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Still More About The Death Of Aaron Swartz

152 points by hudibras 14y ago

hullo 14y ago
I don't particularly think there's much to be gained by going against the hivemind on all of this, but I also don't "blame" the prosecutors for Aaron's death. Aaron killed himself. Suicide and depression are tricky things, and not one single person currently living knows what the full story is. If that's enough to get me labeled as "usually reasonable" as well, then so be it.
- hudibras 14y ago
  I actually agree with you, but this is exactly the opposite of what the author is saying. Charles Pierce (a long-time Boston politics reporter, not a "tech guy") isn't blaming Ortiz for killing Swartz, he's blaming her and her husband for being disingenuous in their public statements about the prosecution and for the casual way they mention a six-month Federal sentence as if it's nothing. He also attacks the obviously political motivation behind the prosecution: I guarantee you, if Aaron Swartz hadn't killed himself, he'd have been in an Ortiz For Governor campaign commercial one day.
  - eli 14y ago
    I'm not sure I buy that. Aaron Swartz is not exactly Willie Horton. Even if you paint him as a dangerous computer hacker, that doesn't strike me as a particularly convincing political ad.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      Imagine the words: "Ortiz has put DANGEROUS HACKERS behind bars!" spoken in dramatic politic ads speaker voice, with the words printed on the screen over a blurred image of jail bars. That's easily the sort of thing that could be in a political ad. It says not only that she was a good prosecutor, but that she is probably technologically savy as well. I doubt they would bother referring to that particular incident by name (it is often best to be somewhat vague, to keep yourself a hard target to attack). (This said, I also suspect the politics aspect is more about favors and less about advertising).
      - eli 14y ago
        I guess so. There may well be some truth to the charge that the case was prosecuted aggressively because it was likely to earn a lot of press. But I think you're right. It seems very unlikely Aaron Swartz was the lynchpin of any grand political strategy.
        jlgreco 14y ago
        Oh, I agree there. If it causes trouble in the future for her it will be because of how it turned out, not for how it failed to turn out.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      Willie Horton is an inapt comparison for every scenario in which Ortiz would try to capitalize on her record that I can think of. Willie Horton was a spoiler, not a feather.
      - hudibras 14y ago
        Well put. At this point, Swartz will be Willie Horton for any of Ortiz's opponents in the hypothetical Democratic primary.
      - eli 14y ago
        I recognize that, but I think it's wholly beside my point, which is that it would be very hard to make Aaron Swartz and his crimes sound threatening. I don't think MIT computer hackers are what keep voters up at night. It might be true that politics played a role in the case, but it's silly to think this case would have been an important part of anyone's gubernatorial campaign.
        jacquesm 14y ago
        Hacker does sound threatening to plenty of folks, thanks to the media. We're not talking graybeards elegant solutions to intricate problems here, we're talking about guys out trying to steal your credit card and to empty your bank account.
  - sociotech 14y ago
    But that's ridiculous. The only thing that made this case big news was his death. It's worth reading over old HN threads on the criminal case. The consensus was pretty close to my position now, which is that prosecutorial discretion worked pretty well in determining the charges. That doesn't make the outcome any less sad; nor does raging at the wrong people.
    - darkarmani 14y ago
      > prosecutorial discretion worked pretty well in determining the charges. The original charges or the pile of wire fraud charges added at a later time to make for good press? She used her discretion to add piles of charges on him and then claims she didn't want a long prison sentence. At the very least what she said is inconsistent.
  - jivatmanx 14y ago
    I agree it's political, but to get the support of the RIAA/MPAA rather than something to tout directly to the public.
- gizmo 14y ago
  When you say things like "we don't know the full story" or "suicide is tricky", you aren't taking a reasonable middle-of-the-road position you're effectively endorsing the status quo. By refusing to pick a side when there is a disagreement or struggle between groups of unequal strength you still pick a side: you side with the stronger group. When people are bullied, be it in the schoolyard on by the government, the power difference is immense. That means by default the bully will win. It's just that simple. We don't have all the information. In life you never have the information you need to make perfect decisions. But we can ask ourselves if we're OK with the status quo, and if not, try to change it. To reduce the whole affair to simply "Aaron killed himself." is crude and far from reasonable.
  - fusiongyro 14y ago
    "If you're not for us you're against us" is a poor counterargument, no matter how eloquently stated. There must be room for more nuanced positions. If insufficient knowledge is not sufficient cause for having no position, the only possible result is complete polarization.
    - jivatmanx 14y ago
      Perfect information is rarely available for any situation, yet one must interpolate the best that one can. It seems to me that we have more information than most. When more information is available, we then adjust (Bayesian interference).
  - jivatmanx 14y ago
    It's for extremely perceptive comments like this that I read HN. Thanks Gizmo.
