A San Francisco man who created the underground drug-selling website Silk Road was sentenced to life in prison on Friday by a judge who cited six deaths from drugs bought on his site.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest told 31-year-old Ross Ulbricht that he was a criminal, even though he doesn’t fit the typical profile — he has two collegiate degrees — and she brushed aside his efforts to characterise the business as merely a big mistake.
“It was a carefully planned life’s work. It was your opus,” she said. “You are no better a person than any other drug dealer.”
Ulbricht’s 2013 arrest shut down what prosecutors described as an unprecedented one-stop online shopping mall where the supply of drugs was virtually limitless, enabling nearly 4,000 drug dealers to expand their markets from the sidewalk to cyberspace, selling drugs on a never-before-seen scale to more than 100,000 buyers in markets stretching from Argentina to Australia, from the United States to Ukraine.
The government said in court papers that Ulbricht left a blueprint that others have followed by establishing new “dark markets” in sophisticated spaces of the Internet that are hard to trace.
‘A Changed Man’
Before the sentence was announced, a sniffling and apologetic Ulbricht told Forrest that he’s a changed man who is not greedy, or vain by nature.
His lawyer, Joshua Dratel, said he was “disappointed tremendously” by the sentence.
Outside court, Ulbricht’s mother, Lyn, called the war on drugs a failure and said two of the victims in the case died during the four months that authorities investigated but did not shut down the website.
Ulbricht was convicted in February of operating the site for nearly three years from 2011 until 2013.
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