> On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, which increased Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines. During plea negotiations with Swartz's attorneys, the prosecutors offered to recommend a sentence of six months in a low-security prison, if Swartz would plead guilty to 13 federal crimes. Swartz and his lead attorney rejected that deal, opting instead for a trial in which prosecutors would have been forced to justify their pursuit of Swartz
Let's be clear, this isn't "here's a slap on the wrist and we'll let it slide", this is "we're throwing the book at you on trumped up charges", and require him to plead guilty to 9 felonies to avoid a potential 50 year sentence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
They mean that if you take the maximum possible sentence that someone could get for each individual charge, and then added up all those individual maximums, you get their press release figure.
There are two big problems with that.
1. Various federal crimes are grouped for sentencing. Roughly, if one single act could be charged with N different crimes, and you are convicted for all N the sentence is not sum of the sentences for each, it is max of the sentences for each. An indictment, say, of 5 charges each with a 20 year max but that all fall in the same group would be listed as 100 years in the press release, but would really only be 20.
I find it appalling that the DoJ does not take into account grouping when writing press releases. Unlike point #2 below, grouping doesn't have much of a subjective component that won't be resolved until trial. DoJ has everything needed when they write the press release to figure out what charges group.
2. The maximum listed for each charge is what someone who committed the worst imaginable instance of that crime could get. Someone who had all the various factors that can affect sentence length go against them.
Unless you are doing your crime for a lot of money, as part of something like a drug cartel or the mob, people got physical hurt or there was a good chance they could have, you caused huge economic loses, and you have a serious prior criminal record, you ain't getting anywhere near the max.
First time offender, not for monetary gain, no one physically hurt, not doing it as part of some larger criminal enterprise? Somewhere near the low end, with a decent chance of just a few years parole instead of jail time.
Here are some articles. The first covers federal sentencing in general. The second two cover it in the context of the Swartz case and also look at each charge.
https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
Short ver: DoJ: either make our prosecutorial life easy or we're going to harm you way beyond what is ethical.
Long ver: DoJ: You did A. Lobbyists have composed and purchased laws against A. Those lobbyists are pressuring their legislators to have us deploy high-profile Gov revenge on their behalf.
We want to charge you with B and have you accept that w/o resistance. To that end we are charging you with B,C,D,E,J,K,L,Q,R,S,T,V,Y and some Dr. Seuss letters we came across.
Sidestepping the issue of the severity of his crime, the concept of "plead guilty to X and waive your rights to a fair trial" or go to a trial which is made unfair by trumped up charges (thus increasing the corresponding sentence by orders of magnitude) almost as revenge for exercising your right to a trial doesn't sound like justice to me. Either someone is guilty and the state can prove it (and is willing to expend resources to do so) or he isn't - nobody should be forced to make such a choice.
Frankly I don't think this situation delivers justice to neither the victim nor the defendant. If we assume the defendant is guilty, why should he be allowed to get off with a sentence that's 29 years lower than what it should be? If we assume that the defendant is not guilty, is it fair to force him to pick between a fair trial and potential 30 years of prison or 6 months without trial, given that even someone that's not guilty would most likely take the deal and this perverts the course of justice by essentially jailing people based on mere allegations without a trial?
Those people either don't know what they're talking about or are deliberately seeking to mislead.
>According to Swartz’s defense attorneys, prosecutors claimed that they thought the judge might impose a Guidelines sentence as much as 7 years if Swartz went to trial and was convicted. That’s consistent with a loss valuation in the range of millions of dollars. In contrast, Swartz’s lawyers thought that Swartz might get just probation, which is consistent with a loss calculation at or less than $10,000.
http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aa...
>So, realistically, Swartz was facing anything from probation to a few years in jail if he went to trial — depending largely on how you value the loss he caused — and either a 4 months in jail or 0-6 months in jail if he pled guilty.
That's a pretty extraordinary claim, as he had competent legal counsel (I think?) and they rejected it.
