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man. Gravity doesn’t care if you agree with it—if you jump off a cliff you are still going to get hurt.”
He ended with a heartfelt apology.
“Thank you, Mr. Ulbricht,” the judge said as Ross returned to his seat. Judge Forrest then told the
court that they would take a fifteen-minute break.
• • •
At first, as Judge Forrest started the delivery of Ross’s sentence, she was calm yet resolute. She
explained that she wanted to walk Ross, and the rest of the courtroom, through the exhaustive thinking
she had gone through to arrive at this sentence.
She began explaining that the site was clearly Ross’s creation and that it was not just an
experiment, not a lightbulb moment, but something that had been planned for well over a year before
it opened for business, that it was meant as an attack on the democracy of the country she had been
appointed to protect. “You were captain of the ship, as the Dread Pirate Roberts, and you made your
own laws and you enforced those laws in the manner that you saw fit,” she said to Ross as she glared
at him. “It was, in fact, a carefully planned life’s work. It was your opus. You wanted it to be your
legacy—and it is.”
The judge noted that the defense had presented research papers that argued that increased drug
distribution could be morally better for society by reducing violence and encouraging the sale of
better-quality and therefore safer drugs. By this Judge Forrest seemed incensed. It was as if Ross had
been arguing that just because he had sold drugs from behind a computer, he was different.
“No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of
arguments to the Court,” Judge Forrest said. “It is a privileged argument. You are no better a person
than any other drug dealer, and your education does not give you a special place of privilege in our
criminal justice system.”
She talked about the collateral damage of drugs. Ross had argued that drug use takes place in a
cocoon and doesn’t harm anyone but the person who takes the drugs. But in her eyes that was not the
case. There are often ancillary people who are hurt as the result of dangerous substances that had
been sold on the Silk Road, she said. People die. Junkies are created. There are social costs, and in
many instances drug addicts lose their ability to care for their children and a generation can grow up
neglected.
She addressed the murders, noting that, sure, no bodies had been found, but that in her mind that
did not matter. “Did you commission a murder? Five? Yes,” she scolded. “Did you pay for it? Yes.
Did you get photographs relating to what you thought was the result of that murder? Yes.”
As she came to a close, she looked at Ross and said, “What is clear is that people are very, very
complex and you are one of them. There is good in you, Mr. Ulbricht, I have no doubt, but there is
also bad, and what you did in connection with Silk Road was terribly destructive to our social
fabric.”
The courtroom fell silent as Judge Forrest asked Ross to rise.
Thirty-year-old Ross stood and arched his neck upward as he looked at the judge, contemplating
what she was about to say. His mother and father sat in the back of the courtroom watching Ross and
the judge as she began to speak.
“Mr. Ulbricht, it is my judgment delivered here, now, on behalf of our country, that on counts two
and four you are sentenced to a period of life imprisonment,” the judge declared. She then added