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Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

He was a pretty argumentative guy, but he was right about so much. He genuinely put his heart into what he believed in. Without him (and Lessig), SOPA easily could have gone the other way.

He didn't deserve what the justice system did to him. Let's be honest. Almost no one does.

Aaron is definitely missed.

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I argued with Aaron a lot. He changed his mind a lot. When he didn't change his mind, it was almost always because I was wrong. In that way, he was the humblest person I have ever met.

"He was a pretty argumentative guy, but he was right about so much."

Not just in person, Aaron argued by email.

When webpy came out I emailed the webpy mailing list asking Aaron a few questions, made a comment on a trivial bug. I got a response and rebuke. Looking back now I see someone constantly underestimated and who probably had to fight to be heard.

Is he missed, absolutely.

>Almost no one does.

That's not even remotely true. Our justice system may be severely fucked in many ways, but it's not completely nonfunctional. But we hear about the problems whenever something goes wrong. The other 99.9 percent of the time when things go smoothly we don't even notice...

There is a huge difference between things going smoothly and things being just. Something like 95% of cases in the US don't even go to trial. They're ended in a plea bargain, which allows the prosecutor to serve as both judge and jury. I do not think that is a sign of a healthy justice system, nor a sign of a justice system that actually pursues justice.

This topic came up with a friend's uncle once, who was an older Sicilian fellow with lots of first hand underworld exposure. He laughed at us as naive and claimed that the main purpose of the US justice system is to prevent vigilanteism.

Generally, however funny or bad this sounds, justice isn't the only objective of a justice system - various kinds of impact on behavior are other reasonable goals (you might believe three strike laws to be just but oppose them because it incentivizes to murder witnesses), as is lowering the cost of the justice system itself (a treatment of every case that is just in isolation might not be a good or even a just deal for society if it costs taxpayers $100M to process each case, even if it's relatively trivial.) (I'm not saying that any specific justice system is good or bad, just that justice shouldn't be its only goal, which I think is an intuitively obvious point for most but a very contentious point for some.)

and private arbitration clause included in most TOS agreements now a days. It doesn't work to provide justice as lawyers on company payroll will favor the company.

That is a very good point. It's indeed a good indicator of how wrong things are.

I don't live in the US, though. I was referring to the judicial system in the western world in general, not the US in particular.

Alternatively, it is the sign of a very healthy justice system. When cases are cut and dry there's no reason to go to trial. A basic example: I know I jaywalked, and I got caught, so I pay the already predetermined fine. Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial and redifing the system with every case?

Some of these folks are taking plea deals to get out on time served. That time they are serving? It's accrued while they are waiting to go to trial. In a hideously over crowded prison system with overworked public defenders, the right to a speedy trial is a thing of the past. Here is a particularly terrible story of this kind: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law

Tragically, the young man from the story committed suicide last year: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief-browder-1993-...

The core principle of the US system of government (and of the British system that precedes it) is that no single person should have absolute power in a criminal trial. Power should be subject to checks and balances, even if those checks and balances are cursory in 95% of cases.

Put another way, the US criminal justice system is the equivalent of a software development process where the vast majority of changes go in without code review.

That's wrong. The defendant and their lawyer are doing a code review.

Most people arrested have to use a public defender.

Public defenders have something like less than five minutes to even review the case file before going in front of the judge.

Then like doing a code review in which the reviewer is underpaid and overworked and may not have access to the full code.

That's not true if prosecutors can lie about strength of case with immunity plus have a ton of leverage. Great explanation by this former prosecutor and judge:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-peop...

> I know I jaywalked, and I got caught, so I pay the already predetermined fine. Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial and redifing the system with every case?

Why punish jaywalking?

Because in a society believing in punitive justice, punishment is morally right.

There's also restorative justice of course but it's more complex and does not bring the same simplistic carnal satisfaction.

That's beside the point here, really.

It certainly shows the proliferation of ridiculous criminal laws.

How many of these "99.9 percent" of "just" cases are simply just persecuting someone for an invented victimless "crime"?

If the questionable legality of walking across an empty street doesn't perfectly illustrate how our minds have been warped by a draconian sense of "justice", I don't know what could.

