Trump Pardons Ulbricht, Betraying His Demand That Drug Dealers Deserve Death
In Trumpworld, loyalty trumps all — even deeply held beliefs about crime and punishment. Shower Trump with praise and you can get away with murder (or at least drug trafficking). But dare to criticize him, and no punishment is too harsh. Making decisions based on who most inflated your ego may not seem like the most effective approach to governing, but it’s where we are.
Anyway, all of the following may be true:
- Ross Ulbricht was almost certainly over-sentenced for the crimes he was convicted of.
- Ross Ulbricht also likely did some other awful stuff which could justify criminal punishment, for which he was never actually convicted.
- The case against Ross Ulbricht was a sloppy mess which the judicial system let slide.
As you’ve likely heard from other news sources, on Tuesday Donald Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the original “dark web” Silk Road marketplace. This wasn’t all that surprising, given that supporters of the “Free Ross Ulbricht” movement had spent years sucking up to Trump, and he had promised to do this, even as (at the very same time) he has insisted over and over again that drug dealers deserve the death penalty (sometimes even without due process).
The fact does remain that Ulbricht’s case was a mess. The fact that one of the main investigators seemed hella corrupt, and also Ulbricht wasn’t allowed to bring that up at trial seems problematic. And while some of his defenses were nonsense, it’s hard to take it as reasonable that the judge who handled the trial held him liable for literally every transaction that ever happened on Silk Road.
Yes, there are arguments that the vast majority of users for Silk Road were using it to engage in illegal behavior, but even so, it seems that the majority of the blame should be placed on those actually using the platform to violate the law, rather than pinning it to the guy running the marketplace (FWIW, Section 230 doesn’t really apply here, since it exempts federal criminal law, but the general principle of pinning the liability on the party actually doing the thing seems like it should still be true).
When you see that the average sentence for drug dealers is 77 months, it does feel that multiple life sentences may seem a bit harsh.
Lots of people will point to the claims of Ulbricht trying to take out a hit on some people (which doesn’t seem particularly true to his supposedly Libertarian outlook), but he wasn’t convicted of that, and I’m uncomfortable with him being sentenced for things he wasn’t actually convicted of doing.
So, on the whole, I think there is a reasonable argument that Ulbricht’s sentence was way too strict for the thing he was actually convicted of, but also that he did some pretty bad shit at the same time that would give an ordinary president pause.
But nuance and proportionality have little place in the upside-down world of Trumpian justice. This was solely a matter of the leaders of the Free Ross campaign correctly calculating that their best chance to achieve their goals was to ingratiate themselves with Trump and hope he won the election. And it worked.
But it certainly makes a mockery of Trump’s ridiculously hardline positions on drug dealers and how to treat them. However, it fits with a clear pattern: just look at Trump’s pardon of the January 6th insurrectionists who either planned or did attack Capitol police officers while simultaneously pretending that he’s all about defending the police. The only consistency is fealty to Trump’s fragile ego.
If you pledge undying loyalty to Trump, you may be able to get away with all sorts of lawlessness. If you don’t, then anything you do may be considered unlawful. It seems like a pretty bad way to run a country, but it’s what we get for the foreseeable future. It creates an environment where criminality is excused as long as you pledge fealty to the president. Left unchecked, this attitude will rot away the foundations of our justice system and replace the rule of law with the rule of ego.