I found an intersting account of the sentencing hearing which quoted the judge as follows:
After Ulbricht spoke, the proceedings took a short recess.
"I have spent well over one hundred hours considering this sentence," said Judge Forrest upon her return. "I've run over and over it in my mind from every angle. What is a just sentence? What does that mean?"
The guidelines for Ulbricht's crimes pointed to life, but she wasn't bound by those, she noted.
"You don't fit a typical criminal profile," she began. "It's not TV or the movies in here. You're educated. You've got two degrees, an intact family, and 98 people willing to write letters on your behalf. And yet, we have you. And you are a criminal."
"I know that word even today may sound harsh to you, even today," said Forrest.
Ulbricht had been betrayed by his own words, and over the next several minutes, Forrest proceeded to read the most damning passages from his own logs and journals. ("It's still not clear to me why you kept a journal," she noted, an aside that apparently produced laughter in the overflow room.)
"This democracy we set up, it did not exist on the Silk Road," she said. "You were captain of the ship. It wasn't a world of 'freedom'—it was a place with a lot of rules. It was a world of your laws."
Ulbricht decided what was bought and sold on Silk Road. When a staffer pointed out cyanide was being sold, Ulbricht as DPR pointed out it was a potent substance that could be used for murder or suicide—and then allowed the sale.
"Within six minutes you made that decision," Forrest noted.
She didn't believe that it was a "naive young man" who created Silk Road.
"It was a carefully planned life's work," she said, pointing to a 2010 journal entry saying he'd already been thinking about the site for a year. "It was your opus. You wanted it to be your legacy—and it is."
Ulbricht's ideological messages on Silk Road boards "reveal a kind of arrogance," she said. "Silk Road's creation shows that you thought you were better than the laws."
As for the "harm reduction" arguments, the judge could not have been more cutting. She read every academic study suggested by the defense, and then some, and was not impressed.
"No drug dealer from Harlem or the Bronx would have made these arguments," said Forrest. "It's an argument of privilege."
Ulbricht was focused on harm that could come the user. But most drug violence didn't come from buys on the street, but from "upstream" violence that grows as demand grows, she asserted. Believing that the user is the only person affected by drug violence is "fantasy, it's magical thinking," she said.
"Poppies for heroin come from Mexico or Afghanistan," said Forrest. "When Silk Road expands the market, it is expanding the demand." Silk Road brought drugs to communities that didn't have access to them, in "staggering quantities," she added.
As for Fernando Caudevilla, or "Doctor X," the Spanish doctor hired by Ulbricht to give advice to users, the judge read his messages, and found them "breathtakingly irresponsible."
Caudevilla told a diabetic that using MDMA would be OK, as long as he remembered to check his glucose levels by setting an alarm. In another message, he advised an 18-year-old first time drug user to "be careful and I think you'll be fine," and to "stick to psychedelics."
Silk Road had done "great harm to the social fabric," the judge concluded. "Your case is without precedent. You are first. For those considering stepping into your shoes, they need to understand, there will be very severe consequences. There must be no doubt that lawlessness will not be tolerated."
For drug crimes, Ulbricht was sentenced to two life sentences, to be served concurrently. In the US federal justice system, there is no parole available from a life sentence. For aiding and abetting the distribution of computer hacking tools, fake IDs, and for money laundering, he was sentenced to five years, 15 years, and 20 years, respectively.