Ross Ulbricht, convicted last February of being the mastermind behind the Silk Road darknet marketplace, has filed his appeal brief. It’s a 170-page whopper that revisits several of the evidentiary arguments that Ulbricht's lawyer made at trial. It also focuses on allegations of government corruption that didn’t come out until afterward.

The brief reprises the central elements of Ulbricht’s defense: namely, that he didn't do it. Ulbricht still says he wasn’t “Dread Pirate Roberts,” or DPR, and that “there were multiple DPRs over the course of Silk Road’s existence.”

As to the digital mountain of evidence that the feds found on his computer—including Silk Road logs and thousands of pages of chats with Silk Road admins—Ulbricht answers with a kind of vague “the Internet is scary” story. His attorney, Joshua Dratel, writes that “vulnerabilities inherent to the Internet and digital data,” like hacking and fabrication of files, made “much of the evidence against Ulbricht inauthentic, unattributable to him, and/or untimely unreliable.”

There's one big element that wasn't present at trial, though. Dratel was aware of corruption allegations against Baltimore DEA agent Carl Force, but he wasn't allowed to talk about them. He complains that he only became aware of the Force investigation in late 2014, a good eight months after the government became aware of the agent's misconduct. As for the second corrupt agent, Shaun Bridges, Dratel wasn't even aware of the investigation against him until after trial. About half of the appeal brief's argument focuses on those agents' corruption. Bridges and Force both pled guilty last year and were sentenced in October and December, respectively.

Independent investigations?

Dratel points out that Bridges' investigation was "already fully underway by Fall 2014," even though the defense didn't find out about allegations against him until after trial. The brief contains a long list of grievances about what the agents did and how the defense didn't know about them until it was too late. "[T]o a significant degree the extent, and in some respects the nature, of Force’s misconduct—as well as Bridges’s participation altogether—was hidden by the government from the defense (and the Court) in this case until after trial," Dratel writes.

While Dratel hammers away at what Force and Bridges did, the tougher challenge will be overcoming the government's central argument about the corruption, which US District Judge Katherine Forrest ultimately accepted. Prosecutors didn't argue that Bridges and Force are good guys—just that their botched and corrupt investigation was wholly separate from the New York-based team that brought Ulbricht to trial.

Dratel counters that the Southern District of New York investigation was "decidedly interdependent," since the agents were in contact with each other and shared information. In October 2012, Chicago-based Homeland Security agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan received Force's undercover chats with DPR. In a May 2013 e-mail, Der-Yeghiayan said, "We would like to examine some of the language, usage diction, etc. with the new U/C chats from Nob." Nob was an online persona created by Force.

Ulbricht should have been allowed to conduct additional discovery regarding the corruption investigation and use that evidence at trial, he argues. Dratel also thinks that the whole trial should have been postponed until after the Force investigation was complete.

"[T]he Court’s error was in large part the consequence of the government’s purposeful failure... to disclose material information about Force’s corruption, and about Bridges’s corruption at all, until after trial," states Dratel.

Limited defense

Aside from dealing with the corrupt agents, Dratel says that Forrest improperly limited his defense. For instance, he should have been allowed to introduce more evidence of "alternative perpetrators," including former Mt. Gox owner Mark Karpeles (who is facing charges in Japan.)

Dratel says he should have been able to present evidence (via cross-examination) about Karpeles' offer to provide the name of someone he thought was running Silk Road, in exchange for immunity on financial charges. (Karpeles has said he hadn't heard of Ross Ulbricht until Ulbricht was arrested in October 2013; the information he had to offer was related to a fake name used to register a website advertising Silk Road.)

In addition to complaints about cross-examination, Dratel says the judge abused her discretion by preventing his two defense experts from testifying. Forrest had said the experts were disclosed to prosecutors too late, and she questioned the qualifications of one.

"By precluding the defense experts, who would have countered the complex testimony regarding bitcoin... the government witnesses’ testimony essentially went unchallenged, and Ulbricht was denied his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to present a defense," states Dratel.

Dratel argues that the judge should have allowed a statement from Andrew Jones, a Silk Road staffer who went by "inigo." During one 2013 chat, "inigo" wasn't able to verify DPR's identity using the handshake they had agreed on. "That statement substantially buttressed the defense theory that there was more than one DPR" and supported Ulbricht's defense that he had been framed, he posits. Seven pages of argument is devoted to the exclusion of this statement.

Much of the middle section of the brief is a re-hash of arguments that failed when Dratel made them in court. The problem he faces now is that even if the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit agrees that Judge Forrest made some mistakes, he's still likely to lose. The standard for overturning her evidentiary decisions is "abuse of discretion," which is a tough hill to climb.

The brief takes aim at the warrants for Ulbricht's laptop, Gmail, and Facebook accounts, which had unlimited scope and "lacked any particularity" in the defense's view. All that evidence should be suppressed, he argues.

As to Forrest's suggestion that Ulbricht couldn't contest that without declaring the laptop and accounts were his, Dratel notes that the government "did not contest Ulbricht's standing," and the court failed to cite any case law for its view. "Ulbricht was in possession of the laptop at the time of his arrest, and there was no factual dispute as to his possession of either the laptop or the Facebook or Google accounts," Dratel says.

Finally, the brief attacks the life sentence as unreasonable. Prosecutors didn't have "reliable proof" when they tied six overdose deaths to Silk Road, and the judge "clearly erred" by relying on those allegations. Dratel also points out that big-time drug dealers busted on Silk Road often got sentences of five or ten years.