Trump pardons Silk Highway operator Ross Ulbricht

On Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump issued a pardon to Ross Ulbricht, who ran the darkish internet market Silk Highway underneath the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts.” Ulbricht has been serving a life sentence with out parole since 2015, when he was convicted of a number of prices, together with the distribution of narcotics.

The Silk Highway market, which was solely accessible via the Tor community, turned some of the prevalent early industrial makes use of of Bitcoin. Patrons and sellers traded in illicit medication, solid passports, and extra.

Within the intervening years, Ulbricht turned a trigger celebrè for a sure phase of the right-wing, significantly within the crypto crowd that embraced Trump final yr. To his supporters, Ulbricht’s life sentence is unusually punitive. Comparable offenses have garnered rather more lenient sentences — as an example, Blake Benthall, who operated Silk Highway 2.0, was sentenced to time served and three years of probation. Ulbricht’s lieutenant, Thomas Clark, often known as “Selection Jones,” was sentenced to twenty years in jail final yr.

Though the felony offenses had been nonviolent in nature, the choose who sentenced Ulbricht took under consideration a number of deaths attributable to medication purchased via the Silk Highway.

All through his trial, Ulbricht denied that he had dedicated the crimes at problem. As a result of legislation enforcement had arrested him along with his laptop computer open, that they had entry to all his recordsdata, which included the code of the web site, personal messages between him and workers of the Silk Highway, and a diary whose entries corresponded to OKCupid messages tied to Ross Ulbricht’s actual identification.