Copyright violations rarely result in prison sentences, but copyright violators are rarely seeking to violate copyright on the same scale and with the same outspoken ideological justification as Swartz.
I disagree. I'd say that Swartz's actions to try and make research freely available online (especially when said research is often funded by taxpayers and not by the copyright holders of the resulting paper) is more noble than for example pirates who publish entertainment material such as movies, music, etc.
> law enforcement did not drive him to suicide
People can keep repeating this, and it will still be false. LEO and Prosecutor action was the proximate cause of his actions.
You can make moral arguments that, say, the prosecutor was Just Doing His Job, and I may even agree with you. But you and everyone else are simply wrong about cause and effect, and attempting to blur that tells me more about your priors and biases than anything about the situation.
I'd say no. Most of such cases, like Swartz, had existing mental conditions that are primarily responsible for their decision to commit suicide. Loss of a job may have been the event that ultimately prompted the act, but the driving factors were mental conditions. Saying that these people were driven to suicide conflates these cases with like this where someone is actively driving someone else to suicide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Conrad_Roy
I think it is "fair" to describe action B as following from action A, when there is good reason to consider them related.
If you revise your observations of reality based on what you fear might happen later, you're not observing reality.
I am part of a support group that is dominated by people who've attempted suicide.
The words trivial and temporary don't describe any part of their journey.
What is common, is how these people were harmed by the self-interested and misguided actions of others.
To me the proximate cause 100% was the legal case against him - it inflamed any underlying issues and they just kept pressing. I could be wrong of course but I don’t think anyone will ever truly know what was happening in his head.
It's fairly clear that Swartz had a history of suicidal ideation, this wasn't of the DoJs making no matter how unfairly they may have treated him.
>To me the proximate cause 100% was the legal case against him - it inflamed any underlying issues and they just kept pressing. I could be wrong of course but I don’t think anyone will ever truly know what was happening in his head.
Obviously the cause was his preexisting mental issues, a healthy individual would not kill themselves in his situation.
Whose fault was Epstein’s suicide?
Robin William’s?
R. Budd Dwyer?
You all know what I'm going to say here.
As for the rest, it's a fine line. There are obviously individual variances in how much it would take to push someone over the edge, I can certainly see how nine felonies would be enough in the case of Aaron's example.
> attempting to blur that tells me more about your priors and biases than anything about the situation
And right on cue, here comes someone who would rather talk about Eminem and Epstein to blur the situation than talk about the actual situation.
http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aa...
>The alternative sentence to consider is what Swartz would have received if he had agreed to plead guilty. According to Swartz’s lawyers, the prosecutors in the case offered two different pleas. First, they would agree to a sentence of four months if Swartz agreed to plead guilty to the felonies. And second, they could agree to a deal in which Swartz agreed to plead guilty, the government would argue for a 6 month sentence, and Swartz could argue for a lesser sentence (presumably including probation). In all likelihood, the judge would have then sentenced Swartz to 4 months under the 1st plea and whatever the judge thought appropriate, up to 6 months, under the second plea.
It either means the deal or the max sentence is wrong.
On the one hand, it's such a "no brainer" to take such a light sentence for what is legally such a "serious crime".
On the other hand, though, it feels ridiculous that Aaron would have been put in jail at all for what he did. I think it's fair to say he wasn't in a good place, but it's maybe a little tone deaf to say the grief of the trial and prosecution had no role in his suicide.
This here is really the insidious nature of what the plea bargain system has evolved into.
How is that not an effort to ruin someone’s life?
This is a memorial thread with a bias to grieving and celebrating Aaron. By making your points, others appear to assume you're criticizing him for taking his life (which is not your intent or how I perceive your stance).
> Swartz’s lead defense attorney, Elliot Peters, said today that both he and Swartz rejected the plea deal offered by the office of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, and instead were pushing for a trial where federal prosecutors would have been forced to publicly justify their pursuit of Swartz.
First result on Google.