I'll take your word for it but I'm getting a different impression.

Aaron was fairly clearly being made an example out of, and I think that after the expansion of the indictment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528083, a thread in which you commented, and which came before the thread about Aarons friends setting up a defence fund) that would have been pretty obvious even to those not already of that opinion.

Maybe I'm slightly more sensitive to this stuff because of some of the things that happened in the wake of reocities.com but let's just say that if Aaron had charges worth a few decades thrown at him for TOS violations and unauthorized access I should probably be in jail for at least several decades because of that little gig.

I know everybody is shocked at what happened, but I'm far more shocked at Aarons' suicide than at the travesty of justice perpetrated there, there are lots more examples of such things happening on a daily basis.