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Stand With Ross Ulbricht. Shun His Tormentors.

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Prosecutor General Vyshinskiy (centre), readin...
Prosecutor General Vyshinskiy (centre), reading the indictment, in 1937 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On May 31, a panel of three judges on the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld the conviction and sentence of American political prisoner Ross Ulbricht.

It’s been two years since I last devoted a column to Ulbricht’s plight, so a refresher seems in order:

After a show trial so obviously fixed in advance that Stalin’s pet prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky would have blushed with embarrassment to participate in it, judge Katherine Forrest sentenced Ulbricht to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the crime of running a web site. Yes, really.

In theory, the issue was that the site, Silk Road, was used by buyers and sellers of illegal drugs. In fact, it was that someone calling himself “Dread Pirate Roberts” — whom the prosecution alleged was Ross Ulbricht — had created and operated an online marketplace in which business was conducted anonymously and beyond the reach of government regulators.

Forrest denied Ulbricht bail on the prosecution’s claim that he had conspired to commit murder — charges which were used to poison the jury pool and keep the defense from  reviewing the state’s evidence or vetting its witnesses until right before the trial began.

Forrest effectively forbade Ulbricht’s attorneys to present a defense.  The prosecution was allowed to present “evidence” while refusing to disclose how it gathered that evidence. The FBI’s technical claims were admitted; expert witnesses to dispute those claims were excluded. The defense was forbidden to suggest alternate theories of the identity of “Dread Pirate Roberts.” The prosecution withheld, until after the trial, the information that two of its own agents were on their way to prison for corrupt activities during, and bearing on, the investigation.

The polite language of procedural appeal in criminal cases is “reversible error” by the judge. But Katherine Forrest didn’t fumble around and screw things up. She intentionally fixed the trial at every opportunity, for the express purpose of seeing Ross Ulbricht convicted of, and giving him the maximum possible sentence for, “crimes” for which he deserved not a day in prison even if he had in fact done the things he was accused of.

In any sane universe, Ross Ulbricht would be a free man and Katherine Forrest would be removed from the bench, disbarred, and sued down to her last dime for damages.

Instead of correcting this massive injustice, federal appellate judges Jon O. Newman, Gerard E. Lynch, and Christopher F. Droney chose to ignore the plain facts, become Katherine Forrest’s co-conspirators, uphold her clearly criminal actions, and keep Ross Ulbricht caged.

Hopefully, the legal saga isn’t over and justice will eventually be served in higher courts or through presidential commutation of the unjust sentence.

Socially, these robed evil-doers deserve to be shunned by all good people. They shouldn’t be able to get tables at restaurants or drinks at bars. Their clergy of choice should withhold communion until they repent and make restitution. We probably can’t make their lives as miserable as they’ve made Ross Ulbricht’s. But we should try.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Free Speech: Ted Wheeler is the Enemy He Invokes

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English: Occupy Portland participants in Pione...
English: Occupy Portland participants in Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Oregon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland, Oregon, wants to control who can say — and hear — what.  He’s asked the federal government to cancel one permit and deny another, both for “alt-right” demonstrations at Portland’s Shrunk Plaza.

His excuse: Portland is “in mourning” and its “anger is real” over an incident in which an anti-Muslim bigot,  Jeremy Joseph Christian, allegedly harassed two women on a commuter train and then stabbed three men who came to their defense, two of them fatally.

Not a bad excuse as excuses go, I guess, but no excuse can be allowed to trump our rights of free speech and peaceable assembly. On this matter, Mayor Wheeler is objectively taking the same position as Christian: The position that it is acceptable to use force to suppress ideas one disagrees with.

There are two  metaphorical ways to describe a world in which various ideas compete for our attention and allegiance. Each of those metaphors has consequences.

Metaphor 1: A “marketplace of ideas” in which the best product wins out because it is sold with good arguments and people like it better. In this marketplace, any idea can be offered at any time by anyone who supports it. Hopefully the better ones get enough “market share” to be implemented; if an idea doesn’t work out, its supporters can move on to another.

Metaphor 2: A “war of ideas” in which things take a darker turn. The competing sides each conclude that their ideas cannot win out unless the alternatives are excluded not just from adoption, but from discussion and consideration. At some point, force inevitably becomes the instrument of that exclusion. The war ceases to be metaphorical. America is clearly at such a point now with the increasing frequency of riots and street fights over politics.

Even scarier than ad hoc riots and street fights, though, are calls by government officials for suppression of political speech through government permit schemes, police action to disperse demonstrators, etc.

The difference between Ted Wheeler and an “alt-right” agitator with a baseball bat is that Wheeler has a full-time police force, armed with lethal weaponry and effective legal immunity for its actions, at his beck and call.

We’ve seen societies in which the likes of Wheeler lay down a party line and the police break out their tear gas and truncheons to suppress all opposition to that line. For example, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany before, and eastern Europe after, World War Two.

I don’t want to live in such a society. Hopefully you don’t either. The events in question shouldn’t even require a permit — or the permission of Ted Wheeler. Freedom is our path away from the war and back to the marketplace.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

The War on Drugs is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, North Carolina Edition

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Opium Poppy (Papaver somniferum) found at Chat...
Opium Poppy (Papaver somniferum) found at Chatsworth House, a large country house eight miles (13 km) north of Matlock in Derbyshire, England. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Apparently this month’s crop of stabbings, armed robberies, rapes/molestations and teacher/student sex scandals in Catawba County, North Carolina aren’t enough to keep the sheriff’s department busy. Or maybe they just have too many deputies on the payroll. Something’s obviously out of balance: They have time to go after gardeners.

“A man was arrested after deputies found nearly an acre of opium poppy in a Catawba County field,” Charlotte’s WBTV News reports. “Deputies spent the day pulling plants and loading them into their trailers.” According to the Charlotte Observer,  the uniformed bandits also stole the victim’s pets and livestock.

Our fearless flower thieves estimate the value of their haul at an insane $500 million. That’s a goody from the American drug warriors’ bag of dirty tricks: Their guess is based on the total weight of the plants, not on the tiny amount of opium that might eventually have been extracted from each flower. They also love to do this with LSD, which is measured in micrograms, including the weight of the paper the chemical is embedded in. Bigger numbers make for harsher charges and more publicity. In reality, if those poppies were destined for the street market, the take would have been closer to half a million dollars than half a billion.

A few  other numbers to put this circus into perspective:

According to Statista, approved pharmaceuticals are a $446 billion per year industry in America, a country accounting, per CNBC for about 80% of global prescriptions of opiates. Call that particular market $20 billion per year.  And its giants don’t like competition.

Then there are the tens of billions of dollars in tax money spent every year on the “war on drugs,” which has over time become a make-work program to pad the budgets and payrolls of law enforcement at every level.

Meanwhile, as I note above, there are actual criminals committing actual crimes in Catawba County. But solving those crimes and busting those criminals isn’t nearly as sexy or lucrative as trampling a guy’s garden, seizing his other property, and talking smack about it on TV.

If you’re a taxpayer in Catawba County or anywhere else, you’re paying for this “drug bust” in two ways: Higher taxes and higher crime.  Every dime and every minute spent busting pot-smokers, heroin junkies and flower farmers is a dime taken out of your pocket and a minute spent making you less, not more, safe from real crime.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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