The criminal defense lawyer representing Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht is a Harvard Law School grad with a prominent practice on Wall Street. For 25 years Joshua Dratel has been standing up for individual rights in complex federal cases including assisting in the defense of detainees at Abu Ghraib, and at the Guantanamo base in Cuba.
Dratel is co-editor of the award-winning The Torture Papers: The Legal Road to Abu Ghraib, published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. The book documents the “torture memos” which US government officials wrote to prepare the way for coercive interrogation and torture (forbidden under international law) in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib. Prior to starting his own firm, Dratel worked at the white collar criminal law firm of Gerald B. Lefcourt, which defended the Black Panthers, Abbie Hoffman, and Michael Milken, among other high-profile clients.
