President Trump fulfilled yet another campaign promise Tuesday when he issued a full pardon to Ross Ulbricht, a/k/a Dread Pirate Roberts, the founder of the original dark web marketplace Silk Road.
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Ulbricht launched Silk Road in 2011, and it quickly became the Star Wars cantina of the dark web. In addition to a marketplace for just about anything you wanted to buy, it will probably, in retrospect, be seen as how Bitcoin and crypto leaped from being something peculiar to guys wearing birth control glasses and practicing poor personal hygiene to being edgy and cool.
As the site grew in underground popularity, it came to the attention of federal authorities. Eventually, Ulbricht was identified as the proprietor and arrested in San Francisco in 2013.
My personal feeling has always been that the Ulbricht prosecution had a January 6 feel about it. He was overcharged, he was prosecuted for what he could conceivably have done rather than what he did, the judge acted like an employee of the US Attorney, and he was clobbered at sentencing, getting two sentences of life without parole (Tech at Night: Internet anarchist and Silk Road founder gets life – RedState), to make him an example of anyone who might want to tread that path in the future. When he appealed the draconian punishment imposed on him, the Second Circuit agreed it was harsh, but since it was Ulbricht and not them in prison, they didn’t particularly care.
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But the life sentence struck many observers as harsh. In 2017, the federal appeals court for the Second Circuit, in affirming Mr. Ulbricht’s conviction, acknowledged the severe nature of the punishment.
“Although we might not have imposed the same sentence ourselves in the first instance,” the court said, “on the facts of this case a life sentence was within the range of permissible decisions that the district court could have reached.”
Again, this is purely my opinion.
During the 2024 campaign, President Trump repeatedly pledged to free Ulbricht, though, along the way, the promise changed from commuting his sentence to time served to a pardon; see Who Is Ross Ulbricht and Why Did Donald Trump Just Vow to Commute His Sentence? – RedState.
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In freeing Ulbricht, President Trump had choice words about his conviction.
“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbright to let her know,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, misspelling Mr. Ulbricht’s name and making a reference to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”
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Trump will draw a lot of criticism for this pardon and for that of the J6 prisoners, but I hope he’s opening a new era in American justice where mercy is a factor. In the words of Voltaire, “He who is merely just is severe.” Or of Psalm 130: “If You, LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” Ulbricht has been in prison for a decade; if you sell the names of CIA agents to the Chinese, you don’t do much more. If you help burn Seattle or Minneapolis, you don’t go to jail at all.
The course of justice has run here; now is not the time for mercy and commonsense to take the lead.
