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Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

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.

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