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US Attorney General Defends Handling of Aaron Swartz Case
TrueSatan writes in with the latest in the ongoing Aaron Swartz tragedy. "Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday said the suicide death of internet activist Aaron Swartz was a 'tragedy,' but the hacking case against the 26-year-old was 'a good use of prosecutorial discretion.' The attorney general was testifying at a Justice Department oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary committee and was facing terse questioning from Sen. John Cornyn (D-Texas). ...Holder stated: 'I think that's a good use of prosecutorial discretion to look at the conduct, regardless of what the statutory maximums were and to fashion a sentence that was consistent with what the nature of the conduct was. And I think what those prosecutors did in offering 3, 4, zero to 6 was consistent with that conduct.' Notwithstanding Holder's testimony, Massachusetts federal prosecutors twice indicted Swartz for the alleged hacking, once in 2011 on four felonies and again last year on 13 felonies. The case included hacking charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that was passed in 1984 to enhance the government's ability to prosecute hackers who accessed computers to steal information or to disrupt or destroy computer functionality."
Huge asshole defends being a huge asshole. News at 11.
What he did was really illegal.
SHOULD it be super illegal? No. Of course not.
This is not the issue.
The problem is that plea-bargaining mechanism (an abomination in itself) leads to situation where to get 6 months (!) he was threatened with something like 30 or 50 years (yes, yes, federal guidelines, blah blah, but the judge would have discretion and it could lead to a lot more than 6 months)
Prosecutors should be barred from piling on an unreasonable number of charges just to scare the defendant into plea bargain.
Except we aren't talking about selling a car. We are talking about putting people in prison and labeling them as a felon.
The 'crime' here was violatoin of terms of service. It was the equivalent of having out too many library books at the same time. It is the *same* Federal crime as creating a Facebook or Google+ profile under an assumed name.
Prosecuters refused any plea bargain that did not involve jail time because Aaron was politically emberassing to some.
You list the exact motive why such bargains shouldn't be allowed. As long as they are they will be used exactly like this, which is a derailment of the legal system's purposes. Plea bargains are an abomination of US justice system whose only purpose is to blackmail people into forfeiting their constitutional rights.
No, someone committed suicide because society had no place for them. What he was doing may have had value to him, but society as a whole has, through its legal system, has made it so even in cases where there is no financial or physical harm to others, said that what he was doing had no value. Since what he was doing was at the core of who he was (obviously, since it drove him to kill himself when he was deprived of it), it is more accurate to say society had no place for him. Whether that's moral, or ethical, right, or wrong, I leave to you. But that is why he died.
You make it sound as if the legal system represents society's will, which is obviously not the true (and never was). Society had a place for him, but those who rule did not, and despite any illusions you may have of living in a democracy, rest assured those who rule are not the people.
If by "more efficient" you mean putting people in jail despite their being guilty or not, and creating the biggest (by far) incarcerated population in the world, than by all means you are right. You know, the Holy Inquisition didn't convict you until you self-incriminated yourself either...
Oh I am quite sure 97% of the people charged are guilty in US, as only 3% of the accused do not plea guilty. Because you know US is THAT different from everywhere else and the government is right 97% of the time in this even though it is usually wrong about pretty much everything else much more often than it is right.
That certainly is a much more reasonable explanation than thinking that maybe a lot of innocent people simply plea guilty because they cannot take the change of being judged guilty and spending a few decades in prison.
"Show me the part of the constitution where it says 'And the state shall not do anything that might make administration of the judicial process cheaper, faster, and more efficient.'"
In this case, "Constitutional scholar" bedamned. You err in citing the Constitution -- or lack of mention in the Constitution, that is -- for justification.
Our legal process is mostly based on Common Law, which predates the Constitution by a rather large margin. Most of it has very little to do with the Constitution, per se.
Regardless, I have to side with GP. Plea bargaining might have started out as an attempt to find ways to keep criminals off the street when cases are difficult to prove. BUT, it has become not just a way to make trials more efficient. It has become a major instrument of coercion on the part of government. The deal offered Aaron Swartz was coercion, plain and simple. It was not an attempt to enforce justice. Hell, it was not even close to anything like justice. They tried to get him to plead guilty to a felony, for the act of downloading files which he had legal right and authorization to download. His "crime" was not even really a crime; he violated an online service's TOS. If you don't think the charges represent a real, genuine threat to freedom then you aren't thinking very clearly.
The proper role of government is neither to make its own job simple at the expense of citizens, or to be coercive in order to "make an example". Coercion has no rightful place in government, and government has no right to be coercive. No, the government did not kill Aaron Swartz. Yes, it was blackmail. Worse than blackmail, really. He was given the option to plead guilty to a felony, or to face charges for far worse felonies, when he hadn't even really broken the spirit of any laws.
People have funny ideas about how the justice system works.
In that they simply would like to see justice?
Except the transfer of ownership on a vehicle involves a voluntary transaction for both parties.
This is more like "Okay, either you buy this car for $4000 or I'm gonna flip this coin. Heads and the car is $2000. Tails and I shoot you."
How about that fuzzy part about being tried by a jury of your peers? And what about that part about facing your accusers? or a Speedy trial? Any thing else is not constitutional.
Instead we have a process that is designed to abuse the accused and give the prosecutors political points. If the prosecutor cannot convict the accused for what they were charged then maybe the prosecutor should not be wasting the taxpayer's money in the first place especially when the "victims" did not want to press charges. This is a case of prosecution for political gain which seems to be a favorite pass time of prosecutors [of both parties] who want to get political traction.
If Judges are forced to used guidelines prosecutors should as well.
Holder should be fired for this bit of stupidity...
Today, Holder testified before the Senate: "US Attorney General Eric Holder testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill today, and discussed the lack of criminal cases against financial institutions in the aftermath of the financial crisis." -- Forbes magazine online
Contrast this with Aaron Swartz. A soft target. It's unclear how much, if any, of a net cost he imposed with his illegal downloads of journal articles. "Illegal Downloads Of Journal Articles." It even sounds trivial. And they hounded him for it. To death. They presented the credible possibility of decades in jail to him.
But, as always, follow the money. Wall Streets spends a tremendous amount of money on federal politicians so they can keep running their swindles and funnel part of the proceeds back to Washington. Swartz was paying little if anything to the politicians as he was trying to provide information to the public at no personal gain.
To understand what's going on here, you have to understand politicians: "No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind." -- Thomas Sowell
Effectively it's denying people a their right to a trail. At some point the whole thing becomes a variant of Pascal's wager, in that the worst case outcome is so severe it makes sense to plead guilty even if you're innocent.
Violation of TOS is breach of contract at most. A civil matter, not even a crime, and nowhere near a felony. The notion that violating a TOS is also a violation of CFAA would mean that anybody could make their own laws, simply by writing them into the TOS on their website. The very idea is ridiculous.
Holder fired? This is the same Holder who has come out publicly saying you don't have due process, this is the same Holder who advocates for blowing up American citizens with drones on US soil with no due process, this is the same Holder involved with Fast and Furious ... so for him to blithely say it's OK to trample on a little person like Aaron Schwarz, seems perfectly in character for this sociopath of note. But if Holder hasn't been fired by now for all the other crap, one can only assume the average American supports what he says and does, either that or Americans are collectively asleep or something.
My other UID is three digits.