The Silk Road trial verdict is in: Ross Ulbricht has been found guilty of running the online drug service. A jury found the 30-year-old Californian guilty on all counts, including money laundering, drug trafficking and computer hacking.
The trial went terribly for Ulbricht, who did not testify. While his defense lawyer conceded early on that Ulbricht had started the digital drug empire, he argued that there was no way to prove his client had continued to run it. The defense's expert witnesses were rejected, and the prosecution laid out a case against Ulbricht that involved tying $13.4 million in Bitcoin transfers from the Silk Road to his personal computer.
The volume of evidence against Ulbricht, including personal journals, was damning. It may have helped if the defense had been allowed to interrogate exactly how the prosecution and law enforcement officials obtained and verified the digital breadcrumbs that led them to Ulbricht, but as it was presented to the jury, the connection between Ulbricht and the Dread Pirate Roberts looked convincing. And the defense's insistence that the true Dread Pirate Roberts had planted the ample evidence to frame Ulbricht lacked the necessary heft for a doubt-sowing counter-narrative.
The case hinged on whether or not the prosecution could convince the jury that Ulbricht was, beyond reasonable doubt, the "Dread Pirate Roberts" who created and oversaw the Silk Road from its inception until its ignominious FBI seizure. While the defense leaned on the idea that digital identity is inherently murky as a way to cast doubt, it wasn't enough to stop Ulbricht from losing.
from Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com/ross-ulbricht-found-guilty-for-running-silk-road-1683815284
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