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    By refusing to pick a side when there is a disagreement or struggle between groups of unequal strength you still pick a side: you side with the stronger group. "Blame" is an interesting concept though. In almost any complicated scenario, there is plenty of "blame" to be spread around and you can reasonably argue that multiple different entities are to "blame" for $WHATEVER. To use a somewhat tangential example... when Ron Paul talked a lot about "blowback" vis-a-vis US policy in the Middle East a few years ago, people said "Ron Paul is blaming America for 9/11". Well, yes... and no. What Ron was saying, in essence, is that there is culpability in multiple places, which is a more nuanced position than "America is good, terrorists are bad, Team America, Fuck Yeah!" OR "We were responsible for 9/11". So with that in mind... I don't exactly "blame" the prosecutors for Aaron's suicide either. But that doesn't mean I don't think they hold some degree of responsibility, and it doesn't mean I support the status quo, or that I don't want changes made in the law, the sentencing guidelines and the behaviour of prosecutors. IOW, it's not necessarily the case that either "side" bears 100% of the responsibility for what happened.
- timwiseman 14y ago
  I think it is very rarely possible to blame anyone for the suicide of another. Aaron's death was tragic, but it was not the prosecutor's fault. With that said, if this event is something that causes society to carefully evaluate things like outdated computer crime laws and the prosecutorial tactics used in this country than that may be a good thing both for the country as a whole and for his memory.
- subsystem 14y ago
  In any system there's going to be a certain amount of leeway, were you can go beyond what is normally allowed. The problems begin when people become arrogant and abuse the responsibility given to them because it makes it easier for themselves to reach a certain result. These acts themselves are of course awful, bordering on corruption, but we choose to trust people in certain positions to use their judgment and therefore give them the benefit of the doubt. Once in a while something happens, like someone getting hurt or taking their own life. Then it's no longer about trust, but about accountability and therefore the burden of proof has been reversed. The person with the privileges now needs to convince everyone else that the trust put in them wasn't misplaced. That doesn't mean people involved were responsible for what happened, but it does mean they should be held accountable for whatever shortcut they took. In this case we need to ask ourselves: Was the pressure and tactics used by the prosecution in line with the alleged crime committed and did the prosecution show enough judgement in regards to the defendants previous mental health issues or even just as a human being?
- larrys 14y ago
  "If that's enough to get me labeled as "usually reasonable" as well, then so be it." It's amazing the number of people (myself included) that when talking about this issue have to package what they say in a way to prevent getting pilloried (or downvoted) for their opinions.
dasht 14y ago
A focus on the prosecutor helps distract attention from the question of whether and how Swartz was mistreated by being made a (somewhat artificial) "tech celebrity" at a very young age only to become a kind of semi-outcast in some tech circles just a few years later.
- sociotech 14y ago
  Bingo. I've been trying not to say petty things out of respect for recently departed people and his family, with whom I sympathize for this terrible, terrible thing. But the radical loss of perspective here is just jarring, and the case is big enough now that it's hard to refrain from trying to put things into perspective. I am aware of the full history, having been a programmer with significant open-source and other contributions through the 90s and early 2000s. Aaron is being totally misremembered. Of those who knew of him before his death - and he was not a "celebrity" or "famous" or considered "brilliant" or a "genius" by technologists - most knew him as a blogger. He was actually a very good writer, even from a young age. He wrote with clarity and purpose, and he had many interests. His technical output was not major. To pull a random name out of a hat, his contributions were less than someone like Craig McClanahan and far less than someone like Brian Behlendorf. Basically, Aaron got a chance with Y Combinator, which he parlayed into a merger with Reddit's parent company, mostly through personal connections. Aaron didn't get end up getting along with Alexis or Steve, who considered him immature, dramatic, and unreliable. Reddit was shortly rewritten entirely, and web.py was too buggy to make any further contribution to Reddit. Aaron was fired from Reddit's acquirer because he didn't bother doing anything after the payout. He then floated around, wrote a few minor libraries and some more interesting blog posts, and then became a very good activist worthy of deeper respect on that front. He wasn't actually a tech celebrity before his death. He didn't "invent RSS." He didn't singlehandedly "defeat SOPA." His work on RSS 1.0, a version of RSS that was never significant itself, was mostly of interest to the semantic-web people, who have themselves have never made much of an impact, although the work is interesting to some. I didn't know Aaron personally, but I do think his volatile relationships with others and his desire to be famous within this community were a source of extreme anxiety for him, though probably more so in the past than recently. But his professional life was, perhaps understandably, extremely frustrating for reasons that had nothing to do with his criminal case. That's not an attack. Most people don't make major technical contributions. But I wish people would see this case for what it is - a volatile activist who pulled a stunt that spiraled out of control.
cbs 14y ago