You stepping in front of my car, going through my windshield, and hurting me, is not victimless.

No, jaywalking just means you walked across the road where it wasn't allowed. The road can be empty, with a low speed limit, and enough distance to safely cross without any car getting to you. That's pretty much when I run across the road. I also find intersections are more unpredictable in less-dense, areas than crossing about 20-30 yds away from it. Crash data supports my point about intersections.

So, safety risk is low and I'm a criminal anyway. How to not be a criminal? Stop traffic and reduce others' productivity using the crossing lights. What a choice... So, I just kneel down, keep looking back and forth, wait for traffic to be nonexistent, and then sprint across the road far from intersection. Has benefit of conveying to cops watching that I was playing it careful while saving everyone else a stop. Tested it in front of a few cops with success. :)

This is exactly the type of knee-jerk reaction that perpetuates the status quo of immoral laws.

In your scenario, there is a civil case for the accident. There can still be a criminal sanction if a pedestrian fails to avoid vehicles (that are obeying traffic laws). This does not change my example, which is an empty street.

You must also be against drunk driving laws, and just about every law.

Waiting until after dangerous behavior causes damages, injury, or even death to to happen, then hiring a lawyer to sue to damages is terrible to way to organize society.

It benefits the privileged on both sides and monetary payouts do not bring back dead people or cure lingering injures.

So let a jury decide guilt or innocence, based on information such as whether there was a moving car within range of the pedestrian's crossing. The point of plea bargains isn't to save the government money. It's to prevent jury trials.

Isn't preventing jury trials done to save money?

Jaywalking is a textbook example of a failure of the criminal justice system. The offence was invented by the auto industry to shift liability from drivers to pedestrians. It became law through lobbying. It is highly pertinent to the Swartz case.

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/...

I don't think so (and it shows that you really didn't understand my argument).

You claimed:

> Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial

With my sentence I wanted to point out that perhaps the problem is perhaps that part of the problem is that there are too many criminal offences - thus the judicial system is much too expense, which leads to the problem that most cases have to be regulated in the dubious way of plea bargaining.

I really don't think we're talking about jaywalking cases here.

(source, 2000: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/dccc.pdf)

I'm not sure what the original commenter meant, but some of us (a minority I'm sure) believe that no person deserves arrest, prosecution and jail in the forms they exist today even if that person is guilty of a crime. Things can go "smoothly" but still result in people being subjected to intimidation, cruelty and violence.

By smoothly I mean not "nice and quiet" even if unjust, I meant lawfully and justly. I'm sad as everyone should when intimidation, cruelty and violence happen under law enforcement and/or the judicial system. Yet I can still recognised that this is not always the case. And that the silent majority of cases happen with no incident, but we don't hear of those. We do hear about the scandals, though.

There are literally thousands of cases that:

.) no one ever hears about

.) are never reported by the media

.) aren't "scandals" (to me they are)

.) aren't just, as I (and probably others) see it

I am talking about petty crimes that shouldn't even end up in court (Aaron is a good example), drug offences, more serious crimes with way too harsh sentences, juvenile offenders tried as adults, mental illness treated as a crime, things like the felony murder rule and so on and so forth.

Mind you, I'm not talking about downright wrong verdicts (of which there are enough) here.

It is very effective at locking up a huge number of people.

> The other 99.9 percent of the time when things go smoothly we don't even notice...

Or just don't care if it really goes smoothly.

I don't think 99.9% is accurate at all, unless you're including really routine things like traffic tickets.

Just to incorporate both of yours' points, I hope we all can agree that the CFAA is rank garbage.

Ironically the biggest supporters of the current iteration of the CFAA are those you'd least expect. The currently-extant grey area allows them to target little guys and threaten them with spectacular, life-destroying threats, while also allowing them to abuse and/or ignore the law because they know that it's very unlikely another big entity will care enough to choose to litigate the issue to a conclusion (a process which often takes the better part of the decade).

If the CFAA were not selectively enforced, the internet landscape would look very different. Search engines like Google never would've been able to exist. Who can quantify what we've lost because a big corporate interest threatened a small innovator with jail time and financial ruin if they didn't stop causing a problem for BigCorp's business, which actually turns out being a pretty good summary of Aaron's case.

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