Federal prosecutors nearly never take cases to trial, because we provide them plentiful resources and allow them an absurd amount of leeway in threatening peopl

Federal prosecutors nearly never take cases to trial, because we provide them plentiful resources and allow them an absurd amount of leeway in threatening people who appear to be politically useful targets. We give their threats teeth by allowing them to say that the victim is liable for a nearly unlimited sentence should he fail to plead out. There are accounts that it's also common to seize a victim's assets to prevent him from paying a real lawyer to defend him. The judges actually recognize that this is cruel & unusual, and have formed an entire extralegal 'sentencing guideline' system for conventional crimes that is entirely at their discretion, separated from the maximum legal penalties by an order of magnitude; You only find out whether you're to be put on this if you dare to try and prove your innocence. That's no way to run a justice system, particularly as without anyone claiming to have been wronged, and novel circumstances of the 'crime', this was an attempt to legislate / regulate through deterrence via prosecution, or possibly just to punish. Aaron Swartz had already been targeted by the American federal justice system for having the audacity to disrupt the PACER bureaucracy that was being run as a behind-the-scenes moneymaking operation.