The Silk Road website founder and UT-Dallas alumnus had been serving a life sentence in connection with his role with the underground website used for selling drugs.
DALLAS — A University of Texas at Dallas alumnus and founder of Silk Road, an underground website used for selling drugs, was pardoned by President Donald Trump this week.
Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 after a high-profile trial.
Trump announced he was pardoning Ulbricht on Tuesday on his social media website Truth Social and said he’d spoken with Ulbricht’s mother during his first full day in office.
“It was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” Trump’s post read. “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.”
Trump called Ulbricht’s prison sentence “ridiculous.”
The Associated Press reported Trump promised help for Ulbricht during a Libertarian Party convention last May. Libertarian activists, who oppose drug criminalization policies, reportedly believe federal officials overreached in their case against Ulbricht.
The news of Ulbricht’s pardon came after Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all 1,500-plus people charged with crimes from the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
Ulbricht created the Silk Road website in January 2011, and owned and operated it using the moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts” until it was shut down by law enforcement in October 2013, according to federal officials.
“Silk Road emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet, serving as a sprawling black-market bazaar where unlawful goods and services, including illegal drugs of virtually all varieties, were bought and sold regularly by the site’s users,” a 2015 press release from federal officials read. “While in operation, Silk Road was used by thousands of drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs and other unlawful goods and services to more than 100,000 buyers, and to launder hundreds of millions of dollars deriving from these unlawful transactions.”
Prosecutors also alleged drugs sold on the website were connected to at least six overdose deaths worldwide.
Following a four-day trial, Ulbricht was convicted of seven charges, including distributing narcotics, distributing narcotics by means of the Internet, conspiring to distribute narcotics, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiring to commit computer hacking, conspiring to traffic in false identity documents, and conspiring to commit money laundering.
