associated violence.
It's the same reason people are so eager to lean into the unproven murder allegations to justify the sentence -- it's intuitively obvious that without them, the penalties are excessive.