By Mark Hamblett, From New York Law Journal

Ross Ulbricht was sent to prison for life Friday for running a dark channel website with a thriving narcotics trade using the virtual currency bitcoin.

Southern District Judge Katherine Forrest dismissed Ulbricht’s tearful plea for mercy, denying every suggestion that he formed the Silk Road website for philosophical or ideological reasons.

“I find it unsupportable that the website was started by an impulsive or naive young man—I give you more credit than that,” Forrest said.

She said the idea that the 31-year-old gradually fell into a scheme which shipped $183 million in heroin and other drugs was “unsupportable.”

“It was carefully planned,” she told him. “It was your life’s work. It was your opus.”

Forrest, during the three-hour sentencing hearing, reminded Ulbricht of a quote presented to the jury that convicted him in February in which he told an associate in an email or text that he was too busy for social activities because “I’m running a goddamned multimillion dollar criminal enterprise.”

Ulbricht’s voice broke with emotion as he tried to persuade the judge to give him no more than the 20-year mandatory minimum sentence. “I’m not a self-centered, sociopathic person who was trying to express some inner badness,” he told the court.

“I’ve changed. I’m not the man I was when I created Silk Road. I’m not the man I was when I was arrested,” he said, sniffling, holding back tears. “I’m a little bit wiser, much more humble.”

Ulbricht was convicted in February on seven drug and conspiracy counts after slightly more than three hours of deliberations by the jury, which heard evidence that he ran Silk Road from 2011 to 2013, made millions of dollars off of drug transactions and tried to have opponents murdered.

Ulbricht was arrested at a public library in San Francisco on Oct. 1, 2013 while logging on to a computer under the alias Dread Pirate Roberts. Agents found more than $13 million in bitcoins, maintenance logs for Silk Road, and a computer journal in which Ulbricht charted the founding and development of the website.

Forrest dealt Ulbricht a setback before trial when she refused to suppress evidence seized from his computer, including his email accounts.

On Friday, defense lawyer Joshua Dratel told Forrest 20 years in prison would be enough. “In 20 years, if he is released, no one will say it was too short.” (See sentencing submission.)

Dratel called for a “reasonable, rational, appropriate sentence.” Nearly 100 letters from his family and friends, as well a letter from the defendant himself to the judge, “demonstrate what Mr. Ulbricht is capable of in the future.”

“The solution for pain is not more pain,” Dratel added. “The solution for suffering is not more suffering.”

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Timothy Howard and Serrin Turner had asked for a sentence substantially above the minimum, saying Ulbricht made drug dealing easy and accessible to people who would otherwise have avoided it.

In their sentencing submission, the prosecutors held Ulbricht responsible for “at least six drug-related deaths” and said he brokered some $213 million in drug deals.

“With the click of a mouse, a Silk Road user could circumvent all of the physical obstacles that might otherwise prevent or deter one from obtaining drugs locally,” they wrote.

Before Forrest on Friday, Turner said, “As for drugs, his policy was ‘anything goes.'”

On Friday, working her way through sentencing enhancements, Forrest held Ulbricht responsible for the distribution of 60,700 kilos combined of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana. She also took the drug-related deaths into consideration, including a man who died of a heroin overdose and was found with the Silk Road website on his computer browser.

She also heard from two people who lost children to drugs, including a man named Richard, the father of “Brian B” who “died of an overdose supplied by Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road.”

“He was the last person anyone would have imagined would have died from a drug overdose,” said Richard, but the “lure of Silk Road, the convenience, the anonymity … the low risk of detection by law enforcement … they all overpowered Brian.”

Forrest disparaged Ulbricht’s notion that the distribution of drugs over the Internet reduces harm because the drug trade on the street is more violent. She called that a “fantasy” in the face of such “broad and unrelenting violence” associated with the drug trade.

Forrest also said that view was “so very narrow” and focused on “such a privileged group that is able to sit in the privacy of their own home with their high speed Internet connection.”

Howard and Turner presented evidence at trial that Ulbricht paid someone $150,000 to murder a Silk Road customer who was trying to extort money from him, and paid to have four others murdered as well, although there was no evidence any of the plots came to fruition.

Turner told the judge at sentencing that “this defendant tried to have people killed to protect his enterprise” and paid over a half million dollars to do it, so he was someone “who was emulating a traditional drug kingpin.”

Forrest agreed there was “ample and unambiguous evidence” that Ulbricht solicited five murders and paid for it.

“There was no evidence he was role playing,” she said. “He believed he was paying for the murder of those he wanted eliminated.”

The judge took note that Ulbricht claimed to have started Silk Road for philosophical reasons, but it “is fictional to think of Silk Road as some place of freedom—it was a place with a lot of rules.”

Later, the judge said, “I don’t know that there’s a philosophy left behind.”

IMAGE: Courtroom sketch of Ross Ulbricht in a Southern District courtroom in February AP/Elizabeth Williams

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