Silk Road founder will get life in prison after losing court appeal

Silk Road founder will get life in prison after losing court appeal

http://bit.ly/2qCuQVM


Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht is set to serve life in prison after he lost his court appeal this week. Ulbricht earned seven convictions — including money laundering and narcotics conspiracy — for operating the drug marketplace in 2015, filing his appeal later that same year, and arguing it in court in 2016.

Ulbricht’s appeal claimed that the court should not have seen documents obtained in alleged breach of Fourth Amendment rights, and that it made mistakes during his trial process that should have led to a mistrial. Ulbricht — also known as “Dread Pirate Roberts” online — also contended that the lifetime sentence handed down by the judge was unreasonable, forcing him to spend longer in prison than others convicted of similar charges.

In this case, his sentence is unusually long due to a “kingpin” charge prosecutors were able to make stick — a conviction usually reserved for major cartel leaders designed to ensure they remain behind bars for the rest of their lives. While Ulbricht himself wasn’t a major drug dealer in the classic mold, the hefty sentence shows how law enforcement officials saw his Silk Road network, and how it helped to redefine the global narcotics black market.





Singularity

via The Verge http://bit.ly/2pxl9Uy

May 31, 2017 at 03:44PM

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to capture videos of brains in real time

Image
How to capture videos of brains in real time http://ift.tt/2sTaUgJ Individual neurons firing within a volume of brain tissue (credit: The Rockefeller University) A team of scientists has peered into a mouse brain with light, capturing live neural activity of hundreds of individual neurons in a 3D section of tissue at video speed (30 Hz) in a single recording for the first time. Besides serving as a powerful research tool, this discovery means it may now be possible to “alter stimuli in real time based on what we see going on in the animal’s brain,” said Rockefeller University’s Alipasha Vaziri , senior author of an open-access paper published June 26, 2017 in Nature Methods . By dramatically reducing the time and computational resources required to generate such an image, the algorithm opens the door to more sophisticated experiments, says Vaziri, head of the Rockefeller Laboratory of Neurotechnology and Biophysics . “Our goal is to better understand brain function by monitor
Read more

Kate McKinnon and Alec Baldwin break character to urge people to vote

Image
Kate McKinnon and Alec Baldwin break character to urge people to vote http://ift.tt/2eCjDNe In its last show before the 2016 Presidential election, Saturday Night Live checked in with Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump and Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton one final time before Tuesday, with both actors breaking character to urge voters to head to the polls. The cold open started by poking at the intense focus on Clinton’s e-mails. The interviewer dismisses questions come up about FBI, Vladimir Putin, and the KKK, even as Baldwin plants a kiss on each representative of each group and as McKinnon gets more and more annoyed with the pivot back to her e-mails. It’s a funny sketch, and it gets funnier as both actors break character, unable to keep up with the ridiculousness of what they’re doing. “I just feel gross all the time,” Baldwin remarked. This leads to a strange, but ultimately fitting bit as McKinnon leads Baldwin out the building, where we’re treated to a montage of the pair da
Read more