The man accused of running the world's largest online narcotics emporium was convicted on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported. He has not been sentenced yet but could face life in prison.

The jury deliberated for 3 1/2 hours before unanimously finding Ross Ulbricht, 30, guilty of running the website as Dread Pirate Roberts. Ulbricht was convicted of all seven counts including trafficking drugs on the Internet, narcotics-trafficking conspiracy, running a continuing criminal enterprise, computer-hacking conspiracy and money-laundering conspiracy, according to Bloomberg.

"The verdict was very disappointing," Ulbricht's lawyer, defense attorney Joshua Dratel, told Business Insider in an emailed statement. "Of course, there will be an appeal, and we are confident Ross has strong issues on appeal," he continued. Dratel noted that the defense believes there were significant errors at trial, including the limiting of defense cross-examination, the preclusion of defense experts, and the exclusion of certain defense evidence in the form of documents and other exhibits. "The extraordinarily short time the jury spent deliberating for a trial of this length and density demonstrates that these elements had a devastating effect at trial," he added.

A man in the back of the courtroom reportedly shouted “Ross is a hero!" after the verdict was read, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara released a statement warning that Ulbricht's arrest and conviction should "send a clear message to anyone else attempting to operate an online criminal enterprise," and that the dark net is not a shield for anyone wishing to evade law enforcement.

Another trial against Ulbricht accusing him of murder-for-hire is still happening in Baltimore, according to the Guardian.

Ross' supporters say the case could have a huge impact on internet freedom, as it is one of the first times an individual has been charged simply for building a website. Ulbricht's family has said that he should be protected under the 1996 Communications Decency Act which protects ISPs from liability for the user content they host.

Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI at a public library in San Francisco in October 2013. After many delays, his trial began in Manhattan on Jan. 13.

Prosecutors accused Ulbricht of being Dread Pirate Roberts (a reference to the cult movie "The Princess Bride"), the founder and operator of the Silk Road website. Ulbricht pleaded not guilty to charges of hacking, money laundering, and narcotics trafficking, and continued to deny that he was Dread Pirate Roberts up until the very end.

Ulbricht's defense team conceded at the trial that Ulbricht was in fact the founder of Silk Road, but had long since given up control of the site when he was arrested. The prosecution, led by Assistant US Attorneys Serrin Turner and Timothy Howard, denied this, saying that Ulbricht was caught red-handed, "literally with his fingers at the keyboard, running the Silk Road" when agents surrounded him at the Glen Park Branch Library in San Francisco on Oct. 1, 2013.



Prosecutors called four witnesses to testify against Ulbricht and even presented his alleged diary entries that detail what he referred to as a "criminal enterprise." The defense struggled towards the end, especially as the journal entries and chat logs found on Ulbricht's laptop continue to incriminate him.



In one 2010 journal entry, Ulbricht said he thought up the idea for Silk Road (which he originally called "Underground Brokers") while working as an editor of scientific journals. He decided to get people interested in the site by producing and selling "several kilos of high quality shrooms" that he himself had grown in a lab — a very risky endeavor that he wouldn't repeat: "I was a hair's breadth from going to jail before the site even launched for growing shrooms," he wrote in his journal.



On more than one occasion, Ulbricht referred to himself as "dpr" (Dread Pirate Roberts) while chatting with Silk Road employees — one of whom turned out to be undercover Homeland Security agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan. According to prosecutors, Ulbricht was arrested with his laptop open to the chat and signed into Silk Road’s administrator page as Dread Pirate Roberts.

In a surprising turn at the close of the trial's first week, Dratel got Der-Yeghiayan to admit that Mark Karpeles, founder of the now-defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, was the FBI's main suspect only a month and a half before Ulbricht's arrest, Forbes reported. The defense suffered a major blow at the beginning of the trial's second week, however, from which it never fully recovered: Judge Katherine Forrest instructed the jury to disregard much of the testimony Der-Yeghiayan gave during Dratel's cross-examination, dismissing it as "hearsay."

Here is Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara's full statement on Ulbricht's conviction:

“As a unanimous jury has found, Ross William Ulbricht operated Silk Road – a clandestine global marketplace that offered buyers and sellers of illegal goods and services a promise of anonymity. Ulbricht built this black market bazaar to exploit the dark web and the digital currency Bitcoin to allow users to conduct illegal business beyond the reach of law enforcement. Ulbricht’s arrest and conviction – and our seizure of millions of dollars of Silk Road Bitcoins – should send a clear message to anyone else attempting to operate an online criminal enterprise. The supposed anonymity of the dark web is not a protective shield from arrest and prosecution.”