Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz | Hacker News Reader

Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz

arstechnica.com

64 pointsgeetarista44 comments

Felony charges abate at death. Either side can file a document known as a "Suggestion of Death" to the court. The case is the dismissed by the court. The Government did not "drop the charges," though I don't doubt that they filed a motion trying to do so. I don't believe there was a civil forfeiture but if there were they would move to substitute the Estate for the individual. This is not the case in criminal cases.

Can we please actually push for change within our government over this tragic loss. There seems to be a problem, how many more times are we going to allow the justice department to do this to individuals?

I hate to compare the notion, but to put it into perspective. Every time I hear of a woman getting raped and the man not being prosecuted because the woman just feels like she shouldn't, I get truly upset. This shows the man, that it was acceptable and he can do it again. How many more times are we going to allow the justice department to push around people of much lesser worth in this world?

Every time I hear of a woman getting raped and the man not being prosecuted because the woman just feels like she shouldn't, I get truly upset.

So you think the government should continue to prosecute cases even when the victim of the crime claims that no crime occurred?

It gets complicated sometimes. What if the mafia have repeatedly extorted money from a shop owner, and the government can prove it but the shop owner doesn't want to press charges because he's worried of what the mafia will do to him? That's not an abstract hypothetical, that's how the mafia traditionally operated.

In the case of rape, the traditional defense is to drag the woman's reputation through the mud. Often there is pressure from the woman's place of work, and she really can suffer retaliation if she pursues the case.

There aren't really easy answers in these cases, and I don't mean to imply that there are. But a blanket, "don't prosecute unless the victim wants us to" policy provides a lot of incentives for the criminal to engage in victim intimidation.

Yes, that's exactly my point. The (alleged) victim cannot be allowed to decide, because that opens the door to intimidation. In this case, look at the comments saying 4chan will "take care" of Ortiz. If JSTOR had stayed in the case, you don't think they would have been taken care of too?

As a practical matter, prosecution without victim cooperation is difficult, but it's not a travesty of justice. It's the way the system is supposed to work.

No, but they should stop overstepping their bounds.

I think the point is that the charges were dropped ONLY because he passed away. There is no mention of any fault in how he was prosecuted even after all the recent press and outcry from so many people. They just washed their hands of it and moved on.

This is non news. What else were they going to do?

This is non-news in more ways than one. There was a link to the CBC's website with this same story. In it, they state:

" The notice says the case is being dismissed because of Swartz's death. Such filings are routine when a defendant dies before trial." - http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/01/14/us-reddit...

This isn't news and it is standard procedure. Just because Aaron Swartz's name is tied to it means that there shall be page views so why not sensationalize it?

It's standard, but I was struck that it appears to have been at the top of their to-do list this morning rather than some days from now. I'm guessing they want to head off any reporters talking to personnel, because the second some DoJ lackey in the process gets asked "how do you feel about this?" a can of worms will open right up.

What's the standard amount of time to delay before dropping charges?

You're overthinking it.

It's a pro forma activity that takes all of 30 seconds, and doing it now means they can close the case file sooner rather than later.

It's easy enough to check, has every other case against someone who died been dropped already? Does the DoJ have an API?

It's not easy to check: PACER does not provide that sort of functionality and the courts have not bothered to record death of defendant as a data field. You're welcome to attempt this project by hand; it will probably take you the rest of your natural life.

PACER was designed and implemented in the days when AOL and Compuserve were the Internet. It doesn't have an API.

> This is non news. What else were they going to do?

Dig him up, put his corpse on trial, cut off three of his fingers, re-bury him in a graveyard for foreigners, dig him back up, and dump his body in the Tiber?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod

TIL....

Wrong #1: It happened, they reported it. It's news! Wrong #2: What else were they going to do? Interesting question, but what does it have to do with your statement regarding newsworthiness?

I assume you are trolling hard and fast with your immature post?

Not really, just pointing out the obvious. I was surprised to find it on the front page of HN. Even more surprised to find responses to this comment.

That's 4 days late.

Admittedly, I dont know anything about the law but I have a couple of questions:

1) If convicted, would that have set some precedent that could have affected others for years to come?

2) If the "Suggest of Death" papers were filed, does that mean that the courts cannot convict him of any wrong doing, thus preventing any precedent from being set?

