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Trump promised at the Libertarian National Convention to commute Ross Ulbricht’s sentence.
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Libertarians view Ulbricht’s life sentence as a symbol of government overreach.
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Trump also promised to include a libertarian in his Cabinet if elected.
Donald Trump delivered a speech at the Libertarian National Convention on Saturday and vowed to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the jailed founder of the infamous online drug marketplace Silk Road.
“If you vote for me, I will commute Ross Ulbricht’s sentence on day one,” Trump declared to enthusiastic applause from the crowd in Washington, DC.
The move to spotlight Ulbricht was strategically targeted at libertarian voters.
Ulbricht, now 40, who was jailed for life in 2015, is a wrongly imprisoned hero of the American libertarian movement.
The Libertarian Party, with its long-standing advocacy for drug legalization and criminal justice reform, has consistently lobbied for Ulbricht’s release, viewing his life sentence as a symbol of government overreach.
According to a Wired report, Ulbricht became interested in libertarian values at university, where he discovered the ideas of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, a proponent of the moral purpose of free-market capitalism and a staunch opponent of interventionism. Ulbricht embraced these ideas of uncompromising freedom, according to Wired.
“When I created Silk Road, I wasn’t looking for financial gain,” says Ulbricht wrote in a heartfelt letter to his judge in 2015.
“I founded Silk Road because I believed at the time that people should have the right to buy and sell whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t hurt anyone else,” he wrote.
In 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was also fined $183,961,921.
Ulbricht is being held in the US prison in Tucson.
The majority of the goods sold on Silk Road were illegal hardcore drugs, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York said at his trial.
“Silk Road was supposed to be about giving people the freedom to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness,” Ulbricht wrote. “While I still don’t believe people should be denied this right, I have never tried to create a site that would give people another option to feed their addictions.”
Trump, who was loudly booed and heckled during much of his speech at the Libertarian National Convention, managed to win over the audience in part by advocating for Ulbricht’s release.
Libertarian Party National Committee Member Katherine Yeniscavich told Politico: “It’s one of the things we wanted from his first term.”
In addition to the Ulbricht promise, Trump made more promises, promising to include a libertarian in his Cabinet and others in senior administrative positions if he were elected.
Read the original article on Business Insider
