Ross Ulbricht, the man convicted of running the online drug emporium Silk Road, has appealed against his conviction and sentence, according to court documents filed on Thursday.
In February, a jury in a federal court in Manhattan found Ulbricht, who went by the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts”, guilty on seven counts related to the drug marketplace, including running a narcotics-trafficking enterprise, money laundering and computer hacking.
Before sentencing, Ulbricht wrote a letter to Judge Katherine Forrest begging her to “leave a light at the end of the tunnel” in sentencing and “leave me my old age”.
But Forrest handed down the harshest sentences possible for Ulbricht – one for 20 years, one for five years, one for 15 years and two for life, to be served concurrently with no possibility of parole.
A separate case, in which Ulbricht is accused of trying to procure a murder-for-hire, is still pending in a court in Maryland.
Lawyers for Ulbricht told Business Insider that the fact that they only learned a month before going to trial that two of the FBI officers investigating Silk Road were being charged with corruption and money laundering themselves would be “one of the key issues we raise on appeal”.
