Very striking to see how the sentiment has drastically shifted, while the facts of the case did not. There is a really cultural shift visible in how this issue is seen on here.
I'd be wary of drawing correlations like this. The people who commented on that thread are not going to be the same people commenting on this one. The topic isn't even the same; in the first thread the topic is his sentencing, and in this its his pardon.
The attraction for people to post on Hacker News is mainly to complain, and so in the first you get complaints the sentencing is too harsh, and in this one you get complaints that he shouldn't have been pardoned. Its not necessarily a cultural shift, just an artifact of the types of discussions people have online.
> and so in the first you get complaints the sentencing is too harsh, and in this one you get complaints that he shouldn't have been pardoned.
You can also hold both positions simultaneously without contradiction. That is to say that you can think that his sentence was too harsh while at the same time being of the opinion that what he did was a crime (and should be a crime) and that he should remain convicted and un-pardoned, just with a different sentence than the one he was given.
Making a distinction of whether individuals have changed perspective on the topic, and whether a community has are different levels of examination, and both may provide insights. In this case, Hacker news is an emergent phenomenon of individuals; it's OK to examine its evolution as whole.
I thought it was parallel construction from illegal NSA surveillance then, I think it is that now. Once you have the suspect in custody and his belongings examined it's "oh, see, we found this Stackoverflow post, that's how we knew".
It's absurd. Even the non-Silk-Road charges look as if they were tacked on so that people like us weren't sympathetic about what were only non-violent drug trafficking charges ("look, he also hired a killer to murder an enemy!").
that's what has me worried about the kohberger trial. the prosecution's delayed it for years; if he gets out, the techniques that caught him so quickly will potentially have done more harm than good.
> The attraction for people to post on Hacker News is mainly to complain
I mean, I won't admit it openly but something like that yeah. It doesn't help either that the way to show you disagree is by sharing what you disagree with (which is great) but the way you show you agree is by upvoting (which others don't see).
So one comment with three complaints in the replies but 100 upvotes might look like "people wholeheartedly disagree with this person" but in reality, most readers actually agreed. Comments that are just "I agree" are kind of pointless, so I prefer how things are, but useful to not read too much into "X people said Y" on HN.
It's interesting to consider how the tension in the design choices for HN's discussion board have affected the perceived & actual tenor of the platform:
1. Votes are not shown, but they affect the rank of posts.
2. Every post regardless of rank is shown beneath its parent, as in a tree.
3. Only highly downvoted posts are grayed out or hidden.
4. The community considers simple agreement to be low value noise.
It doesn't seem like a stretch to guess HN's flavor from a handful of these facts...
its crazy to look at this old thread and know that i almost certainly left a comment in it. although ive created and left behind hundreds of accounts in the meantime. i first got on HN feb 2015 when i read an article about “famed god” getting arrested in las vegas… his shirt had “hack the world” written on it and when i googled “hack the world famed god,” not knowing about the movie reference, it gave me a HN thread about the incident. and then HN became my home for almost ten years… i didnt have facebook or instagram or vine. i literally just spent all my time on HN. now that the displacement of programmers by AI has begun, somehow my interest has waned.
at the time, the murder for hire accusations seemed legitimate and they still do today. hopefully they charge him with attempted murder if the statute of limitations isnt up.
ok. so for some reason the federal government indicted him on attempted murder in 2018(?) and for some reason the charge was dismissed… on what grounds was it dismissed? and i believe he could still be charged by the state of California or another state so hopefully we will see that
edit: this section of reasons’ article summarizes the situation nicely.
“Now that Ulbricht has no chance of having his initial conviction and sentencing overturned or adjusted, it's likely the feds out of Maryland decided the indictment no longer was needed to make sure the government had some further means in their back pocket to punish Ulbricht for showing a safer, saner way around their insanely damaging drug war.”
the reason the charges were dismissed is similar to the reason he wasnt charged initially: because attempted murder charge was unnecessary from the prosecutors point if view. not because he is innocent of the charge. the article also notes that torture was an element in those murders. this guy should not be walking free
Doesn't "dismissed with prejudice" usually mean something like "the evidence presented for the charge is so lacking that the charge should never have been brought in the first place"?
