Lord knows it's probably not smart to hold politicians accountable to their campaign promises. But President-elect Donald Trump is no typical politician and at least one of his campaign promises was both uniquely specific and uncontroversial enough to expect—or demand, really—follow-through.
"If you vote for me, on day one, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht," proclaimed Trump last May while addressing the Libertarian National Convention. The request was on a list of 10 demands the Libertarian Party shared with Trump before he spoke. If Trump has failed to follow through on his other memorable promise from the convention—he said he would "put a Libertarian in my cabinet"—this one is still in play. It would right a small but potent wrong when it comes to the carceral state, the deep state, the drug war, and a host of related bastions of state overreach. By most accounts a model prisoner who has been behind bars for almost a dozen years, Ulbricht deserves his freedom.
As readers of this site—along with crypto people, drug policy mavens, and others interested in the intersection of tech and social freedoms—know, Ulbricht is the founder of Silk Road, the pioneering dark web site that allowed people to buy and sell illegal drugs, mostly using bitcoin (indeed, Silk Road was arguably the first real test of bitcoin being used as a payment system on a regular basis). In a 2015 federal trial in the Southern District of New York, he was convicted of money laundering, computer hacking, and narcotics trafficking and sentenced to life in prison by Judge Katherine B. Forrest, who excoriated the former Eagle Scout for daring to step outside of the law:
