President Donald Trump has pardoned the founder of an online black marketplace for selling drugs, he announced Tuesday.
Ross Ulbricht, aka “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was sentenced to life in prison nearly 10 years ago for creating the Silk Road, which facilitated the sale of illicit drugs like heroin and cocaine between 2011 and 2013.
According to court documents in the case, the Silk Road site gave users anonymity and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales related to illicit items.
Ulbricht, now 40, was arrested in October 2013 in a San Francisco library after he allegedly hired someone to kill a Silk Road user who threatened to release the identities of thousands of other users, according to court documents. He has been serving his sentence at a federal prison in Tuscon, Arizona.
“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbright to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”
The president called Ulbricht’s sentence “ridiculous.”
Trump promised to help Ulbricht during a speech last year at the Libertarian Party national convention.
In determining Ulbricht’s sentence, a federal judge cited six deaths from drugs that were bought on Silk Road and five people he tried to have killed.
Ulbritch tweeted about Trump’s victory after the presidential election, saying he had “immense gratitude to everyone who voted for President Trump on my behalf. I trust him to honor his pledge and give me a second chance. After 11+ years in darkness, I can finally see the light of freedom at the end of the tunnel. Thank you so much, @realDonaldTrump.”
A petition his account linked to has more than 600,000 signatures calling for his release.