I think this article speaks to why the case is getting so much attention. Lets presume for the sake of argument the trial didn't contribute to the suicide in the slightest. But it did cause us to look at the case, and you can't just un-see the fact that maybe you're not entirely comfortable with the way justice is being carried out in your name. We tend to trust in our legal system, one way or another. Even if that way is by ignoring it and assuming everything will sort itself out. Events like Aaron's suicide put it on your radar in a way that makes some of the public sit up and reexamine whether or not the power we have entrusted in others, to carry out our buisness, is being exercised as we would like it to be. Something smells like bullshit about the case, and just because a prosecutor with political ambition can issue a cover-your-ass statement isn't entirely comforting when faced with the convoluted web that extends beyond her to the entire nature of justice in the country. Welcome to being a citizen in a democracy, please stay engaged beyond this single case. edited: speeling
- 1337biz 14y ago
  May I add one point: Please don't understand political engagement as a way of signing and submitting petitions. At least try attending a meeting of one of the big parties, whichever one you can connect with at least on some level, and help those people understand the issue at hand. From my experience most are no idiots but just ignorant and open to a reasonable dialogue.
- aes256 14y ago
  As much as my personal beliefs align with Aaron's and I am saddened by his passing, I think people are being more than a little disingenuous in their references to the charges he was facing. I'd understand the indignation if we were talking about an actual sentence, but these were just charges. The maximum possible sentence for those charges might be dizzying, but realistically, Aaeron was never going to be handed the maximum.
  - justin 14y ago
    Giving the government the theoretical power to exact a tremendous punishment (30 years in jail + $1m fines) is terrible even if the full extent of that punishment is rarely or even never inflicted. Many others have pointed out that it can be used to get defendants to accept a plea bargain to reduce risk even when they don't believe themselves guilty, and increase the effect of systematic disenfranchisement of a class of minorities when used with selective enforcement.
homosaur 14y ago
I appreciate this article because this is someone outside the tech milieu bandbox that basically comes to the exact same conclusions as the tech insiders about prosecutorial blindness and overreach.
hamai 14y ago
It's relieving to read pieces like this. That last paragraph was spot on. The top comments got me laughing at "Those poor old bosses need all the help they can get".
jjtheblunt 14y ago
One sad aspect of this event, that I see rarely mentioned, is that Swartz knowingly taunted the legal system to test its response, which he sadly was inadquately patient in using to his own advantage. Had he really intended to make a lasting point, perhaps he'd have more effectively done so by risking prosecution, refusing to spend any money on legal fees, as he was obviously eloquent himself. The public awareness of a trial's outcome may have been as extreme and intense as that of his unfortunate choice. Importantly, the world wouldn't have lost him so early, and, importantly, he would have been a wonderful voice in explaining the flaws in the process through its completion.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  Thank you for this very insightful comment. Food for thought.
Cl4rity 14y ago
I really have no stance on this (in that I don't side with Aaron or the prosecutors in the case), because I don't have all the facts. Some of you may say that that is a stance, but I just don't see it that way. I am aware, however, that what I'm about to say may be considered controversial given the nature of how this case is being reported--and how it's being responded to. Whenever we have shootings like the one in Newtown, we talk about gun control and mental health care. There is always that talk about mental health care. But when someone commits suicide, regardless of cause, those same mental health advocates are nowhere to be found. Why? There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who have it worse than Aaron Swartz did, but they don't go killing themselves. Some people lose their spouses and children in house fires, along with all of their belongings. They spiral into depression, lose their jobs, go back to living with friends or family, see nothing but bleak prospects and they ultimately pull out of it. Others lose their fortunes and things they've spent their lives working for, a few of them do commit suicide, like the ones after the 2008 financial collapse, but some don't. There are people who commit crimes and know they face stiff prison sentences, like life sentences or death penalties, but they don't kill themselves. I could go on and on about how much worse it is for people in third-world countries, for those who don't know where their food and clean water are going to come from day in and day out. I could go on about the people who are brutally bullied, day in and day out. Many of these people, some in arguably worse condition than Aaron Swartz was in prior to his death, don't kill themselves. So when we're faced with a case like Swartz's, why are we so quick to find someone to blame? Yes, prosecutors were overreaching and giving him hell, but they didn't kill him. He killed himself. Hell, there are people who are currently serving long or life sentences in prison who are innocent of the crimes brought against them, but they're fighting and hoping from within their cells. Many of them are not committing suicide. All I'm trying to say is it takes a lot more than a prison sentence, 6 months or 50 years, to get most people to kill themselves. And yet hardly anyone is talking about mental health care.
- larrys 14y ago
  Excellent points. "So when we're faced with a case like Swartz's, why are we so quick to find someone to blame?" Let me answer that for you by quoting Rahm Emanuel: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
gonzo 14y ago
So what happens next time one of Ortiz's targets decides to die, rather than face trial?

