Aaron Swartz did not die because he was persecuted. He died because he suffered from extreme mental illness.
It has any of several face-palmingly obvious flaws:
* Extremely aggressive federal prosecution is not known for its mental health benefits;
* It desperately tries to avoid a conversation about how unjust the prosecution was and what their motives were in the case by loading all of the fault for the tragic outcome at Aaron's feet now that he's not around to defend himself;
* It is indistinguishable from arguments that people with severe health problems who become ill with covid-19, and die, didn't die of covid-19 but of their health problems;
* It is ignorant of modern understandings or sensitivities towards mental health;
* It argues from the least nuanced and informed view of his situation possible -- it's a knee-jerk reaction from people with a particular moral framework.
It's such a seriously dull-witted argument, it should be confined to screenshots of Facebook.
I've seen better retorts on Facebook, frankly.
In other news, the victim didn't die from the bullet, he died from cardiovascular collapse following the bullet incident.
If the law, I can't think of a single case citation I could give that would act as precedent for assigning responsibility to the federal prosecutor for Mr. Swartz taking his own life. I'd be interested to see any such citations people have found.
The philosophy of morality, ethics, and determinism is a much wider space where such a thing could be discussed.
That all said - it seems pretty clear that the guilt and fear from legal threats were an extremely strong motivation for suicide. Whether anyone suffers legal consequences for it - it was wrong.
The US legal system is designed to be adversarial. It isn't the prosecutor's job to worry about the defendant's feelings; that's the defense lawyer's job. The prosecutor's job is to seek legal truth and conviction (and, generally, to err on the side of the latter, on the belief that truth is proved out by the defense working to challenge any hypotheses the prosecutor brings to the table that are countered by evidence). Innocent until proven guilty, but it's the prosecutor's job to prove a defendant guilty, not innocent.
This is, obviously, extremely stressful on the defendant.
And this is not the only model of law. Adversarial finding of guilt-or-innocence a popular model in countries descended from European colonies, but other nations have different models. And the adversarial model has known weaknesses... In terms of introducing scientific facts to the table, the adversarial model encourages both sides to bring expert witnesses and the jury to decide who's version of facts is true, which is somewhat farcical. Some countries use an inquisitive system, in which the Court is empowered to do its own investigation and analysis (as opposed to acting as an impartial referee to the best cases the plaintiff and defendant can build). There are pros and cons to this system (and it's actually used in some pieces of the US).
It's heartbreaking what happened to Aaron, and in general, the American system of governance addresses mental illness extremely poorly. I don't have any good suggestions on how to do better, but that doesn't mean the current design is acceptable.
In my company code reviews are an adversarial process - as they are everywhere. The primary developer presents something they think is worthy to merge into the mainline branch - the reviewer inspects this and raises questions and highlights facts in the code that they think need to be address. And, throughout this process the aim isn't to prove the other person is an idiot - it's to arrive at a PR that's better than either of you would have produced on your own (ideally).
We go through this process and ideally avoid being overly critical or a dick about things. I don't reply to some confusing code with "That's dumb!" I'll point out routes to correct the confusion or just highlight my reasoning to feel it's confusing and let the dev decide on their favorite course to resolution.
A trial is certainly going to be more emotionally involved simply by being about the future of someone's life instead of some code that runs a checkout process somewhere - but we can still, as a society, try and minimize how dickish we let people get. In a company someone who is overly combative is going to face problems keeping their job and advancing - you'll generally find financial incentives offered to people that can more reasonably navigate the social aspect of being an employee[1]. Unfortunately in the world of prosecution, while these incentives still exist (people who are dickish overall will be dickish to their coworkers (other lawyers) and likely be held back by that) they tend to be minimized in comparison with performance evaluation based on conviction rates - and that creates a lot of really bad incentives. I think it's a bit of a misstatement to say that both parties in a trial are seeking the truth when one of those parties is being evaluated not on accuracy after the fact - but instead on how many people they manage to line up as guilty.
