Except he was offered 6 months in a plea bargain, which he declined because he wanted a trial. Whether 6 months was reasonable punishment for "plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers" is another matter, but "you forfeit your life" or "35 years in prison and a $1 million fine " is massively misleading.
Swartz wasn't the kind of person to accept a plea bargain from an overzealous prosecutor who was indicting him on 13 felony charges with a possible sentence up to 35 years along with a $1 million fine. I assume he wanted a trial because he wanted to continue his fight for open access. And maybe he thought he might lose, but wouldn't lose on all counts, and would make the prosecution look unreasonable in the public eye. Was that decision rational from a self-interest point of view? Maybe not.
And then you might ask, if he wanted a trial, why did he kill himself? Obviously no one knows what was going through his head when he did it. He left no note. But the prospect of being locked in a cell until he was an old man probably had something to do with it.
You can certainly argue it was his own fault for not pleading down, but even if that's your view, that doesn't absolve the prosecutor. Ortiz has a lot of blame in this too, and the fact she still hasn't acknowledged it over a decade later speaks volumes to the kind of person she is.
His criminality is one matter, but the full weight of the Federal Government on him was an entirely separate matter. A federal prosecutor's job is to jail you regardless of whether it is for downloading a file from a server or for trafficking in humans, and they will come at you with the same vigor regardless of the crime. And nothing has changed about that.
Treating a human trafficker and someone who downloaded some files from a server the same is not in the job description of a prosecutor. What an absurd statement. It's very much the job of a prosecutor to make judgements about the severity of the crime and how to respond. And in this case, the prosecutor showed incredibly poor judgement. There wasn't even a particular reason why the case should go federal in the first place. The state prosecutor saw things very differently.
That is complete bullshit as evidenced by the federal criminal sitting president.... The ONLY time I ever see this argument is to try and paint over blatant police and state injustice and tyranny.
"A federal prosecutor's job is to jail you regardless of whether it is for downloading a file from a server or for trafficking in humans, and they will come at you with the same vigor regardless of the crime."
You have to be malicious to put forward this statement in the current environment. Or you are so propagandized you think it's true? Either one is very frightening
I agree there's more nuance here than was initially stated, but I also think there's more nuance than simply "he was offered 6 months". Even if he was offered 6 days, the ways in which someone's life and livelihood changes by having ever been convicted of a crime and gone to prison, is dramatic. This is especially true in white collar work and/or knowledge work.
Schwartz was a research fellow at Harvard. Really think he would've been able to continue?
Wild to see the concept of the plea bargain being defended. It's a blatant retraction of the due process clause from the bill of rights, and here you are defending it.
