I don’t want such ridiculous claims seeing the light of day, because that would seriously compromise legitimate criticism of the government’s case against him.

edit: Although here you will have to use two dots.

Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck

The trouble is, JSTOR is supposed to be a non-profit organization. In my state (Illinois), non-profit organizations, if they wish to remain exempt from property taxes and other taxes, are required to function as charities — that is, they must provide access to their services at reduced cost or for free to people who have low incomes. Because JSTOR charges a flat fee for access to everyone, regardless of income, they do not satisfy the requirements of a tax-exempt non-profit organization in my state because they are not acting in a charitable manner. Unfortunately, the letter of the law (it’s in the Illinois constitution) is not always applied to the more privileged non-profit organizations. While Federal law and other state laws may define the requirements of non-profit organizations differently, it seems to me that all non-profit organizations should adhere to the Illinois standard.

This lack of charitable behavior is true not only JSTOR, but many other organizations in the academic community. The real crime, here, is allowing a non-profit organization (that is almost certainly tax-exempt) sell short articles for ridiculously high prices, thereby limiting access to this knowledge to a rather exclusive circle of wealthy individuals and institutions. To make matter even worse, much of the research that is reported in these journal articles has been funded by the government (state, federal, and local levels) using taxpayer dollars. It appears that Aaron Swartz was attempting to remedy this social injustice.

> .. unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he
> needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire
> of a district court judge …

Anyone know what that’s about?  You’re not supposed to raise money for your own defense?

And I stand firmly behind the idea that it wasn’t legally wrong, either.

toyg’s link above, the article written by Alex Stamos,  is very informative on this matter.

TL; DR: it wasn’t worth 35+ years because it wasn’t even a crime.

“Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.” When the condition gets worse, he wrote, “you feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms.”

His family’s:

Mr. Wolf said he would remember his nephew as a young man who “looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult.”

You can see now why he was depressed, why everything he did was not enough to overshadow the fact that he was not accepted in today’s society. Society today does not accept those who are different, it tries to change them, make them cogs of the grand system. But how can you do that do people who are much greater, who are not average by any means? You force them into a spot reserved for a piece of the puzzle that is average, and which is not large enough to accommodate those who are ‘special’. Aaron was too different, too smart to fit into a system meant for average people, that is why he did not fit in – which in turn was the reason why he was depressed. When society rejects you because you don’t fit in, you are lost, you star doubting and losing faith in yourself, a new belief takes over you that you are crazy and everyone else is sane. You ask yourself, why are you the only one who cannot fit in? Because you’re insane? No, it is because you are indeed the only sane one and everybody else is crazy but too average to realize.

My original response was intended to highlight two things. First, that the fact that they are lawyers does not de facto mean that they never consider ethics. Second, that your perception of the perverse incentives in prosecution was slightly skewed. There are perverse incentives, but they are slightly different, and if we are to reform a system we must understand it.

The third paragraph was included, ironically enough, because I was concerned that with just the first two paragraphs I would be ignoring the very real human tragedy of what happened to Mr. Swartz in my attempts to comment on who becomes a judge and how lawyers thing about ethics.

As others have mentioned, we see the exact opposite of the problem, namely prosecutorial leniency out of proportion to the proven crimes, in re: the money-laundering executives of HSBC and the economy-wrecking executives of the “too big to fail” financial services corporations. First under the torture-justifying Cheney regency and now under Obama, the Department of Justice has slowly but surely been losing the privilege of the name.