Comment by temphn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by temphn | Hacker News Reader

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As Lessig reported, the plea bargain would have meant pleading guilty to a felony.

http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bull...

  In that world, the question this government needs to 
  answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be 
  labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, 
  that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that 
  was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in 
  April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly 
  to us for the financial help he needed to fund his 
  defense, at least without risking the ire of a district 
  court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad 
  as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, 
  defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but 
  troubled boy to end it.

The prosecutor isn't getting the "benefit of the doubt" because even a cursory look into her history shows that her office and attorneys (like Steve Heymann) have been railroading defendants and pushing spurious cases (google "Ortiz Russ Caswell" or "Ortiz UIGEA"). Carmen M. Ortiz is a bad person who abused her authority and the public trust; with Steve Heymann she pushed for 35 years in federal prison for downloading pdfs even when JSTOR refused to press charges. She cannot be voted out, and she will not listen to reason, so she must be forced to resign in disgrace. This is what prosecutors call "deterrence".

Sign the petition if you don't want Aaron's death to be in vain. He helped start the movement against SOPA for us, it is the least we can do for him.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat...

From what I understand, he committed a felony and would most probably have been labelled a felon either way. I don't see this as a reason to tie up government resources in a trial whose outcome is basically a foregone conclusion. I do not endorse what he did being a felony. But that issue is only marginally relevant to the discussion of the prosecutor's behavior.

He was accused of committing a felony. There's quite a difference.

Then he should have gone to trial.

Even a not-guilty plea would have left him ruined.

How so? What was preventing him from setting up a legal defense fund and accepting contributions?

Hell, what if the judge had thrown out the charges?

Federal criminal charges don't get thrown out. That is very rare. The way the laws are written the feds were going to win. Aaron was trying to do something that should be legal, but the feds were going to get their win. The problem is that what they report to the press and what they actually win on at court can vary widely, so Aaron was going to be ruined and he was going to serve hard time in prison. He shouldn't have killed himself though. He could have had a prosperous life after prison, but his public reputation was destroyed forever.

There's not always so much of a difference between those two things. If he did the things he was accused of doing that is a felony. There's little doubt that he did those things (the downloading and such) so he, in all likelihood, did commit a felony. Let's not focus too much on technicalities and semantics.

Please.

If you are accused of being a child molester, does it mean that we should all consider you guilty? But we should not quibble about such technicalities as you so blithely claim.

"Innocent until proven guilty". That's how the law works (and should)

If I had openly admitted the facts and several reliable parties had corroborated them? Feel free to call me a child molester before my conviction in that case. Don't throw me in jail before proving it, of course, but you needn't qualify every single thing you say with "alleged."

If the facts aren't pretty well established, then of course it is wise to be more judicious.

No one is denying that he did download those documents. What is mostly likely getting you downvoted is your assumption that his acts are felonies and that he would have been found guilty. That is debatable and why it would require a trial. That's why I would suggest not labeling someone a felon when no jury has had a chance to decide.

> your assumption that his acts are felonies and that he would have been found guilty

I understand that that is debatable. I don't view these things as foregone conclusions, only as highly likely outcomes. I'm not aware of any serious observers of the case who disagree, but if they exist it would be helpful to know about them.

Thank the maker the justice system does not work the way you think it does.

No I disagree with your statement entirely. He was trying to download scientific and court documents that were paid for with taxpayer money that are supposed to be FREE to the public. The controlled distribution of these free documents to private companies is a scam by the US government to generate revenues for friends of the government. Yes the government was going to win their case because Aaron had to break the law in order to try and make these documents available. However, what he could have done, was brought action against the government and continued to violate the law in order to bring attention to it. But he was too young and too scared by the weight of the prosecutorial charges. They weren't going to get 30 years agains the poor kid for trying to right a government wrong. They were going to get house arrest and probation. Aaron should have stuck in there but having been falsely acused of a federal crime once in my life I know that the desire to commit suicide is strong.

most probably

Which means "maybe." The government should have to fight for these things, not have them handed a victory through sheer intimidation in the form of a plea bargain.

And the government was fully prepared to fight for them. So . . . the world is as it should be at least according to the parameters of your previous comment.

Also, "most probably" indicates a bias toward true, where maybe is more like 50-50. I did not say maybe, I said most probably. All degrees of likelihood are not the same for me, so please don't replace my words. If you did want to reword what I was saying, "not certainly" or "not definitely" would have been more appropriate.

I'm not rewording, I'm interpreting. "Maybe" covers the whole field of uncertainty, and unless you're going to show your work, vis a vis probability calculations (such as they may be), I'll just stick with that.