1. This has some downsides - in particular autism is actually a much bigger impediment in the real world than perhaps it needs to be. I think that's a separate issue though.
An adversarial code review process would look more like attempting to solve a problem by having two separate teams devise a solution, and a neutral third-party chooses exactly one of those solutions to accept and discards the other. Team A, in this system, is not particularly interested in helping Team B succeed (and, indeed, within the rules of the process, has no incentive to improve the odds that Team B's solution is accepted).
This would be a hellishly-inefficient process (though, funny enough, something similar at the scope of project initiatives has been used at a few more Machiavellian corporate institutions). But it might be the sort of thing one could adopt if one thought, for some reason, that you couldn't trust that all development teams to collaborate cleanly (because their goals weren't aligned).
The notion that innocence or guilt (on a per-charge basis) as a binary state is very deeply built into our criminal legal framework. For any given charge, either the prosecution's case wins, or the defense's case wins. The prosecution isn't incentivized at all to help the defense win. And the judge's incentives optimize for neutrality... Because, the thinking goes, if they aren't neutral, their likeliest bias is in favor of the prosecution as a fellow agent of the State, which gives even more power to the already-powerful State authority, since the whole system assumes two things: (a) the defendant is innocent until proven otherwise, and (b) the State is a good-faith actor until proven otherwise. Generally, faith in (b) is almost never shaken without definitive proof (such as direct evidence of prosecutorial misconduct). Whether this means the prosecution is "dickish" as they pursue their goal of a conviction is a bit in the eye of the beholder, but note that nowhere in this process is the prosecutor obligated to assume the defense is a good-faith actor (and, indeed, if defendants were always good-faith actors, trials would be unnecessary and criminals would just confess their transgressions). And it is entirely possible that this system does not work without prosecutors leaning on defendants (in legal ways) under the assumption (on the part of the prosecutor, not the Court) that the defendant is guilty and hiding it.
This isn't the only model possible, but changing it would basically require restructuring the American criminal legal system from the bedrock up. Not impossible, but I wouldn't bet on it in my lifetime. What is heartbreaking in this case is that the pressure caused Mr. Swartz to take his own life, and without a prior diagnosis of likelihood of suicide / prior involuntary commitment, I have a hard time seeing any way for the legal system to account for that risk and still function. :(
... and of course, all this analysis ignores the elphant in the room that the Supreme Court dumped in the graveyard this week: we probably shouldn't have even thought of putting "used a computer in a way other than the way its owner intended its use" under the aegis of criminal law in the first place! That was a terrible use of the CFAA. But until this week, it wasn't understood that it was not a use of the CFAA.
That prosecutor should be in jail for pushing Aaron to the edge.
How did the prosecutor make Swartz believe that?
Edit: to elaborate, the commentator above is implying that Swartz had a way out that the prosecutor somehow prevented Swartz from finding out about.
I would like to know what that way out was, and how the prosecutor prevented Swartz from finding out about it. Swartz had a legal team defending him who I would have expected to inform him of all his options.
It's not clear to me how one assigns blame for suicide in most cases, or what the options are for prosecutors. If a quasi-suicidal person cuts me off on the highway and I give them the middle finger, and they go home and commit suicide because of it - am I culpable? If, generally, a prosecutor thinks that a person is not mentally stable enough to face trial for their crimes without commiting suicide, are they just allowed to get away with what they want? Or should they be involuntarily committed?
They absolutely are. Suicidal episodes are usually kept quite quiet - people you're extremely close to may have attempted suicide without ever telling you about it due to the societal shame and perception of weakness.
As a general rule, it's a good idea to not emotionally abuse people or induce unnecessary mental stress on anyone since you're not going to be aware of how they're doing internally and, honestly, trying to emotionally abuse people, even when they're able to take it, is just being an abusive ass.