see my edit. i am a full supporter of letting adults have freedom to buy and use whatever drugs they want but i also think murdering and torturing people should not be allowed
> the reason the charges were dismissed is similar to the reason he wasnt charged initially: because attempted murder charge was unnecessary from the prosecutors point if view
But why were the charges dismissed with prejudice? That's not the normal way to dismiss charges.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Robert Hur has filed a motion to dismiss the pending charges filed against Ross Ulbricht
Last week, Hur sought “to dismiss with prejudice the indictment and superseding indictment” pending against Ulbricht
in the motion that he filed, which is linked above, the reason he provides is that ross had already been sentenced and all his appeals had been denied. the motion never mentions lack of evidence or the corrupt investigators. this isnt mentioned in the freeross page
the idea that chat logs were forged or that someone else was using his account are plausible but just barely. its much more plausible that a powerful drug lord ordered hits. its practically unavoidable in the course of running a large, high volume illegal drug operation. its routine. and the feds didnt need a murder charge to screw him, not even a little bit. i havent seen enough evidence to dismiss either camp but i think it should go to trial so the public can see all the evidence and the matter can be settled. there certainly is grounds for further investigation.
>It was dismissed with prejudice, and can’t be tried again
But there were in total six murder-for-hire allegations against Ross Ulbricht. That Maryland case in your link [0] was only one of them.
That Maryland one was also a case in which Carl Force, a corrupt federal agent, was deeply involved. The New York trial which incarcerated Ulbricht avoided considering that single allegation, specifically because of the corrupt agent's involvement. [1]
(Confusingly, there were also six allegations of drug-related deaths. These were completely unrelated with the six murder allegations.)
It's notable that, in that Maryland document you linked, the US Attorney could have moved to dismiss the charge without prejudice, meaning that it could be retried, but he chose not to do that.
But he then continues, to say, without explaining why, that Ulbricht was already serving a life sentence which had been affirmed on appeal in New York. The implication is that the US Attorney is hinting that there's no point ever pursuing the 'attempted murder' angle, because Ulbricht is already locked up for life (Narrator: he was wrong).
Here's a summary
* One murder-for-hire allegation (Maryland): Indicted, but dismissed with prejudice by US Attorney
* Five murder-for-hire allegations (New York): Not indicted/charged, not decided by jury, but included in sentencing decision
* Six drug-related death allegations (New York): Not indicted/charged, not decided by jury, but included in sentencing decision
*
What I understand is that the New York jury was allowed to know about the attempted murder-for-hire and the drug-related death claims, but not about the corrupt federal agents.
The murder-for-hire allegations, meanwhile, were allowed to influence his sentencing (and the rejection of his appeal) due to "a preponderance of evidence" as decided by the judge, which would not be sufficient grounds for criminal convictions such as murder, which require evidence "beyond reasonable doubt".
> The people who commented on that thread are not going to be the same people commenting on this one
This is the point. HN readership has changed dramatically in the intervening years. I don't buy at all that the difference is solely due to comments tending to contradict the article.
> Very striking to see how the sentiment has drastically shifted
I'm not sure. I have two questions on that. Is there the appearance of a sentiment shift? I see plenty of people arguing both against and for incarcerating him in both this thread and that old one.
And then if there is an appearance of a sentiment change (which I'm not sure about) is that evidence of a sentiment change or just selection bias? People who are okay with an outcome are much less likely to write a comment than people who are upset. That alone would change the bias of the comments.
To suggest there hasn't been a cultural shift is insane, imo.
I wouldn't argue that both sides have gotten more extreme, rather the political spectrum curve has flattened. There is much less rational discourse in general.
Reddit is a great example. Even 10 years ago you could have mostly rational discussions. Now its no better than Facebook. I saw a post today about people being upset the government is giving OpenAI half a trillion dollars. They didn't even realize it wasn't government money. They didn't want to be corrected.
the internet has a lot more people on it, it is much less self-selecting than in the past. even this website is a lot less self-selecting than in the past
As someone who's been following this since the beginning, the most striking difference is the assumption that Ross was in fact the DPR ordering hits, which he repeatedly denied. Obviously, he could be lying, but that's the main question for me. Since people now assume he was the one and only DPR (I wonder if people didn't get the concept from The Princess Bride), they assume DPR chat logs where murder-for-hire occurred must have been him as well.
Both threads seem to share a similar sentiment: he should not serve much time for the drug marketplace but should for the murders-for-hire. There's just a difference in how many people believe those allegations and to what extent they should factor into the sentence given the charges were dropped despite the allegations almost certainly being true.
