"I was just telling this guy I was going to take away his life, lock him in a cage for decades, and force him to live with violent criminals in a place notorious for violence and rape as punishment for his victimless 'crime' - and then he killed himself."
I'm not going to respond to you any more as I consider your position too reprehensible to continue engaging with. You are defending the murder of an innocent person and the abuse of government power. It's clearly a bad thing for agents of the government to use threats of extreme punishment to coerce people to accept lesser punishment. Rather than come up with some kind of argument to justify your moral degeneracy you simply keep repeating what happened.
A suicide is not a murder, no matter how little you believe in personal accountability and/or free will.
Crimes should be punished, no matter how little you believe in justice and/or the rule of law.
The life-preserving choice he had every chance to make was simple, no matter how little you believe in the righteousness of admission of clear guilt and/or simply saying what you must in order to move on with life.
These things are all true regardless of your beliefs – or my so-called reprehensibility and/or moral degeneracy.
Before you complain that a comment is a tactless description of history that distorts the truth, you should perhaps try learning some of the facts about said history. Such a habit will serve you well, I promise :)
Even the concept of a plea deal is morally atrocious in this and similar cases. The government threatens you with decades in prison in hopes of bullying you into pleading guilty where you are not.
6 months in prison is extremely inappropriate for what he was accused of. Threatening far worse to compel someone to accept a sentence they don't deserve is a crime orders of magnitude worse than anything Swartz was accused of.
Now you're being dishonest. The 6-month sentence was a plea deal he declined. It was a 35-50 year sentence if he fought and lost all charges.
It remained to be seen if he were actually guilty.
> Carmen Ortiz, the federal prosecutor who hounded Aaron Swartz in the months before his Friday suicide, has released a statement arguing that "this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case." She says that she recognized that Swartz's crimes were not serious, and as a result she sought "an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct – a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting."
> That's funny because the press release her office released in 2011 says that Swartz "faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million." And she apparently didn't think even that was enough, because last year her office piled on even more charges, for a theoretical maximum of more than 50 years in jail.
> Some have blithely said Aaron should just have taken a deal. This is callous. There was great practical risk to Aaron from pleading to any felony. Felons have trouble getting jobs, aren't allowed to vote (though that right may be restored) and cannot own firearms (though Aaron wasn't the type for that, anyway). More particularly, the court is not constrained to sentence as the government suggests. Rather, the probation department drafts an advisory sentencing report recommending a sentence based on the guidelines. The judge tends to rely heavily on that "neutral" report in sentencing. If Aaron pleaded to a misdemeanor, his potential sentence would be capped at one year, regardless of his guidelines calculation. However, if he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies. Also, Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe.
The intimidation of the stacked charges led to Swartz's suicide.
The gov. was 100% responsible for his death, which is why I say they killed him, indirectly, but they still caused the anguish that made him feel like suicide was the only way out.
Sadly this strategy is used all too often on citizens, plea deal offered to say "look they pleaded guilty, we were right", otherwise you get the stick, life in jail.
Not if you believe in personal accountability. He made a choice, he faced the consequences; he made a choice again, he faced those consequences. If I kill a man and am given a very long sentence, then kill myself to avoid the wait, it's not the government's fault I died.
Ahh, "personal accountability" for the victims. It's the victim's fault the government threatened them with decades of imprisonment over a minor "crime".
Where is the personal accountability for the prosecutor?
There is a notion of reckless disregard for human life in the law. If you are throwing bricks off an overpass just for fun, you are still guilty of murder if you kill someone - because you have reckless disregard for human life even though you weren't trying to kill anyone.
Likewise, a prosecutor who threatens someone with decades in prison for freely distributing academic material displays a reckless disregard for human life. Even if the prosecutor didn't intend to provoke a suicide the prosecutor was doing something bad with a reckless disregard for human life and it got someone killed. That's murder, in my view.
Perhaps you should ask for accountability from the prosecutor/murderer rather than from her victim.
Yes, she is accountable for her actions of making clear the gravity of the matter and letting him have an easy out of 6 months in low security prison should he make the choice of his own free will to admit his trespassing and copyright infringement were illegal.
And he is accountable for his actions of refusing to do that, and furthermore refusing to participate in the matter whatsoever.
> Now you're being dishonest. The 6-month sentence was a plea deal he declined. It was a 35-50 year sentence if he fought and lost all charges
No, it was not a 35-50 year sentence. That's the theoretical sentence one could get for those same crimes if all the sentence enhancing factors that can apply do apply. Repeat offender, part of organized crime, massive monetary damage, drugs involved, things like that. Swartz didn't have any of those factors.
Here's an article on how DoJ press releases ridiculously exaggerate potential sentences [1].
If the prosecution has been able to prove everything they alleged and the judge decided to make an example of Swartz it might have been up to 7 years, but that is unlikely. Swartz's attorney said that if they had gone to trial and lost he thought it was unlikely that Swartz would get any jail time.
> The 6-month sentence was a plea deal he declined.
Right, so he could have picked the option where he walked free in six months, but instead he picked the option where he's dead.
> Felons have trouble getting jobs
> aren't allowed to vote
> and cannot own firearms
He's not doing any of those now, so I do not see how his would-be restrictions are relevant. The following speculation is just that, and also irrelevant.
> Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe.
Ah yes, the "Sure I secretly entered the networking cabinet of an institution I have no formal relationship with, to install my personal equipment into it without their knowledge (much less consent) in order to exploit their access levels to fulfill personal objectives that would otherwise be impossible to me, then hopped around IP's as the institution I was stealing documents from blocked the IP I was stealing until the entire IP range of the institution whose access I was hijacking was blocked due to my hacking and hence all the researchers doing legitimate work at that institution could not access the resources they paid for, but how could I have known that was unlawful?? I fundamentally cannot accept any blame for my actions." defense. I don't buy it.
> Right, so he could have picked the option where he walked free in six months
You missed this part:
> However, if he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies.
There was no guarantee it would only be a six-month sentence.
I'm actually in the "personal responsibility" camp myself, but the amount of overcharging they did to him was obscene. He wasn't facing the consequences of his actions-- he was about to get fucked by the Statutory Ape.
To put it in perspective...Ghislaine Maxwell got 20 years for being an accomplice to child sex trafficking. This is the same sentence given to lesser spies. Swartz committed trespassing, a bunch of copyright infringement, and caused a DoS? It's not cool, but it's not 2.5x worse than pimping children.
Again, that's all speculation. Sentences of this sort are almost always served concurrently, not back to back. Just because a sympathetic narrative on the matter wants to paint the picture of it being a hopeless situation does not make it so.
If he was willing to admit his trespassing, bunch of copyright infringement, and DoS was wrong he'd in all likelihood walk free within a year. But for whatever reason he was not able to do that, and here we are.
Personally, I'm glad we are in the world where trespassing into a property to hijack their network and cause outages of global services is not considered "minor". Obviously the situation as it played out here is an absolute tragedy, but the matter was indeed serious and was handled with an appropriate level of gravity. All the prosecution was looking for was a "my b, that was wrong" to prove their point - and he refused to give it.
As they say: if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
The fact that he was unwilling to face the consequences of his actions (or even stand trial on the matter) does not make his death the fault of the government, no matter how tragic the situation was.
