You're now the third lawyer I've seen on HN in the past couple days who has come on here and defended Ortiz with an argument that essentially claims that she did nothing wrong, that procedures were followed, that it's the system that's broken and needs fixing. That getting rid of Ortiz won't fix anything ("it's not the relatively simple matter of stopping overzealous prosecution in one agency".)
Those things may all be true, but what you don't seem to understand is that calls for firing Ortiz aren't about fixing the system. That's a bigger fight, a job that will take a long time. They're about punishment. With your narrow legalistic thinking, you seem to be incapable of recognizing that people have means of discovering the truth other than legal procedures. It's almost certain that Ortiz followed the letter of the law and the rules of criminal procedure, but it doesn't matter. She threatened a man, a man many here consider a hero, with 35 years in federal prison for allegedly committing a crime that, at most, prevented MIT from accessing JSTOR for a few days. People have decided, using means not codified in statute, that she has done a terrible thing and must be punished. It doesn't matter that the system is broken.
You lawyers keep saying that punishing Ortiz will have no consequence, because someone else will take her place. Well, people don't care. This is not about deterrence. That's such a laughably small part of it. Here are some other reasons for punishment, courtesy of Nietzsche
> punishment as a way of rendering someone harmless, as a prevention from further harm
People would certainly like to see Ortiz rendered harmless.
> punishment as isolation of some upset to an even balance in order to avert a wider outbreak of the disturbance
Who knows what some of the more unbalanced Anons will do
> punishment as festival, that is, as the violation and humiliation of some enemy one has finally thrown down
Yep
So you see it's not just about deterrence. The sad part, though, is that the one thing punishment will never achieve is to make Ortiz have a guilty conscience. She and people like you will never realize that she is a bad person and should feel bad.