I think your example of flipping a bird on the highway is honestly a good thing for more people to keep in mind in their daily lives - if someone is feeling particularly vulnerable then lashing out at them could tip the balance and you don't want that on your conscience - but I think legally speaking it'll always be a matter of judgement on the specifics. In the highway example it's likely that your bird barely nudged a needle that was already on the brink - while, when it comes to the legal system, prosecutors regularly use emotional abuse to expedite confessions and coerce defendants - as a society I think we tend toward a view where once someone is charged with a crime they are segregated into a different class of people who are unworthy of common respect, we need to change that.
First, they ignore that actual sentencing takes into account assorted aggravating and mitigating factors. To get the maximum on a charge you have to have several aggravating factors and few mitigating factors.
Basically, if it is possible that someone could receive 20 years, say, for a given charge--even if to get 20 years they would pretty much have to be that crime's equivalent of Al Capone, then they are going to say 20 years on every press release involving that crime even if it concerns the mildest possible instance of it.
Second, there are often multiple charges that could apply to the same act and would require largely the same elements of proof. Prosecutors can charge you with all of them and let the jury decide which, if any, to convict you of. Many of these are grouped for sentencing, so that if you are convicted of more than one in the same group you only get sentenced for one of them.
Grouping is ignored in the press releases. If you are charged with three things, with a max of 10 years each (and remember, that 10 years is already greatly exaggerated as described earlier), the press release is going to say you are facing up to 30 years.
This really needs to be changed. The DoJ knows what facts they intend to try and prove about your particular instances of the crimes they are charging you with. They are perfectly capable of looking at the aggravating factors for the charge, comparing to what they are trying to prove, and figuring out the real maximum for your case. They are certainly also capable of dealing with grouping. I can't see any good reason they should not do so, and so put realistic maximums in their press releases.
Here's a good article on how press release sentences are misleading [1]. Here's an article that looks at it specifically in the context of Swartz [2].
[1] https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
[2] http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aa...
If you are innocent or believe as is in fact the case here that the governments position is legally incorrect you shouldn't face punishment for arguing that in front of a judge. For innocent people whom are inevitably convicted every day in any justice system this represents a punishment for asserting innocence.
The fact that you think this is normal is just a sign that our entire society is itself abnormal and broken.
I think the question here is: would Aaron Swartz have committed suicide at that particular time if not for the prosecutorial overreach he was mired in? I suspect the answer there is pretty safely: no. Would someone else in his position perhaps not have committed suicide in that situation? Sure. But he did, and it was clearly in no small part due to the circumstances he was in. I'm fine assigning much of the blame to the persecution he suffered under the US government. They wanted to make an example of him, by using a poorly-written, over-broad law that has traditionally been applied selectively depending on the needs of law enforcement. And sometimes when you put people in that position, they can't take it.
If you don't agree, I guess that's fine, but quibbling about semantics here is just in poor taste and not particularly productive.
> If, generally, a prosecutor thinks that a person is not mentally stable enough to face trial for their crimes without commiting suicide, are they just allowed to get away with what they want?
Of course not, and this kind of question makes me feel like you're arguing in poor taste. Prosecutors have a ton of latitude in how they handle cases. Swartz was not some violent criminal who needed to be taught a lesson and be held up as an example to others. He was just a flawed human who believed scientific research (much of it funded by public, taxpayer money) shouldn't be locked up behind a corporation's paywall. The zeal in which this case was prosecuted far exceeded the "crime".
But in general, if a person is a suicide risk during any kind of court proceeding, yes, actions should be taken to ensure that they won't (or aren't able to) commit suicide. If that means being put in a hospital under observation, sure, though that extreme may not have been necessary to save Swartz. We have an obligation as a society to treat everyone with respect and care, even -- especially -- those we've accused of crimes. We're very far off from that ideal, of course.
Aaron was offered a 6 month sentence in a low security facility
The mental fatigue makes a lot of people just admit the crime they committed.
Or just anything, after a certain point.