You can disagree with the laws of the land, protest them, even violate them in protest assuming you are willing to pay the consequences.

You can blame the country, its politicians, or its voters for having bad laws. You can't blame those entities for this suicide. That was his choice, and it's unfortunate he will not be around to make his case.

There's a difference between a child who is victimized while growing socially and emotionally and an adult man who allegedly broke the law knowingly.

JSTOR didn't want him pursued like he was, but the justice department was trying to nail him to the wall anyway. They wanted blood, and unfortunately they got it.

They guy actively broke many laws over a long period of time. The government is neither acting without reason nor intimidating someone for lawful behavior.

Bullies don't enforce proscribed consequences based on written law. Bullies don't use courts with impartial judges, juries, and defense advocacy. Comparing this to bullying is insulting to anyone actually bullied.

Comparing this to beating a child? Seriously?

I am arguing a massively disproportionate response occurred. Not that he was innocent, or that he deserved no punishment at all.

> Comparing this to beating a child? Seriously?

Decades of prison and 13 felony charges were in play. A man is dead. All for what? A little trespassing, a fake email, and a bunch of downloads? It is going to take more than your mock shock to convince me the comparison is anything other than generous. I am holding back here.

I don't understand the people saying the DOJ was just doing their jobs either. Are none of the people involved in that process given any sort of power of discretion at all? Any person in this case who was in a position to use some discretion but chose not to should be doing some serious reflection and consideration right now.

I'd also like to add here that while maybe the DOJ had no way to know that Aaron would kill himself, their general pattern of ruining people's lives over minor offenses will, it seems obvious to me, result in some number of suicides. Heat up a pot of water and some percentage of the molecules evaporate. So while we can't hold the DOJ responsible for Aaron's actions, we can certainly hold them accountable for the aggregate misery they've created for so many people. And we should.

This idea is quite an easy cop out, isn't it?

You'll note that he was indicted in June 2011, more than a year and a half ago. Throughout this time he must have been under tremendous stress: not knowing whether he'd be spending the next few decades behind bars, and not even knowing when he would find this information out. Months drag on into years and nothing seems to get any better. Your life is on hold until someone else decides what your life will be looking like.

This sort of stress tends to eat away at your insides. You can't make long-term plans of any kind; meet a nice person at the bar and you're reminded that you can't start anything serious since you might be going away for a long time. A thousand tiny reminders every day that you are already a prisoner and will be for an indefinite period while the lawyers are lawyering. All the defendant has is time to think about what prison would be like, how the course of their life is not in their hands. It is a feeling of abject powerlessness.

It's not unfathomable that a person in this situation might look at suicide as the only way to regain control of their life, even if it means ending it prematurely.

Suicide for a defendant can, therefore, seem almost enticing. A siren who sings of a quick and easy escape from seemingly insurmountable troubles. I do not know why he did it, but I have been where he might have gone to in his mind. It is a dark place, and much evil can be wrought there.

RIP Aaron

Minor nitpick: The "justice" system treats rapists far better. Typical sentencing for rapists is 112 months, of which the typical rapist will serve half, from a system( rape is usually a state-level crime )with conviction rates hovering around 65%. Aaron was facing 3-4 times that, in a system( the federal courts )with a conviction rate over 90%.

I imagine if I were suddenly facing a potential 35 years in prison, I'd be at a pretty high risk of becoming depressed.

Someone described the process in which a depressed person takes his/her life with a person standing in the window of a burning building choosing between burning to death and jumping to death. It can basically be the very same thing.

And to a certain degree, jumping just makes your problems disappear - just like that. But saying that the person jumping is selfish because he/she didn't contemplate the consequences? Do you honestly believe that killing yourself is something that people take lightly? That it didn't occur to them that they would be missed? Think. That point of view makes me sick and expressing it makes you extremely selfish in my eyes.

You're blaming Aaron for taking the supposedly cowardly approach and hurting his friends and family in the process, but what about the people who put him in this position? Are they beyond reproach? What about the people who affected those people? Clearly something fucked up along the way because I don't think Aaron deserved to be in a position where he had to do this because he downloaded bytes from a website.

Edit : Also as Udo points out lets stop this line of argument for a bit. Some members of the community either knew Aaron or were affected by his work, lets not subject them to this argument right now.

I don't think anyone disputes that Aaron was probably not in the best of mental health to be facing this kind of thing in the first place, but even for a paragon of stability, a multi-year witchhunt and prosecution by the feds will push you to the limit. I know of a few people who have been in the eye AUSA doom (and some ongoing, like Harborside Health Center), and especially for an individual defendant vs. a group, it's very hard.