(Though it sounds like one.. this is not a conspiracy theory.. just a legitimate question)

Common law holds an individual responsible for their actions, not their families or associates. As such, there is no-one to punish in the event of death, so there is no point in continuing the trial (and no-one to pay for a defense, hence no fair trial is possible). It's why in some areas suicide is not a crime, but attempted suicide is.

Criminal convictions don't carry any binding authority of precedent. Only if some issue of the case were to be appealed, would the ruling on that issue become precedent on courts subject to that appellate jurisdiction.

Having said that, a successful conviction could encourage other ambitious AUSAs to bring charges in situations with similar facts.

1. Generally speaking, district court criminal cases are non-precedential; i.e., they are not binding on other courts. Sometimes a district court will decide a legal issue that is adopted by a higher court and then becomes precedential. But the more I think about this case, the more it seems to be a political case, and in political cases, the rules are different. In this case, if the Internet reporting is correct, Swartz was only given the option to plead open to the indictment. That is extraordinary. Usually in a non-political case the prosecutor will agree to dismiss most of the counts in exchange for a guilty plea; would recommend a cap or prospective sentence, agree on the amount of the fine, agree not to allocute, etc. Someone wanted Swartz' head on a pike, perhaps for the PACER episode. 2. Yes. Upon the death of the defendant, the case is over. With all respect to Ms. Ortiz, Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Crim. Proc. shouldn't apply in this case. That rule relates to the dismissal of charges before trial. Upon the death of the defendant, the case cannot proceed to trial as there is no longer a case or controversy; there is only one name on the side of the v. and there needs to be a name on each side. This is a simplification, and it may well be a practice in the District of Massachusetts, but it is not the correct procedure (though I may be hypertechnical here). The point is that it wasn't government benevolence that caused them to file, the case was over upon the death of the sole criminal defendant. If there was another party involved, the case can and would proceed, absent a plea.

Your questions are kind of like asking about what could happen if we could go faster than the speed of light. But in this case I don't think there's much to be gained precedent-wise one way or the other, the applicable laws have been on the books (at least in their basic form) for decades.

I'll drop my personal indictment of USG after it's dead too.

Please let us know in a year how the Civil War is going.

It's not a war, as it's not even really an actionable thing. It's a calmly stated judgment that informs interpretation of events.

USG, having become entirely inconsistent with its founding philosophy, the purported highest law of the land, and the People's will, has ceased being a legitimate government by or for the People. It should instead be regarded as an uncontrolled, extremely powerful entity to be avoided at all costs, and hopefully worked around eventually.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017141

Exactly. The left can see that USG is the enemy when it is setting fire to Muslim lands. The right can see that USG is the enemy when it is fining, taxing, regulating volitional behavior internally. Both can see USG as the enemy when it is doing the bidding of Hollywood and the RIAA, attacking the internet via SOPA, or bailing out Wall Street.

The job for hackers now is to develop alternatives to allow people to exit USG's sphere of influence. Whether that means emigration to other countries, or longer term projects like SpaceX and seasteading is a tactical matter. But first we need to realize that this government and its enthusiastic enforcers (including especially many of the lawyers and apologists who have brought dishonor upon themselves in these recent Swartz threads) are the problem and the source of much of the world's woes.

We might live in the US, we might live in one of USG's many colonies around the world, but this government is no longer responsive to the people and it does not deserve our custom. It's time to find alternatives.

Who would you like to rule instead?

This is an anti-productive question. Any answer will have specific downsides from the status quo, polarizing most people into supporting the current system for fear of the unknown.

Personally, after trying out various political decompositions, I don't even have a straightforward answer to this. I still cling to a hope that as technology progresses, it will empower people to be informed and mostly autonomous, easily moving between any still-necessary minimal domains of leadership/authority to keep them responsible to those they serve.

So you want to knock off the government. But you refuse to specify who you want to replace it with. This should arouse suspicion in any person capable of thinking critically.

Which part of 'not really actionable' did you willfully misunderstand? The main things I would like are for people to separate their perspective from that of the government, start seeing themselves as autonomous actors that only follow its practically infinite proscriptions out of pragmatism, and make sure the systems they create are empowering their fellow humans and not augmenting this unaccountable machine.

You keep backsliding from your original stated intent to see the US Government "dead," which is plain enough. The key detail is that you have no vision whatsoever of what would be there instead. Would it be a US-scale Somalia? The Confederacy? You and your buddies running things? In the absence of any specifics it would be rational to assume the very worst. Even the Bolsheviks had specifics.

