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Comment by Maxious | Hacker News Reader

> ALLEGED HACKER CHARGED WITH STEALING OVER FOUR MILLION DOCUMENTS FROM MIT NETWORK July 19, 2011

> AARON SWARTZ, 24, was charged in an indictment with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. If convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million.

http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR....

Maybe us common folk don't understand that when the Department of Justice says 35 years they don't mean 35 years? Do the defendants in these cases understand how many years they are actually being expected to serve?

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It is obvious from this press release from the formulation "faces up to 35 years in prison", that they are simply quoting the maximum penality for the charges.

The prosecutors press release says that they didn't intend to push for maximum penality.

These two statement are perfectly compatible with each other.

I think those two statements are in direct contradiction with each other, and Aaron's lawyer is on the record that they were putting up a > 10:1 ratio for a plea bargain.

So they may not have been seeking the technical maximum but they were definitely beating their drums quoting that maximum where ever they could. Now that that makes them look terrible they're backpedaling on that but there is enough documentation out there to make this look like what it is: full-on damage control.

The Aaron Swartz story is starting to get some serious play in mainstream media and that is something that worries people like Carmen Ortiz more than anything else.

Why would those be contradictory? If the prosecution charges a person with X, and the maximum penality for X is, say, 10 years then it seems perfectly reasonable to say that this person faces up to 10 years in prison.

In court the prosecution may well argue for, say, a 5 year penality under the given circumstances, and ultimately it's up to the judge.

The maximum was so high they didn't even need to go near it for the terrifying threats of the > 10:1 ratio. The talk is that the plea would have been 6 months and that at trial they would have asked for 6 years. 12:1 ratio and they can truthfully say that they weren't asking for the maximum. They can't truthfully say that they wouldn't seek the ridiculous though.

Likewise she focused on the plea bargain offer of side of 6 months but not on the fact that this would have involved admitting guilt to 13 felonies. For someone with honour who really believed themselves not guilty (at least of serious crime) that could be as much of an issue as 6 months low security detention. For lawyers it seems to be a game and the sentence and number of convictions is the score; unfortunately the victims of the law take it more seriously.

Always look at what isn't said not just what is said.

Ha. They're actually not contradictory, if you look at it like a lawyer. They never said to the court or to his lawyers that they'd seek maximum penalties. They said it to the press.

Jesus, that's slimy. I'd say Ortiz is still in denial about the fact that she just lost her chance at the governorship just for playing the game by the normal rules. Corruption sucks when it comes back to bite you.

That's a strange line of argument.

It's obvious that the communication to Aaron was "up to 35 years", he wasn't told "up to 7 years" or "up to 3 years", the communication he received was "up to 35 years in prison".

To argue that the prosecutors didn't intend to push to maximum penalty would be to do so without any basis in fact - it would be mere speculation and of 0 value compared to the recorded facts as they stand.

From the very press release we are commenting on it is clear that this is not mere speculation but what the prosecutors office claims:

"Ultimately, any sentence imposed would have been up to the judge. At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek – maximum penalties under the law."

At best you could say that her statement contradicts the one of Aaron Swartz' lawyer (I don't know, I don't have a reference for his statement), but ignoring the existence of one statement while elevating the other one to the level of truth is dishonest.

>> From the very press release

Which occurred after the unfortunate events and as such constitutes nothing more than back-pedalling at full speed.

When Aaron was suffering through this, what information did he have to make his decisions on?

What her office said, did, failed to say or failed to do before the events is what matters.

After the fact you can try to make it sound however you like. But when your option is to get off the lawn or get a bullet in the head, it sounds entirely different. The release is loaded with statements making it sound like he "deserved it" and some empty "didn't intend to" is worthless.

what about the "to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million" ?

and adding to that, his legal fees would have also cost millions?

everything about their stance said "we are going to destroy you, grind you to bits", with all the "up to this" and "maximum that", it seems like only the very luckiest outcome would have left him with his life and that of his family somewhat in tact.

apart from the legal fees, those would go down the drain regardless, just for buying the chance to fight back.

can someone explain that to me btw, I've heard it a few times, but how can legal fees become so exorbitantly high? In other cases I've heard about numbers like $100k, which is also crazy high, but normal for the US, but for Aaron's case I've heard numbers quoted like "millions in legal fees", how is it possible that those legal fees are suddenly 10x more than the already high numbers I normally hear about? Does the price go up because he's rich? What happens to people that cannot buy justice?

Being forced to sink a million dollars will ruin most people's lives as well. The worst part is, as legal fees, it's not even part of the punishment, officially. As an individual, $100k is a tough pill to swallow, but a debt you can work yourself out of over the years.

The reason why those legal fees are so high is because you're not just hiring a lawyer to defend against a federal suit, the lawyer is just the point man. There is a whole army of support behind that point man working hard to supply him/her with relevant data. A missed detail can cost you the case. The other side in cases like this has a (from the point of view of a single defendant) unlimited budget to make something stick, so just like any other arms race your own resources (money, translated into legal time) will have to be brought up to match this or you will almost certainly lose, even if you are innocent.

There is something extremely wrong here but that is how it works at the moment.

>The reason why those legal fees are so high is

...because the penalties are so high. That's the actual reason. Because when the maximum penalty after a trial is a 30 day misdemeanor, you hire a lawyer and pay them two months of your salary and you make your case, because that's about the point past where spending more money to defend the case is no longer worth it against the possibility of losing.

But when the maximum penalty is a 30 year felony, or even a 10 year felony, you spend every dime you have, because the penalties are that high. And then, because criminals are so consistently charged with enormous penalties like that, which makes them consistently go all out on their defenses, the prosecutors go to Congress and say "we don't have enough resources to fight these people who have these high priced defense attorneys" and they get multimillion dollar budgets for individual cases.

Which brings on the arms race. So now you're not just spending every dime you have, you're spending every dime your parents have, every dime your friends have to prove that you didn't do it, every cent you can borrow from a bank or a loan shark, because the alternative is even worse. And the more defendants spend, the more prosecutors get to outspend them, because "we can't have criminals with more resources than prosecutors."

Scale back the stakes and you scale back the resources needed to fight over them.

Do the defendants in these cases understand how many years they are actually being expected to serve?

No. This is intentional.

+1 for "us common folk"

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