In April, President Joe Biden granted clemency to 78 individuals who had been convicted on drug offenses that included possession and distribution, money laundering and tax evasion. Many of them had already served time under what many Americans, as well as leaders of both parties, acknowledge were unfair sentencing guidelines.
In the meantime, a 38-year-old American languishes in prison, his case largely ignored by most political leaders for a decade. He is serving two consecutive life sentences plus 40 years without parole, for creating and running a website.
In February 2011, Ross Ulbricht launched Silk Road, an anonymous, e-commerce free market. Silk Road was the product of a young man who had grown passionate about individual freedom and privacy rights while in college. Ulbricht said he created the website because, at the time he believed that “people should have the right to buy and sell whatever they wanted so long as they weren’t hurting anyone else.” He believed they should have “the freedom to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness, however they individually saw fit.” Accessible through the US Navy-developed Tor browser, Silk Road offered its users the opportunity to pay anonymously for their transactions with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, then in its infancy.
Word about Silk Road spread and attracted a wide range of buyers and sellers seeking a variety of products — including art, collectables, and musical instruments. It grew to be a huge marketplace of buyers who had one thing in common: they wanted to engage in their commerce anonymously.
But, as one might imagine, many traded illicit goods and/or services, and this (rightfully) caught the eye of the authorities. Once illegal activity was noticed on the site, the Federal Bureau of Investigation got involved and started investigating. Eventually, Ulbricht was arrested in a San Francisco library on October 1, 2013.
Ross Ulbricht’s arrest made for many sensational headlines. Allegations of murder-for-hire were even thrown into the mix (conspicuously never prosecuted and later dismissed by the U.S. District of Maryland after Ulbricht was sentenced), but ultimately Ulbricht was only tried for and convicted of nonviolent conspiracy charges– allegedly undertaken with people he had never met. It should be noted that Ulbricht did not store, transport, or have any contact with the items that were sold on the Silk Road website. Yet his sentence is far longer than any of the actual drug sellers who used the platform and were nabbed, thanks to the digital trail Silk Road left. The largest drug sellers got sentences from three to ten years, and their sentences combined add up to a fraction of Ulbricht’s. In fact, all of them are already out of prison!
While Ulbricht was given two life sentences plus 40 years without having inflicted any bodily harm, stolen anything or defrauded anyone, a con man like Sam Bankman-Fried of the scandal-plagued FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was asked this year by U.S. senators to help write legislation to regulate himself.
As crypto tech leader Erik Voorhees tweeted, Ulbricht is sentenced to die in prison for building a website “that lets consenting adults buy recreational drugs” while Bankman-Fried built a website that “steals $10 billion from innocent people” and got “hugs with politicians and celebrity endorsements.”
Indeed, as Biden’s bulk-clemency action earlier this year demonstrated, there was clearly something wrong with how sentences for non-violent drug-related offenses were being given out a decade ago. Survey data shows that Americans have a much different view of recreational drug use (as well as the use of cryptocurrency) than they did a decade ago—and were most Americans more aware of the Ulbricht story, they’d be shocked by his double life sentence.
According to FreeRoss.org, the website owned by the Ulbricht family, throughout his time in prison, Ulbricht has been recognized as a model prisoner, who positively impacts those around him, mediating conflicts, teaching classes and tutoring fellow inmates. In 2022, on Ross Ulbricht’s behalf, his family started a charitable fund called “Art4Giving,” which has already donated nearly $500,000 to charities that support prisoners and their families.
Ulbricht was ahead of his time when Silk Road went live in early 2011, and the political environment concerning Bitcoin and drug laws were very different. Public opinion and sentencing laws have changed. Ulbricht is not alone among cases that cry out for review, and he should not be excluded from discussions of policy reforms dealing with the criminal justice system.
The Biden Administration has already shown it will follow the appropriate method for addressing past wrongs in sentencing. Given his obvious remorse and rehabilitation, the nonviolent nature of his convictions, and the length of time he has already spent in prison, Ross Ulbricht’s case should be added to the list under review for clemency, and progressives and libertarians alike should find rare common cause in seeing that it happens.
Andrew Langer is President of the Institute for Liberty and has written on issues related to cryptocurrency and regulation.