Real trials don't play out like they do in hollywood. You don't get to spend your time in court talking about your ideology and lobbying for better laws. The entire trial will be about whether or not he's guilty of breaking the laws that already exist.
> Prosecutors in the case against alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht want the court to prohibit Ulbricht from saying almost anything political at all, according to a motion filed last week by the government.
> They’re worried that the jury might end up sympathizing with Ulbricht’s politics.
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/silk-road-jury-nullificatio...
To me, this goes against every freedom of speech. To not be allowed to defend yourself in any and every way possible is to not be free.
Edit: "in any and every truthful way possible" - obviously perjury is perjury.
It's not about the trial, because the trial is lost no matter what he does (regardless of whether or not he's innocent, he's going to jail, guaranteed), it's about nailing your colours to the wall and showing the rest of the world that you're willing to go to jail to stand up for the freedoms you ostensibly believe in.
Ulbricht won't be doing any of that, instead he's going to mount a defense that effectively says that his manifesto, his politics, his core beliefs, are all just something to be discarded when it's convenient.
In modern society, this authority is the state.
In Dread Pirate Robert's universe, no authority should wield violence... except Dread Pirate and his associates if it suites them.
Libertarian and anarchistic ideologies start from the wish that no-one would wield violence and all would be equal.
Unfortunately, how real world scenarios evolve is that existing system is replaced by chaos, from which a few entities reach political authority, at which point they take the authority to wield violence and make the decisions for everyone else they want to make.
Anarchy and the like work only in smaller social groups such as a family or a commune where everyone can rationally assume everyone can be trusted and to act fairly within the context of an uncodified behavioral standard - to stay within the groups culture.
At larger scales these types of population dynamics just don't work, and the stuff rises up which require the equivalent of the functions of modern state to function properly as a whole.
The point is, if there is no central auhtority, someone will become that authority (picture somalian warlords, russia after 1917 revolution and so on).
So replacing current state with an entity on 'non-violence' and non-coercion does not work - these are sociological oxymorons that do not exist.
But there are some core arguments about freedom of choice that Silk Road addressed in some ways, and DPR was a figurehead for those arguments, and to see him ignore those ideals in exchange for a half-hearted defense like this is disappointing, that's all. Whether or not he's guilty, DPR is dead and Silk Road achieved nothing.
The court of popular opinion seems to be edging ever so slightly in Ulbricht's favor. Morally and politically, arguments for minimal government and drug legalization might have some merit. But no one is ever going to convince a judge that, while, the defendant might be guilty, the real crime is that there are even laws against everything he's accused of.
Although I suppose he could use the opportunity to make a statement anyway, regardless of how well it works as a legal defense. I wouldn't blame him either way, really. </IANAL>
On what planet? Public opinion just shifted in favor of legalizing marijuana in 2013, but support for keeping everything else illegal is overwhelming: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/drug-legalization-p.... Around 10% of people support legalizing cocaine, crack, heroin, meth, or LSD. 80-85% oppose legalizing those drugs.
The transition in political thought doesn't seem to have been toward "people should be able to freely trade in whatever they want." It seems to have been a change in attitude towards the harmfulness of marijuana specifically.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041386/
(or read it...)
Nope. My opinion is that it's a desperate ploy from a guilty man who knows that the strength of the evidence against him is so great that he's resorting to a defense they wouldn't use in a movie plot because it's so unbelievable. I'm entirely unapologetic about my opinion, because that's what it is, an opinion. Fortunately I'm neither judge nor jury in this case.
Also, don't put words in my mouth and don't ascribe motives to me that I don't have. The very first sentence of my comment says explicitly that I understand he's free to mount whatever defense he likes - it's his freedom to lose.
Whatever Ulbricht himself may be, whether or not the murder for hire allegations are true, however he might have gone about running Silk Road, the libertarian ideals that justify the existence of Silk Road should have their day in court. But that won't happen here, because his defense relies on Silk Road being a terrible thing that somebody else did.