3 ms·

> 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

> 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.

dumbo-octopus 3y ago
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.

dumbo-octopus 3y ago

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.