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."

Comments

Re:So much for democracy then

[Genda]

Its so strange you should be having this conversation now. Apathy has this nation by the throat. It takes time to become this apathetic, spirit broken, cynical, resigned. It takes having your dreams squashed, beliefs shattered and dreams abandoned. And lie after lie after lie. On the way home I heard a public service announcement. To date 6,000,000 children have died from AIDs worldwide, all innocent victims of the epidemic. That is more children than in all the preschools and kindergartens and grade schools and High-schools in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Atlanta and Miami combined. Apathy is lethal. This is a preventable disease. Go to apathyislethal.org.

"All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing" -- Edmund Burke