I know it seems almost impossible, but it might be that the group of people who complained about the sentence, may be a different group than the one who complain about the pardon.
you know there's a pretty massive gap between "double lifetime sentence + 40 years w/ no chance of parole is too harsh" and "10 years w/ full pardon expunging the record is bad". A really, really fucking massive giant gap between those, in fact.
But surely it's just that people love to complain, right? Can't possibly be that they thought something like 25yr was more reasonable?
Pardons are inherently political. If your guy does it, it's good. If other guy does it, it's bad. And like most political topics, it's hard to have a earnest convo divorced from that simple dynamic.
This debate about IQ could have been had yesterday, and I‘m pretty sure I saw a pretty similar debate a few months ago on this site. Not much has changed there at least.
I don’t disagree but I also don’t agree with the life sentence. If he was charged properly with the crimes stated during his trial, maybe that would be warranted but he wasn’t charged with it, only the website charges and conspiracy. Which some of them could apply to meta or craigslist if you got creative.
He’s famously flexible based on whatever he thinks is advantageous now. This could be as simple as his claims to have been unfairly persecuted by law enforcement, it could be part of his wealth gained from cryptocurrency, or it could simply be that he thinks it’ll make his opponents angry. Rich people often act on whims just to show that they have the power not to need to justify their actions.
It could be any of that, but it could also be as simple as libertarians requested it, he told them he would, and he didn't feel any reason to renege on that.
(I do think there's probably an element of deliberate disrespect to federal law enforcement and the justice system, but that alone doesn't answer the question why Ross specifically?)
AFAIK, it wasn't done because he wants to be lenient on drug traffickers, but because the overall case of Ross Ulbricht is huge in certain political circles that he was pandering to during the presidential race, so seems he's "paying back" for those votes or something.
> “Ross Ulbricht has been a libertarian political prisoner for more than a decade,” said a statement from Libertarian National Committee Chair Angela McArdle. “I’m proud to say that saving his life has been one of our top priorities and that has finally paid off.”
Seems the US-version of libertarians is that group.
There is a high correlation between his condemnation of drugs and characterizations of families, many poor and desperate, illegally crossing the border.
Most illegal drugs by far go through regular border crossings, but he hasn’t obsessed about them in the same way.
I don't think I buy this. He doesn't need to care about citizen votes anymore, and how big is the libertarian with a capital 'L' true believer block in Congress? Is there any? I'm not sure there was ever any political support for Ross Ulbricht.
Has to be something else going on here, none of the explanations in this thread are hitting it on the head for me.
If he wants to make the most of his next/last four years as president, then he needs to keep his supporters happy enough to vote in Republican congressmen in two years. Many of his supporters are the type to not vote at all because they think politicians are all two-faced liars, so it's important to keep them sufficiently moralized to vote in 2026.
Trump has never been a big drug warrior (against drug users). His social views are basically late 80's 1990s Democrat and not out of line with Clinton, etc.
Clinton was a drug war supporter. He started the whole "Yea But it is Still Federally Illegal under Federal Law" in response to proposition 215 in California in late December of 1996.
It was a big cause that many libertarians cared about. I'm sure all the crypto people who have Trump's ear have been pushing him on this. There are also rumors that some state-level libertarian leaders promised not to promote their candidate if Trump promised to free Ulbrecht.
Trump is predictable. This was his side of a transaction designed to secure support from a voter contingent. His personal opinions don't matter much when he is making a deal.
Perhaps, but I'm of the opinion that if a sentence is unjust, or if the means to convict violated the defendant's rights, then the defendant should walk. While this may seem unreasonable, it's the only way to check the state which has unlimited resources when it decides to go after somebody.
I don't really have an opinion on this case because I'm not completely familiar with all the details. It's certainly going to be contentious.
The idea of a pardon is exactly that: it erases the record of the crime/conviction.
I think you are thinking of a commutation. That ends the punishment while not absolving the person of the crime.
So the January 6th criminals who got pardons no longer have a criminal record (on this count at least). The 14 people who were only granted commutations are still counted as felons.
> As these opinions confirm, a presidential pardon removes, either conditionally or unconditionally, the punitive legal consequences that would otherwise flow from conviction for the pardoned offense.
A pardon, however, does not erase the conviction as a historical fact or justify the fiction that the pardoned individual did not engage in criminal conduct. A pardon, therefore, does not by its own force expunge judicial or administrative records of the conviction or underlying offense.
Very striking to see how the sentiment has drastically shifted, while the facts of the case did not. There is a really cultural shift visible in how this issue is seen on here.