alt Hacker News> 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.
> whereas if he was only guilty of running a website,
Yes, he was guilty of running a website, which on the face of it seems innocent right? Sure thats an argument. "i'm just providing an online location for this to happen, but I don't know whats going on"
Apart from he was _also_ running an escrow service, Now to run an escrow service you need to create a contract with conditions to allow money to be released. The problem is that to say "oh he didn't know what was going on" is a provable lie, because to keep the escrow trustworthy, you need to arbitrate, to arbitrate requires knowing what was supposed to be delivered and why it didn't get delivered.
Now, escrow isn't free, you're taking a risk holding that money. So Ross takes a cut.
But the problem is, that money comes from illegal activities. He knows this, so he needs to find a way to make the money legit. This means fraudulently laundering it.
The problem there is that when you combine laundering money and drugs trafficking, you get compound sentences. see https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/operation-foxhound-nets-47...
which has:
> Those arrested face sentences of 10 years to life in prison for the narcotics violations and up to 20 years for the money laundering violations.
However
I want to find agreement, because I want to make sure that understand I'm not saying your viewpoint is wrong, I think your anger is directed in the wrong place.
The sentence is within tolerance for the scale and combination of offences, the murder allegations are a red herring, and didn't materially affect the sentence.
For a large number of drug users, silkroad provided a safer way to obtain drugs, both in terms of violence and quality.
The people that ultimately set the bounds for these sentences are congress. They have chosen the war on drugs, which I think we can agree has caused more violence that it has stopped. The courts did exactly as they are supposed to do with the laws that they had at their disposal. The way the court operated was correct.
What is not correct is the federal governments approach to drugs.