152 points by hudibras 14y ago

hullo 14y ago

I don't particularly think there's much to be gained by going against the hivemind on all of this, but I also don't "blame" the prosecutors for Aaron's death. Aaron killed himself. Suicide and depression are tricky things, and not one single person currently living knows what the full story is. If that's enough to get me labeled as "usually reasonable" as well, then so be it.

hudibras 14y ago
I actually agree with you, but this is exactly the opposite of what the author is saying. Charles Pierce (a long-time Boston politics reporter, not a "tech guy") isn't blaming Ortiz for killing Swartz, he's blaming her and her husband for being disingenuous in their public statements about the prosecution and for the casual way they mention a six-month Federal sentence as if it's nothing. He also attacks the obviously political motivation behind the prosecution: I guarantee you, if Aaron Swartz hadn't killed himself, he'd have been in an Ortiz For Governor campaign commercial one day.
- eli 14y ago
  I'm not sure I buy that. Aaron Swartz is not exactly Willie Horton. Even if you paint him as a dangerous computer hacker, that doesn't strike me as a particularly convincing political ad.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Imagine the words: "Ortiz has put DANGEROUS HACKERS behind bars!" spoken in dramatic politic ads speaker voice, with the words printed on the screen over a blurred image of jail bars. That's easily the sort of thing that could be in a political ad. It says not only that she was a good prosecutor, but that she is probably technologically savy as well. I doubt they would bother referring to that particular incident by name (it is often best to be somewhat vague, to keep yourself a hard target to attack). (This said, I also suspect the politics aspect is more about favors and less about advertising).
    - eli 14y ago
      I guess so. There may well be some truth to the charge that the case was prosecuted aggressively because it was likely to earn a lot of press. But I think you're right. It seems very unlikely Aaron Swartz was the lynchpin of any grand political strategy.
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        Oh, I agree there. If it causes trouble in the future for her it will be because of how it turned out, not for how it failed to turn out.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    Willie Horton is an inapt comparison for every scenario in which Ortiz would try to capitalize on her record that I can think of. Willie Horton was a spoiler, not a feather.
    - hudibras 14y ago
      Well put. At this point, Swartz will be Willie Horton for any of Ortiz's opponents in the hypothetical Democratic primary.
    - eli 14y ago
      I recognize that, but I think it's wholly beside my point, which is that it would be very hard to make Aaron Swartz and his crimes sound threatening. I don't think MIT computer hackers are what keep voters up at night. It might be true that politics played a role in the case, but it's silly to think this case would have been an important part of anyone's gubernatorial campaign.
      - jacquesm 14y ago
        Hacker does sound threatening to plenty of folks, thanks to the media. We're not talking graybeards elegant solutions to intricate problems here, we're talking about guys out trying to steal your credit card and to empty your bank account.
- sociotech 14y ago
  But that's ridiculous. The only thing that made this case big news was his death. It's worth reading over old HN threads on the criminal case. The consensus was pretty close to my position now, which is that prosecutorial discretion worked pretty well in determining the charges. That doesn't make the outcome any less sad; nor does raging at the wrong people.
  - darkarmani 14y ago
    > prosecutorial discretion worked pretty well in determining the charges. The original charges or the pile of wire fraud charges added at a later time to make for good press? She used her discretion to add piles of charges on him and then claims she didn't want a long prison sentence. At the very least what she said is inconsistent.
- jivatmanx 14y ago
  I agree it's political, but to get the support of the RIAA/MPAA rather than something to tout directly to the public.
gizmo 14y ago
