Aussie Silk Road employee avoids jail over role with drug-trafficking site

Queensland prison counsellor Peter Nash has evaded a lengthy sentence in the US, with a judge deciding he has served enough jail time for his part in the global drug-trafficking website, Silk Road.

US District Court judge Thomas Griesa sentenced Nash, 42, to a time-served sentence for his role as the website's moderator.

Nash was facing a life sentence when he was arrested by the FBI and Australian authorities in Queensland in December, 2013.

Prosecutors had asked for between 10 and 12.5 years' jail.

Nash has been in Australian and US jails since his arrest and his lawyers asked for a time-served sentence.

"Mr Nash is hardly the sort of predatory large-scale drug trafficker that policy makers had in mind when formulating the severe penalties in whose cross-hairs he now finds himself," Nash's lawyers, Andrew Frisch and Jeremy Sporn, wrote in a sentencing memorandum.

Prosecutors admitted Nash played a relatively minor role in Silk Road, had entered guilty pleas to drug trafficking conspiracy and money laundering charges and had an impressive history helping people with physical and intellectual disabilities.

An undercover operation by US authorities shut Silk Road down on October 2, 2013.

"The website was designed to make conducting illegal transactions on the Internet as easy and frictionless as shopping online at mainstream e-commerce websites," prosecutors wrote in a sentencing submission.

Nash worked as a senior manager of the Forensic Disability Service in Wacol, Queensland, where he helped intellectually-disabled adults in or facing jail and in his off hours was paid $US1,000 ($A1,293) a week as a Silk Road forum moderator.

He didn't sell drugs on the site, but bought cocaine to feed his own addiction.

Silk Road, which used digital bitcoins as currency, had $US17.3 million in sales of cocaine, $US8.9 million in heroin and $US8.1 million in sales of methamphetamine.

San Francisco-based site creator Ross Ulbricht, known as Dread Pirate Roberts, was convicted in February of seven charges, including conspiring to commit drug trafficking and money laundering, and faces a life sentence.