US District Judge Katherine Forrest cited “privilege” as one reason she handed down a life sentence Friday to Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, an online marketplace for off-grid and illegal online purchases.
“No drug dealer from Harlem or the Bronx would have made these arguments,” she said of Ulbricht. “It’s an argument of privilege.”
Ulbricht, 31, was sentenced in Federal District Court in Manhattan by Forrest for his role being what prosecutors called “the kingpin of a worldwide digital drug-trafficking enterprise.”
Silk Road, part of the Internet’s “dark web,” was notorious for facilitating illegal activities and the sale of drugs like cyanide, heroin, cocaine, LSD and other illegal drugs. In its three years of operation, over 1.5 million transactions were carried out involving more than 100,000 buyer accounts, authorities have said. The transactions were made using Bitcoin, a virtual currency.
Ulbricht faced a minimum of 20 years in prison on one of the counts for which he was convicted and had no criminal history. He also had nearly 100 letters in support of his character, but ultimately Forrest handed down a far more sever sentence. “What you did in connection with Silk Road was terribly destructive to our social fabric,” she said.
Ulbricht “developed a blueprint for a new way to use the Internet to undermine the law and facilitate criminal transactions,” and his conviction was “the first of its kind, and his sentencing is being closely watched,” prosecutors said.
According to Forrest, what Ulbricht did was “unprecedented, and in breaking that ground as the first person” to establish such an international marketplace, he had to pay the consequences.
Ulbricht was convicted in February on charges that included engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise and distributing narcotics on the Internet. He also had allegedly solicited murders of people he saw as threats to his website. At least six deaths were attributable to drugs bought on the site, as well.
“I remember clearly why I created the Silk Road,” Ulbricht said during the proceeding. “I wanted to empower people to be able to make choices in their lives, for themselves and to have privacy and anonymity.”
“I’m not saying that because I want to justify anything that’s happened. I just want to set the record straight, because from my point of view, I’m not a self-centered sociopathic person that was trying to express some kind of inner badness. I just made some very serious mistakes.”
Forrest cited Ulbricht’s six minute decision to allow for cyanide to be sold as one reason for her decision: “This democracy we set up, it did not exist on the Silk Road. You were captain of the ship. It wasn’t a world of ‘freedom’ — it was a place with a lot of rules. It was a world of your laws.”
There is no parole from a life sentence. He was also sentenced to five, 15 and 20 years, respectively, for aiding and abetting the distribution of computer hacking tools, fake IDs and money laundering.