Regardless, you don't address my, "intimidation by plea bargain," angle, which speaks to their confidence. If they want to make an example of someone, which I hope we can agree was happening here, why even try to short circuit the process and evade establishing precedent? Even (or especially) for a careerist prosecutor's scoreboard, verdicts are more valuable than deals made.

I addressed it in another comment on this thread. Intimidation by plea bargain could equally be referred to as "No reason to plea bargain if the punishment upon guilty verdict isn't worse."

> make an example of someone

I think you're reading more into the motives of the prosecutor than is actually available from the evidence.

> evade establishing precedent

I don't think they need a case to establish precedent here. The law isn't perfectly clear, so there are gray areas, but my reading of it (as a non-lawyer, and corroborated by lawyerly readings in other threads) is that aaron's case was pretty deep in the "illegal" territory.

Not to be mean about it but it doesn't seem like you know what the word "felon" means. If you are never convicted of a felony, you are not a felon. There are real legal implications beyond your sentence if you are convicted as a felon. I think you should look into the information, possibly on Wikipedia regarding this; it is very relevant and the fact that you think it's not is confusing to me.

> As Lessig reported, the plea bargain would have meant pleading guilty to a felony

Felonies can be expunged. See Randall Schwartz's case, for example.

Oh yeah, I guess a felony is no big deal then. How foolish of Aaron.

I guess I wasn't clear.

They seemed to have a pretty strong case against him, which means ending up with a felony label was pretty much a foregone conclusion if it went to trial.

A felony on your record is indeed a big deal. However, when you have the connections he did, and the reputation he did, a felony is not necessarily a "destroy your future" type big deal. Plenty of tech companies would have still jumped at the chance to hire him, for instance.

He was going to almost certainly end up with the felony tag regardless of whether or not he took the plea. Taking the plea gets him out and lets him get right to building his life back, and working on getting his record expunged.

Going to jail for, say, 10 years, not only delays all that by 10 years, but also makes it much harder. 10 years is a long time in the world of internet fame. Connections and reputations fade.

I was under the impression that the offered plea bargain still included an excessive amount of prison time and pleading guilty on all counts.

With respect, was there any problem with the felony besides his ego? I mean, I know people whose lifelong dream is to be a defense attorney. For those folks, a felony would be a huge problem since it would keep them from gaining admission to the bar.

Did Swartz have a similar issue? Or was he unable to bear the thought of being called names by that paragon of moral legitimacy known as the US government?

Being a felon seriously decreases ones ability to move internationally.

It also hurts employment (not just if you want to be a lawyer...) and even housing prospects. Being a felon very effectively makes you a second class citizen.

Even ignoring all of that, there is the factor of being forced to submit before an unjust power. The "felon" assignment did not represent just a label, but also total submission. Just summing this up as a problem with his "ego" may seem a good way to marginalize this consideration, but it is incredibly transparent.

Ah, thanks for explaining.

Is the "moving internationally" issue a question of travel or permanent residency?

I get how a felony conviction might be a big deal for someone with a GED and no money and no connections. But Swartz had lots of connections and lots of money and was widely respected in professional circles. I really can't see any startup that he wanted to work for rejecting him over his felony conviction. And while some owners might not want to rent to people with violent felony records, I'm having trouble seeing many owners reject an accomplished man with money and recommendation letters from Larry Lessig and Cory Doctrow.

He had no money left, was already bankrupt after defending himself to this point...Besides, this is the wrong question - on what earth should it even be possible for a prosecutor to threaten thirty five years and a felony conviction for this sort of thing? That kind of sentence is for attempted murder, it is a few years short of life in prison. This was wrong, this was not right. Prosecutions like these mean that we lose our humanity.

Congress wrote the law making those acts a crime and imposing sentencing guidelines, not the USDOJ.

The DOJ lobbied for these laws and they routinely lobby to make sentencing more severe. They make the recommendations and congress implements.

>Is the "moving internationally" issue a question of travel or permanent residency?

Both

Look, the bigger problem is spending 10 years in jail and coming back to a society that has called you a con artist in national newspapers after the DOJ gets to talk with the press. He went from being a respected and loved person who have a big career opportunity to being despised. I went through this and you know that it is almost impossible to find a girl to date after getting in this kind of trouble. They Google your name and say "Fraud" no way. He was facing 20 years in jail and feds do get sentences this long (probably would not have in this case) but Aaron was still a kid and doesn't understand that the government is not going to get 20 years on him. 20 years means no family, no children, probably no marriage, no work prospect, a life of shame. It's like having leprosy its awful.

Not really. Only for a crime like murder.

You think being a felon is little more than being called a schoolyard name by the US government? Wow, this is a pretty childish understanding of the world. ... :(

No. Not federal felonies. Only state and under certain circumstances such as a person who is under 18.

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