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Silk Road Mastermind Ross Ulbricht Won't Get a New Trial, Judge Rules
• http://motherboard.vice.comA judge denied Ross Ulbricht's appeal for a new trial Monday, saying that there is an "overwhelming" amount of evidence against the convicted mastermind of the dark web's Silk Road market.
In February, Ulbricht who was found guilty on all seven counts (including money laundering and drug trafficking) stemming from the operation and creation of the site. Judge Katherine Forrest filed a 25-page opinion denying Ulbricht's motion for a new trial based in part on evidence of agent corruption in a federal investigation related to Silk Road.
Ulbricht's attorneys claimed he was denied his right to a fair trial because information regarding the agents' corruption was not provided to the defense in a timely manner, rendering them unable to prepare an adequate defense before the trial.
"There is no reasonable probability of a different outcome here"
But Forrest said the rogue agents' activity would do nothing to exonerate Ulbricht, citing the extensive evidence found on his laptop implicating him in the operation of the site, as well as the fact he admitted to creating it from the beginning.
"There is no reasonable probability of a different outcome here: the circumstances of defendant's arrest, and the evidence found in his own possession at the time of the arrest, are in and of themselves overwhelming evidence of his guilt," Forrest wrote.
Much of Ulbricht's defense rested on an alternative perpetrator theory: that Ulbricht created the site, but then handed it over to someone else (who at one point was implied as being Bitcoin entrepreneur Mark Karpeles). The defense argued that the site was then returned to Ulbricht, leaving him to take the fall when law enforcement was closing in, and that the evidence found on his laptop was somehow planted there.
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