Will Donald Trump give clemency to Ross Ulbricht who's serving a life sentence without parole
for founding and operating the black market e-commerce platform called The Silk Road?
Please Mr. President, consider my son, Ross Ulbricht.
Please give him a second chance. He won't let you down.
The case for commuting Ulbricht's sentence is simple.
He never directly harmed anyone and his sentence was wildly disproportionate
to the severity of the crimes for which he was convicted.
Life sentence without parole is shockingly extreme.
The bluntness by which the judge communicated why she was pronouncing the sentence,
what took everyone really by surprise.
At that fateful hearing in 2015,
US District Judge Katherine Forrest told the courtroom
that she had decided to go well beyond the mandatory minimum of 10 years
because Ulbricht had taken a philosophical stand against drug prohibition.
The Silk Road's creator thought that he was better than the laws of this country.
This is deeply troubling, terribly misguided, and very dangerous.
The Silk Road stated purpose she said,
was to be beyond the law, which is exactly right and why prohibitionists should have instead tried
to learn something from Ulbricht's creation.
America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.
In order to fight and defeat this enemy
it is necessary to wage a new all out offensive.
What Judge Forrest failed to see is that what's actually troubling and misguided
is the US war on drugs which has cost the public more than a trillion dollars,
fueled decades of crime and violence, and stolen life years away from millions of Americans.
Ulbricht set out to disrupt the drug war by moving sales to an online marketplace,
impervious to government interference,
where consenting adults could buy and sell anything of their choosing.
He aimed to abolish the use of coercion and aggression against mankind, according to his old LinkedIn profile,
and create an economic simulation to give people
a firsthand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.
His arguments are incredibly relatable.
You know, he argues very succinctly, okay.
Why is it that people are thrown in jail for buying weed or magic mushrooms?
When it comes to that, I think I completely agree with Ross
and his arguments and his ideas.
Where I started to have a really hard time was with the idea of selling things like heroin and fentanyl.
Vanity Fair's Nick Bilton argues that the Silk Road caused irreparable harm to others,
citing the six people who allegedly died from drugs they had purchased on the Silk Road,
including a teenager in Australia who had an adverse reaction to a hallucinogen
and had jumped out of a hotel window.
Those deaths were tragic and heartbreaking, and jurors were right to be moved.
But the real culprit is the drug war itself,
because that's what drove the narcotics trade underground in the first place.
That's why there are no reputable brands or quality control in heroine, LSD, or MDMA,
meaning users have no choice but to take dealers at their word.
The Silk Road was an, albeit, imperfect attempt
to correct for the lack of information in drug markets,
which is why, on net, it probably saved lives.
A study in the International Journal of Drug Policy
found that users flocked to the Silk Road out of concern for street drug quality and personal safety.
And vendor selection appeared to be based on trust, speed of transaction, stealth modes, and quality of product.
Several users on the site's forums regularly answered questions about drug safety
and what to do in the case of an overdose.
The Silk Road made buying drugs too easy according to a mother
whose son struggled with addiction before dying of an overdose.
But shutting down Silk Road didn't make drugs less readily available,
it only pushed sales onto less trustworthy platforms.
If the president does give Ulbricht clemency, much of the credit belongs to his mother, Lyn,
who has spent the last five years tirelessly advocating on his behalf.
Rehabilitation is done.
This is about punishment and making him an example.
Ulbricht's critics often point to a series of contract killings that he allegedly ordered
with the intention of stopping blackmailers who were threatening to bring him down.
But those allegations remain unproven.
The alleged murders were never carried out
and the government never charged him on those counts.
It's extremely irresponsible to fall hard on one side or the other
of allegations involving murder that have not been charged much less proven.
Perhaps the Silk Road's most enduring legacy is bootstrapping Bitcoin,
as New York times Reporter, Nathaniel Popper, explained in 2015.
Silk Road proved that Bitcoin worked.
It proved that you could actually send real value across the world.
And people were willing to try that experiment because they had an incentive to,
because getting heroin that way was that much better than the alternative.
Freeing Ross Ulbricht would be the most appropriate way
to cap off a year in which American voters
made it loud and clear that they're ready to close the book on the drug war.
What frustrates me the most is you have everyone out there defending Ross.
But I don't see anyone out there defending all these poor people who are in jail
for selling weed or magic mushrooms, who are African-American and Hispanic.
If Ulbricht's supporters really cared about the war on drugs or libertarian ideals, Bilton opined,
they'd be demanding that the nearly half a million people
currently in US jails for drug offenses should be pardoned too.
And that's exactly what libertarians have been saying going back to the 1970s.
Prior to his sentencing, Ross Ulbricht wrote a letter to the judge pleading for mercy.
"I've had my youth and I know you must take away my middle years,
but please leave me my old age.
I certainly won't be the rebellious risk taker I was when I created Silk Road.
In fact, I'll be an old man."
Ross Ulbricht turned 36 this year.
Let's hope he's still a rebel, and soon enough, once again, a free man.