When you say things like "we don't know the full story" or "suicide is tricky", you aren't taking a reasonable middle-of-the-road position you're effectively endorsing the status quo. By refusing to pick a side when there is a disagreement or struggle between groups of unequal strength you still pick a side: you side with the stronger group. When people are bullied, be it in the schoolyard on by the government, the power difference is immense. That means by default the bully will win. It's just that simple. We don't have all the information. In life you never have the information you need to make perfect decisions. But we can ask ourselves if we're OK with the status quo, and if not, try to change it. To reduce the whole affair to simply "Aaron killed himself." is crude and far from reasonable.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  "If you're not for us you're against us" is a poor counterargument, no matter how eloquently stated. There must be room for more nuanced positions. If insufficient knowledge is not sufficient cause for having no position, the only possible result is complete polarization.
  - jivatmanx 14y ago
    Perfect information is rarely available for any situation, yet one must interpolate the best that one can. It seems to me that we have more information than most. When more information is available, we then adjust (Bayesian interference).
- jivatmanx 14y ago
  It's for extremely perceptive comments like this that I read HN. Thanks Gizmo.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  By refusing to pick a side when there is a disagreement or struggle between groups of unequal strength you still pick a side: you side with the stronger group. "Blame" is an interesting concept though. In almost any complicated scenario, there is plenty of "blame" to be spread around and you can reasonably argue that multiple different entities are to "blame" for $WHATEVER. To use a somewhat tangential example... when Ron Paul talked a lot about "blowback" vis-a-vis US policy in the Middle East a few years ago, people said "Ron Paul is blaming America for 9/11". Well, yes... and no. What Ron was saying, in essence, is that there is culpability in multiple places, which is a more nuanced position than "America is good, terrorists are bad, Team America, Fuck Yeah!" OR "We were responsible for 9/11". So with that in mind... I don't exactly "blame" the prosecutors for Aaron's suicide either. But that doesn't mean I don't think they hold some degree of responsibility, and it doesn't mean I support the status quo, or that I don't want changes made in the law, the sentencing guidelines and the behaviour of prosecutors. IOW, it's not necessarily the case that either "side" bears 100% of the responsibility for what happened.
timwiseman 14y ago
I think it is very rarely possible to blame anyone for the suicide of another. Aaron's death was tragic, but it was not the prosecutor's fault. With that said, if this event is something that causes society to carefully evaluate things like outdated computer crime laws and the prosecutorial tactics used in this country than that may be a good thing both for the country as a whole and for his memory.
subsystem 14y ago
In any system there's going to be a certain amount of leeway, were you can go beyond what is normally allowed. The problems begin when people become arrogant and abuse the responsibility given to them because it makes it easier for themselves to reach a certain result. These acts themselves are of course awful, bordering on corruption, but we choose to trust people in certain positions to use their judgment and therefore give them the benefit of the doubt. Once in a while something happens, like someone getting hurt or taking their own life. Then it's no longer about trust, but about accountability and therefore the burden of proof has been reversed. The person with the privileges now needs to convince everyone else that the trust put in them wasn't misplaced. That doesn't mean people involved were responsible for what happened, but it does mean they should be held accountable for whatever shortcut they took. In this case we need to ask ourselves: Was the pressure and tactics used by the prosecution in line with the alleged crime committed and did the prosecution show enough judgement in regards to the defendants previous mental health issues or even just as a human being?
larrys 14y ago
"If that's enough to get me labeled as "usually reasonable" as well, then so be it." It's amazing the number of people (myself included) that when talking about this issue have to package what they say in a way to prevent getting pilloried (or downvoted) for their opinions.

