I seriously doubt that any of this is unique to a few prosecutors. At the end of the day, their incentives are not for the social good. Individually, they want a flawless record as a victor, costs to their victims be damned.
She was exceptionally pissed to have to agree to stay the charges.
The tactics described in the petition are ingrained in the US justice system. Getting rid of a single prosecutor isn't going to change a damn thing because the injustices are systemic, not the product of a vindictive individual.
Like Aaron said, shouting at the gears isn't going to fix the machine.
But excising the broken, unfit, insidiously malicious gear from the machine will make said machine one gear short of harming the innocent-until-proven-guilty.
Ortiz comes across to me as a better than average human being who did something evil because she seems to have been morally confused about something. I don't think Ortiz is, say, as bad as Kissinger.
Maybe the evil justifies the revenge of removing Ortiz. But this petition striking me as an exercise in nastiness. Wouldn't an official, public reprimand be better?
If engineers started getting sacked for breaking the build, you can be damned sure people would get very scrupulous about only committing working code, whether they're fresh out of school or greybeards.
No, it's not a perfect analogy, but I don't think it needs to be.
Just like this is, actually.
No, so not like this, actually.
How many software engineers or their professional peers have been nudged, pushed or shoved into committing suicide because of a broken build? No, really?
When a person in position of authority is maliciously responsible for driving people to the brink of suicide and then some, they need to be held to a higher standard because of the very position they hold.
This episode is not an excuse for a witch-hunt of those in power, but the people who precipitated this episode need to be excised from their position precisely because of the irresponsible witch-hunt they carried out.
It wasn't my shitty analogy to begin with. You're missing the point: getting one prosecutor fired won't change anything, because everyone above and below that prosecutor will continue operating the exact same way.
Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. But de-throning that one prosecutor will, in her own words, serve as a message [0] to others of her kind that reckless, power-drunk actions have real-world repercussions.
[0] http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/December/EremianVer...
No, it won't. People respond to risks and rewards, and we've shown amply over the years that the severity of punishment has little deterrent effect on future offenses if the odds of getting caught aren't high enough.
In other words, by throwing one prosecutor to the wolves, we have no inspired any behavioral change in other prosecutors, because we've shown that once every few decades we will punish one person - and that's stacked against the systemic pressures they face to prosecute as many people as vigorously as possible, every day.
This is the same reason why the death sentence, as severe as it is, has basically no effect on crime rates, because it's not handed out with enough regularity to be a deterrent (whether or not we should have the death sentence is another story altogether).
To achieve the "message sending" you want, we will have to regularly investigate many prosecutors, such that the odds of escaping their reckless prosecutorial actions are low. This is what most other people call "changing the system" ;)
Outlier one-offs is just compounding tragedy upon tragedy.
Pour encourager les autres.
My guess is she is just as vituperative and mean to people who work in in her office. She has done far more harm to this country in her mistreatment of Aaron Swartz than she can ever atone for.
Well, maybe. It's also entirely possible that she was just doing her job, and didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing.
> didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing
These are quite entirely contradictory. How can you charge someone for a so-called crime you do not even understand?
She had the resources to hire the types of experts who are what I call "executive whisperers." She doesn't need to know what a perl script is to understand what happened at JSTOR.
On top of it, when the "victim" JSTOR is saying "what the hell, why are you prosecuting this guy?" Then its pretty obvious we're looking at political motivations here. Sorry, but you have way too much faith in people if you think what just happened was one big 'honest mistake.'
As a tax payer I don't want a prosecutor who doesn't know who to go after or how far to go. From reading the thread(s) here and loosely following the case in the news I am not convinced that the money spent to prosecute this case was the best possible use of my tax dollars.
Much of law is a very technologically backwards field. Up until recently, some law schools (and not backwater ones, but major top-tier ones) only accepted hard-copy, type-written (as in, on a physical typewriter) applications. Harvard's student library had several typewriters specifically for this purpose.
Someone in a position of power is not strong unless they know when to apply the full amount of power entrusted to them and when to practice restraint; when and how to apply less so that the level of punishment is commiserate with the crime being prosecuted. It is bad for our society to give give someone a pass when they over prosecute a crime in both the short term and the long term.
Yes it's vitally important that there be a completely different and much weaker standard of justice applied to wealthy software developers then those other people.
Messaging that violating proportionality in such crimes is electorally unacceptable is necessary. Villainising a messenger of the law is not.
I do not doubt that Mme Ortiz believes, or at least believed, that what she did is right. Her sense of morality was reinforced by her institutional context and is not unique for a prosecutor. She simply failed to recognise when she stepped outside the bounds where her values are recognised - this is not all that dissimilar from Aaron Swartz. As she should have done in his case, if we intend to use her to send a message, there is no need to do so with such zeal.
I am highly conflicted about signing this petition. The call for bloodletting should never ring so clearly.
However, even if that came to pass, she would still be a top flight lawyer with a broad set of connections; at worst she would move on to another position.
I sure hope you can see the proportional difference between the two acts!
No doubt she intended for her campaign for governor to describe her as a "staunch defender of intellectual property rights" who, as prosecutor, put a "dangerous hacker behind bars" for "breaking into MIT and stealing millions of dollars of federally funded research."
The Obama administration has thrown better people than her out the airlock because they became political liabilities. We need to add a new rule to the political rulebook that she's playing by. Ending her career is necessary to send a lesson to every other prosecutor who sees a guy like Aaron the way a housecat sees a cornered rat.