In the presence of specifics, it would still be rational to assume the very worst. If we overthrew the government for a plausible movement to create a scarcity-free utopia, we still most likely wouldn't end up with such - the kind of people who seize the reins of power don't sit idly by just because we're hopeful. And correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the major reason you're having an allergic reaction to what I'm saying.

But don't worry, democracies usually aren't overthrown. And this one, being ultimately ruled by capital, certainly won't be. But it still is dying, and may even get there in our lifetimes. In the worst case, it will face this long period of decline followed by ultimate economic and thus societal collapse. This process will not be pretty, and we can only hope that whomever fills the resulting power vacuum isn't preaching a message of a scarcity-free utopia, if you know what I mean.

The better outcome is one in which this failing husk of a nation is used to incubate (and is slowly replaced by) more agile and sustainable methods of societal interaction and coordination - based on voluntary interactions on the Internet. For rough examples, we can look at the positive ideas of cryptoanarchism for example implementations of various things (and please note that these technologies evidently play out much differently than was forseen). We don't need a "first amendment" and constant struggles to define a uniform meaning of freedom of expression for 300M people. We can codify the first pass of this concept by running TOR, and let much smaller autonomous groups use the resulting environment as a starting point for refinements appropriate to their community. Likewise with economic policy and many other issues that are currently centrally and unaccountably dictated by Uncle Sam. There's obviously a whole host of things I'm not or am unable to address, and focusing on any particular philosophy/technology is missing the larger picture (which is why I avoid doing so). However, the beauty in this approach is that if you decide you don't like it, but still believe in everyone's right to be generally left alone, you can simply not participate.

Nobody.

USG, having become entirely inconsistent with its founding philosophy, the purported highest law of the land, and the People's will, has ceased being a legitimate government by or for the People.

I suggest you read up on your U.S. history. Despite its problems, the U.S. is the closest to its intended purpose than its ever been in history. Women, minority, and slaves were not citizens when this nation was founded; people did not directly elect their senators for several decades; free speech and freedom of religion was generally regarded as an "ideal," not an absolute right, until the start of the 20th century (or in the case of religion, until nearly WWII).

You've got to be intellectually negligent to believe these two (appointment of senators was part of the intended purpose, by definition) areas of progress represent the entirety of today's civic zeitgeist.

Centralized government dictates most laws to the states. The citizens are completely disarmed with respect to government. The entire population being tracked, surveilled, and permanently recorded. There is a complete lack of due process, including presumed guilty until plea bargained. There is a standing army occupying our conquered yet not-incorporated colonies. And around one third of everyone's income is taken as taxation to support all of the above.

Now you may not consider the above facts important, and your livelihood may even depend on ignoring them. But please stop pretending they do not exist or were even somehow part of the original plan for a country of self determination.

You should consider that instead an attenuation of due process rights, which is what you perceive, we have instead a consistent level of access to justice through the court system, which seems otherwise because technology has given us more insight into the workings of our criminal justice system than we've ever had before.

If you were screwed over by federal prosecutors in 1952 as a result of an anti-Communist prosecution under the Smith act, to which message board would you have appealed?

If you find my observation credible, you are of course in no way prohibited from making the case that our system is unjust or ineffective or capricious. Progress maybe be slow; progress towards greater justice can always use acceleration.

It is possible for you and 'rprasad to be right simultaneously. Nobody has to be "negligent".

I'm quite receptive to the argument that connectedness is causing things to look worse even as they get more open, and this does apply to a few of my stated points. But it's a huge leap of faith to go from there to insisting that this implies progress, or even just non-deterioration, across the board. For example, what kind of process dictates the quantity of federal government employees?

What do you have against a building materials company?

Have you never knocked on a drywall wall? Have a sense of permanence and use plaster. Also, it's a bit odd when you find out their second largest market is food additives.

It's too late to apologize....It's too late

Not to sound crass, or maybe I want to sound crass. But this is just looking like a chess game now.

As if we couldn't see this kind of thing coming with the way the movie industry portrayed hacking in the 80s and 90s. Public consciousness will, I venture to assert, take this kind of non-news as the new news norm. To the dismay of EFF, Creative Commons, Wikileaks, etc.

So, they admit pressure was only there to make him commit suicide?

Now that he's done it, charges can be dropped?

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