dasht 14y ago

A focus on the prosecutor helps distract attention from the question of whether and how Swartz was mistreated by being made a (somewhat artificial) "tech celebrity" at a very young age only to become a kind of semi-outcast in some tech circles just a few years later.

sociotech 14y ago
Bingo. I've been trying not to say petty things out of respect for recently departed people and his family, with whom I sympathize for this terrible, terrible thing. But the radical loss of perspective here is just jarring, and the case is big enough now that it's hard to refrain from trying to put things into perspective. I am aware of the full history, having been a programmer with significant open-source and other contributions through the 90s and early 2000s. Aaron is being totally misremembered. Of those who knew of him before his death - and he was not a "celebrity" or "famous" or considered "brilliant" or a "genius" by technologists - most knew him as a blogger. He was actually a very good writer, even from a young age. He wrote with clarity and purpose, and he had many interests. His technical output was not major. To pull a random name out of a hat, his contributions were less than someone like Craig McClanahan and far less than someone like Brian Behlendorf. Basically, Aaron got a chance with Y Combinator, which he parlayed into a merger with Reddit's parent company, mostly through personal connections. Aaron didn't get end up getting along with Alexis or Steve, who considered him immature, dramatic, and unreliable. Reddit was shortly rewritten entirely, and web.py was too buggy to make any further contribution to Reddit. Aaron was fired from Reddit's acquirer because he didn't bother doing anything after the payout. He then floated around, wrote a few minor libraries and some more interesting blog posts, and then became a very good activist worthy of deeper respect on that front. He wasn't actually a tech celebrity before his death. He didn't "invent RSS." He didn't singlehandedly "defeat SOPA." His work on RSS 1.0, a version of RSS that was never significant itself, was mostly of interest to the semantic-web people, who have themselves have never made much of an impact, although the work is interesting to some. I didn't know Aaron personally, but I do think his volatile relationships with others and his desire to be famous within this community were a source of extreme anxiety for him, though probably more so in the past than recently. But his professional life was, perhaps understandably, extremely frustrating for reasons that had nothing to do with his criminal case. That's not an attack. Most people don't make major technical contributions. But I wish people would see this case for what it is - a volatile activist who pulled a stunt that spiraled out of control.

cbs 14y ago

I think this article speaks to why the case is getting so much attention. Lets presume for the sake of argument the trial didn't contribute to the suicide in the slightest. But it did cause us to look at the case, and you can't just un-see the fact that maybe you're not entirely comfortable with the way justice is being carried out in your name. We tend to trust in our legal system, one way or another. Even if that way is by ignoring it and assuming everything will sort itself out. Events like Aaron's suicide put it on your radar in a way that makes some of the public sit up and reexamine whether or not the power we have entrusted in others, to carry out our buisness, is being exercised as we would like it to be. Something smells like bullshit about the case, and just because a prosecutor with political ambition can issue a cover-your-ass statement isn't entirely comforting when faced with the convoluted web that extends beyond her to the entire nature of justice in the country. Welcome to being a citizen in a democracy, please stay engaged beyond this single case. edited: speeling

