But Aaron was still months from being tried or (if found guilty) sentenced. Even being sentenced doesn't mean serving the sentence is a certainty, after potential appeals, suspensions, pardons.
We can see from Aaron's writings (including those long after the prosecution began) that he was endeavoring to "think better", to improve himself, and to "invent new options" rather than just accepting the tradeoffs presented to him.
The choice to exit the situation, by ending life itself, isn't quite consistent with those other expressed perceptions and preferences. (Perhaps those other expressions were themselves simply products of passing moods, or a calculated facade, but we have to assign them about as much credibility, as expressions of Aaron's rational thinking, as his suicide itself.)
Such inconsistency suggests to me that the suicide decision was the result of an irrational and possibly transient mood problem, and an erroneous assessment of likely future legal/incarceration outcomes.
(If some deep, emotional portion of the decisionmaking machinery goes wrong, and 'chooses' death, then subsequent painting-in of all the reasons that death is or might be a reasonable course can be an expression of choice-supportive biases. And we, as outsiders running little simulations of what we might do in similar situations, can suffer the same bias, along the lines of: "A smart guy killed himself, he must have had good reasons. I'll keep thinking until I find them.")
There could of course be other factors that outsiders don't know: other personal or health issues, things that made even the "beats this federal rap" future seem less appealing. But legal persecution and the potential for imprisonment aren't, before trial and given Aaron's other writings, a rational basis or sufficient explanation for early final exit. A recurrent or chronic mood problem is a sufficient explanation.
In other words, instead of laying down/giving up/killing myself, I would like to think I would fight my oppressors and protect my rights to be alive and happy by whatever means necessary.
Someone mentioned victim-blaming, and perhaps this has transformed into a discussion of suicide "victims" in general rather than Swartzs specific case. I mean no disrespect to the memory of Aaron Swartz, but I do feel compelled to say that given the choice of (a) killing yourself or (b) not killing yourself, one of these choices illuminate your personal fortitude and character.
In just about any other case I would agree with your assessment of the choice, though. Most seemingly hopeless situations are really not hopeless.
Perhaps personally I am angry at Aaron for giving up, and this makes me selfish.
I guess I can understand people wanting to find someone to blame, because putting the blame on someone you love, in this case Aaron, is a lot harder. We would rather sympathize with his situation and forgive him for his actions. He was only human after all.
I think it's tricky to appeal to the irrational pessimism of depression without actual evidence that, in a given case, it was irrational. Depression can trick you into incorrectly thinking that a situation has no way out, but that's only relevant if, viewed rationally by someone not suffering from depression, there actually is a way out. In that case, treatment can solve the problem. But treatment can only dispel pseudo-dead-ends where the "depression was speaking", so to speak, which weren't really dead ends; it can't manufacture a way out of actual dead ends, like impending lengthy imprisonment.