[mortov]

"I personally think ulbricht is guilty.."

Which is presumably the intention of the fanfare around the smears - pollute the jury pool as much as possible to avoid the inconvenience of people making a decision based on the facts or evidence presented in court; get out the jury deliberations quickly, just go for whatever knee-jerk guilty feeling you got when you read the headlines about how evil the defendant is; don't bother reading any detail or anything that might hurt your brain and destroy your prejudices !

Despite my reservations, the US would be better served if it had contempt of court laws like England which specifically prohibit discussion of any details of court cases prior to them being heard precisely in order to stop this sort of situation happening.

edit: spelling.

[ceejayoz]

Pollute the jury pool? If they bring in 100 potential jurors maybe one might have some basic knowledge about Bitcoin if they're lucky. A few might recall hearing about it on the nightly news once. Chances are none will have heard anything about "the Dread Pirate Roberts".