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Prosecution of Swartz Typical for the "Sick Culture" Pervading the DOJ
tukang writes "According to a report in the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, State prosecutors had planned to let Swartz off with a warning and Swartz would not have faced any criminal proceedings or prison time had it not been for the decision of Carmen Ortiz's office to intervene and take over the case."
Although the CNET article focuses on Aaron Swartz's particular case, the original article calls attention to general abuse of power within the DOJ: "It seems never to have occurred to Ortiz, nor to the career prosecutors in her office in charge of the prosecution, Stephen Heymann and Scott Garland, that there is something wrong with overcharging, and then raising the ante, merely to wring a guilty plea to a dubious statute. Nor does it occur generally to federal prosecutors that there’s something wrong with bringing prosecutions so complex that they are guaranteed to bankrupt all but the wealthiest. These tactics have become so normal within the Department of Justice that few who operate within the bowels of this increasingly corrupt system can even see why it is corrupt. Even most journalists, who are supposedly there to tell truth to power, no longer see what’s wrong and even play cheerleader."
Journalists of Fox News...
You're a funny one.
We have such a double standard in this country. We scream when a person who is charged with a crime, makes a choice and takes their life because they where charged with a crime, that we are to tough. The next day we scream when another person charged with the same or a different crime gets off or only gets a light sentence. It is all subjective to the individual. What do you find important, right or wrong. I have no problem with them stacking charges, as long as they can show cause. The court system is already backed up, could you imagine if every charge when to trial. Nothing would ever get done, and most important people would complain (louder then ever before) about being called for jury duty all the time. You can't blame others, for the choice of an individual to take their life. If you do, where does the blame end? It wouldn't...
Lets get off the "he was innocent" kick. Swartz broke into a server closet, installed his own hardware behind MIT's firewall so he could download files he was told he was not authorized. I guess I can come into your home and use your bandwidth to do anything I want. He broke the law. It is as simple as that and he wanted to go to court. He put himself in the way of justice and then he ran. If he was not prepared to go to jail he shouldn't have knowingly broken the law. Many civil rights activists willingly went to jail to stand up for what they believed. Swartz on the other hand took the easy way out. Painting an entire system due the the actions of on obviously disturbed individual is ludicrous.
Instead of pointing the finger at the prosecutor how about the incompetent defense lawyer who insisted on zero jail time. Couple that with reporting that Swatrz was suicidal then doing nothing else. Perhaps protecting his client might have been in order.
The Swarts case was not an example of how the system is broken because the process was cut short. A six month jail term was reasonable for the crimes committed. That he was threatened with a lot more is irrelevant until he is sentenced to that term. For all we know the judge may have given him a suspended sentence, 50 years or something in between. We will never know because Swartz ended the process prematurely.
No. That would be called a straw man.