1337biz 14y ago
May I add one point: Please don't understand political engagement as a way of signing and submitting petitions. At least try attending a meeting of one of the big parties, whichever one you can connect with at least on some level, and help those people understand the issue at hand. From my experience most are no idiots but just ignorant and open to a reasonable dialogue.
aes256 14y ago
As much as my personal beliefs align with Aaron's and I am saddened by his passing, I think people are being more than a little disingenuous in their references to the charges he was facing. I'd understand the indignation if we were talking about an actual sentence, but these were just charges. The maximum possible sentence for those charges might be dizzying, but realistically, Aaeron was never going to be handed the maximum.
- justin 14y ago
  Giving the government the theoretical power to exact a tremendous punishment (30 years in jail + $1m fines) is terrible even if the full extent of that punishment is rarely or even never inflicted. Many others have pointed out that it can be used to get defendants to accept a plea bargain to reduce risk even when they don't believe themselves guilty, and increase the effect of systematic disenfranchisement of a class of minorities when used with selective enforcement.

homosaur 14y ago

I appreciate this article because this is someone outside the tech milieu bandbox that basically comes to the exact same conclusions as the tech insiders about prosecutorial blindness and overreach.

hamai 14y ago

It's relieving to read pieces like this. That last paragraph was spot on. The top comments got me laughing at "Those poor old bosses need all the help they can get".

jjtheblunt 14y ago

One sad aspect of this event, that I see rarely mentioned, is that Swartz knowingly taunted the legal system to test its response, which he sadly was inadquately patient in using to his own advantage. Had he really intended to make a lasting point, perhaps he'd have more effectively done so by risking prosecution, refusing to spend any money on legal fees, as he was obviously eloquent himself. The public awareness of a trial's outcome may have been as extreme and intense as that of his unfortunate choice. Importantly, the world wouldn't have lost him so early, and, importantly, he would have been a wonderful voice in explaining the flaws in the process through its completion.

jacquesm 14y ago
Thank you for this very insightful comment. Food for thought.

Cl4rity 14y ago

I really have no stance on this (in that I don't side with Aaron or the prosecutors in the case), because I don't have all the facts. Some of you may say that that is a stance, but I just don't see it that way. I am aware, however, that what I'm about to say may be considered controversial given the nature of how this case is being reported--and how it's being responded to. Whenever we have shootings like the one in Newtown, we talk about gun control and mental health care. There is always that talk about mental health care. But when someone commits suicide, regardless of cause, those same mental health advocates are nowhere to be found. Why? There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who have it worse than Aaron Swartz did, but they don't go killing themselves. Some people lose their spouses and children in house fires, along with all of their belongings. They spiral into depression, lose their jobs, go back to living with friends or family, see nothing but bleak prospects and they ultimately pull out of it. Others lose their fortunes and things they've spent their lives working for, a few of them do commit suicide, like the ones after the 2008 financial collapse, but some don't. There are people who commit crimes and know they face stiff prison sentences, like life sentences or death penalties, but they don't kill themselves. I could go on and on about how much worse it is for people in third-world countries, for those who don't know where their food and clean water are going to come from day in and day out. I could go on about the people who are brutally bullied, day in and day out. Many of these people, some in arguably worse condition than Aaron Swartz was in prior to his death, don't kill themselves. So when we're faced with a case like Swartz's, why are we so quick to find someone to blame? Yes, prosecutors were overreaching and giving him hell, but they didn't kill him. He killed himself. Hell, there are people who are currently serving long or life sentences in prison who are innocent of the crimes brought against them, but they're fighting and hoping from within their cells. Many of them are not committing suicide. All I'm trying to say is it takes a lot more than a prison sentence, 6 months or 50 years, to get most people to kill themselves. And yet hardly anyone is talking about mental health care.

larrys 14y ago
Excellent points. "So when we're faced with a case like Swartz's, why are we so quick to find someone to blame?" Let me answer that for you by quoting Rahm Emanuel: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

gonzo 14y ago

So what happens next time one of Ortiz's targets decides to die, rather than face trial?