Ross Ulbricht, Creator of Silk Road Black Market Website, Sentenced to Life in Prison

At Wired, "Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison":

The Silk Road saga is way more than a crime story http://t.co/XTJFMHQHpl

— WIRED (@WIRED) May 29, 2015

ROSS ULBRICHT CONCEIVED of his Silk Road black market as an online utopia beyond law enforcement’s reach. Now he’ll spend the rest of his life firmly in its grasp, locked inside a federal penitentiary.

On Friday Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for his role in creating and running Silk Road’s billion-dollar, anonymous black market for drugs. Judge Katherine Forrest gave Ulbricht the most severe sentence possible, beyond what even the prosecution had explicitly requested. The minimum Ulbricht could have served was 20 years.

“The stated purpose [of the Silk Road] was to be beyond the law. In the world you created over time, democracy didn’t exist. You were captain of the ship, the Dread Pirate Roberts,” she told Ulbricht as she read the sentence, referring to his pseudonym as the Silk Road’s leader. “Silk Road’s birth and presence asserted that its…creator was better than the laws of this country. This is deeply troubling, terribly misguided, and very dangerous.”

In addition to his prison sentence, Ulbricht was also ordered to pay a massive restitution of more than $183 million, what the prosecution had estimated to be the total sales of illegal drugs and counterfeit IDs through the Silk Road—at a certain bitcoin exchange rate—over the course of its time online...

Also at Ars Technica, "Sunk: How Ross Ulbricht ended up in prison for life — Inside the trial that brought down a darknet pirate."