The Supreme Court announced on June 28, 2018, that it will not reconsider the conviction[1] or life sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the alleged mastermind behind the darknet site Silk Road. At press time, no reason has been provided for the Court’s decision.
Ulbricht was first arrested in October 2013[2] at the Glen Park Branch Library in San Francisco. During his trial, prosecutors stated that, at the time, he was speaking online with an undercover FBI agent while running the site through an open laptop under the name “Dread Pirate Roberts.” Among the evidence collected from Ulbricht’s computer were chat logs, journal entries and spreadsheets pertaining to Silk Road financial data between the years 2011 and 2013.
Ulbricht’s defense team insisted that he was not the man prosecutors were looking for. They argued that Ulbricht had created Silk Road as an “economic experiment,” but that he handed the website off to another person when it became “too chaotic.” They claimed the real Dread Pirate Roberts was still out there and that Ulbricht was simply a “fall guy.”
The jury remained unconvinced by these remarks. Ulbricht was found guilty on counts of trafficking drugs on the internet, running a criminal enterprise, narcotics-trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking and money laundering, and was sentenced to life in prison. Ulbricht’s legal team later filed an appeal of the sentence[3], which was formally denied in 2017.
Ulbricht attempted to bring his case before the Supreme Court last December[4], alleging that his fourth and sixth amendment rights had been violated. Ulbricht said that during the investigation and his sentencing, law enforcement agents had collected internet traffic information without warrants, and that the judge presiding over the case had imposed an “unreasonable sentence”
