At least you're engaging with the topic at hand instead of making ad hominem attacks now.
And... I partly agree with you! If you look at my comment upthread, you'll note I tried to make it clear that there's some ambiguity in whether the Silk Road, and the rise of darknet markets as a whole, has been a good thing. I'm certainly not holding up Ullbricht as some moral hero--that's entirely perihelions' hallucination.
The question in my mind, is whether what Ullbricht did is worth putting a 30 year old in prison for the rest of his life. I fundamentally disagree with two things which were involved in this sentencing:
1. Accusations that Ullbricht paid for murders should have no bearing on the court system. From what I've read, it seems like those accusations are probably true, but in the United States of America, we don't sentence people on "probably true" for crimes that weren't even prosecuted. If we're at all committed to the presumption of innocent until proven guilty, we can't be allowing prosecutors to convict for a crime, vaguely insinuate that a worse crime was committed, and get a sentence based on that worse crime's severity. If Ross Ullbricht was being sentenced for murder, he needed to be convicted of murder.
2. Making an example of someone isn't justice for that person. Our court system should not be engaged in sacrificing individuals for political goals, no matter how noble those political goals might be.
In my mind, it's pretty hard to justify a life sentence without accusing Ullbricht of murder or saying we should make an example of him. Everything he was accused of was a nonviolent offense for which he was a first-time offender. The only argument I can see for a harsher sentence is the scale of his operation--but when we compare to SEC cases for example with similar scales, we're still not seeing this severity of sentences.
Ullbricht served 11 years in prison before he was pardoned, and I don't think anything our current justice system does is "fair", I think that's about as fair as we can expect given what he did.
I would say he deserved about 20-25 years. He engaged in a large-scale drug operation. He explicitly set out to start a drug operation. He operated a drug operation that was larger than most could even imagine. And the fact he tried to put hits out on people really seals the deal, while it doesn't matter legally it does matter when we think about how much time did he really deserve.
Do you believe in the presumption of innocence or not? This isn't an ambiguous thing.
Furthermore, they had the evidence, they just dropped the charges because he had multiple life sentences.