This is true. In general, the harm done by crime is directed outwards from the perpetrator, not inwards to the perpetrator. In fact, the behaviors that only cause self-harm that we criminalize are relatively few.
Sorry, I don't see how you arrive there from the fact-pattern. He wasn't a criminal because he never had a trial. He killed himself before he even had a hearing on whether the prosecution's evidence was admissible, much less his opportunity to either prove his innocence or argue the acts he undertook shouldn't by rights be a crime at all.
What should the government (executive or judicial) have done differently to balance the needs of the accused vs. the needs of the enforcement and adjudication of the law here?
The government killed him by threatening insane punishment for something that is practically harmless, and relevant to the original point, is done without a second thought now by the bigcorps to feed their AIs
Prosecutors do that all the time. Basically nobody dies of it. I'd humbly propose there were unfortunate mitigating circumstances in Mr Swartz's situation that made it unusual. When a person with AIDS dies, did the AIDS kill them or the pneumonia a regular body would have fought off? When a person with deep mental illness commits suicide, did the circumstances of their life kill them or did they succumb to a deep mental illness?
Perhaps we could craft a way to hold people with mental health issue to the same standards we are all held to while simultaneously being more sensitive to their needs. But in general, his story is an unfortunate tragedy of a sick person who took their own life under a stress that doesn't kill most other people, and we adjust the way we prosecute crime at our own peril. It is, as I said elsewhere, the mother of all Chesterton's Fences. Which is not to say it cannot or should not be improved! Only that it be done with great care.
And to be completely clear: Swartz ripped content via back-dooring a secured network physically, in a closet, and (it is alleged) planned to dump that content in public. We'll never really know since he (or his illness) denied himself his day in court, and that's a tragedy; he may have successfully defended himself, or could have been a living example of persevering anyway like Mitnick instead of a martyr. Companies using their authorized accounts to scrape Google are likely at most guilty of a TOS violation and Google may choose to cut their accounts, but it's very hard to make a case that the Google API saying, over and over again, "Yes you may view that video" constitutes either unauthorized access or exceeding the bounds of access under 9-48.000.
It's hard to comment on whether Swartz violated the CFAA. Since he wasn't tried, we'll never really know. He exited life before justice could happen one way or the other.
