How can a suicide of a 26 year old man under prosecution by your office not warrant some sort of change? How can you not reflect and try for a better outcome. To not change suggests that this was an acceptable outcome... which is the point we are trying to make. Prosecution should not be so severe that suicide is a viable alternative.
The first one is that if someone is suicidal and they commit a crime, you can't decide not to prosecute them simply because they may kill themselves. Our community might be certain that his suicide was a result of the prosecution, and there may or may not be evidence of that, but all things being equal, simply being suicidal cannot be a get-out-of-jail-free card.
The second response is that these people are lawyers. They're not going to openly admit to having done wrong even if it's obvious because it will only make their punishment that much swifter. Statements like the above are publicly made until it becomes clear that an act of contrition will reduce the penalty. That isn't obvious to Ortiz or her department right now, so there's no reason to expect them to attempt to publicly admit wrongdoing.
Note that this would be true even if Ortiz actually were wracked with guilt. These people are lawyers.
When a suicidal criminal is caught you do need to prosecute them. That means that you need to keep them alive to be able to prosecute them. Justice is not served when suspects kill themselves. We still don't know whether what he did was a crime or not.
When no person is harmed, and there has been no physical damage, (but with some kind of monetary loss due to shutting off a connection) it's absurd to suggest that 35 / 50 years in prison is a suitable punishment. It's absurd to suggest that any time in prison is a suitable punishment. Note that this applies even if the suspect is not suicidal.
Using these kind of plea-bargaining tactics when you know the suspect is suicidal is cruel.
> Unfortunately, a primary tool in that job seems to be plea-bargaining.
I cannot reconcile those statements. If a prosecutor's job is to prosecute then they should charge with crimes, and say what the maximum sentences might be, and go to court. But they clearly think that part of their job is to adjust the sentence to be commensurate.
> Using these kind of plea-bargaining tactics when you know the suspect is suicidal is cruel.
If your point is that you should prosecute someone who is suicidal differently from someone who is not, wrt prosecuting them then I'd strongly disagree.
If you do prosecute them less severely then where is the line? What about pregnant women, stress can cause miscarriges. what about old people, stress can cause them to have heart attacks What about overweight people, stress can cause them to die from a heart attack.
What if someone is faking being suicidal? You can never know for sure until they actually die, if they attempt suicide and survive then it might just be a hoax to get out of prosecution.
I think the world is better served when everyone knows they will be treated equally.
Thinks like this make me think that some is really rotten in this system. Some people think that is justified, fair and right to menace the life of an innocent baby if you got the robber mother in jail?.
There is really a need to say that this idea is a monstrosity?
Should be noted that the system is _obliged_ to care for the life of this baby?
"What if someone is faking being suicidal?"
Absolutely nothing
Is not so easy to fake this for much time... in the end this man or woman will reach the same place in front of a jury, but anyways is a better choice that the other option, that you _help_ to someone to be a suicidal.
> Thinks like this make me think that some is really rotten in this system. Some people think that is justified, fair and right to menace the life of an innocent baby if you got the robber mother in jail?. There is really a need to say that this idea is a monstrosity?
Being pregnant should not, under any circumstances, give you a get out of jail free card.
I can't believe I even have to state this and I have a hard time believing that you actually think this should be the case.
> Is not so easy to fake this for much time... in the end this man or woman will reach the same place in front of a jury, but anyways is a better choice that the other option, that you _help_ to someone to be a suicidal.
I can't parse this into a coherent sentence. I'm guessing english isn't your first language. No harm done, i'll move on.
> Being pregnant should not, under any circumstances, give you a get out of jail free card.
Of course, but this is not what i'm saying...
You can't wait, let's see,... six months?, eight months? You can't wait a year until the baby is born and someone can care or him? You really need to put this pregnant woman in jail Just Right Now?
Even if the proccess could be so stressful for the mother that the life of the foetus could be in danger?
He didn't commit suicide because he was, you know, chronically depressed for years. Obviously, people who are chronically depressed for years but are in great life circumstances never kill themselves(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace)
Let's not shy too far from the facts here. Aaron knew what he was doing was breaking the law. He participated in an act of civil disobedience, that does not grant freedom from consequences.
There's a certain proportionality that's very definitely lacking in this case.
Way to intentionally not understand the situation.
Yes, it is obvious to anyone downloading academic papers that they are committing 13 crimes and could be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. After all, changing your MAC address, hiding a laptop in a closet, and ignoring JSTOR's TOS clearly add up to 13.
He should have read the law? Have you read the law? Are you sure you haven't committed any felonies today?
I seriously doubt that Aaron really considered the possibility of criminal action for what he did, and certainly not so many charges that he could have been legally imprisoned for the remainder of his adult life. A civil suit by JSTOR would have been a reasonable expectation, and note what Aaron did when faced with a civil suit: he returned a hard drive of files to JSTOR and settled the matter, without any suicidal actions.
Your sort of reasoning -- that he allegedly broke the law, therefore no mercy can be considered and the prosecutor was right to harass him -- is one of the most destructive far-right concepts to have been popularized in America. It is the line of reasoning that leads to teams of soldiers attacking civilian homes to serve a basic search-and-arrest warrant. It is the sort of reasoning that opens the door to the crushing tyranny of overly broad laws and abuses of the justice system. Allowing ourselves to fall victim to the logic that the law is perfect and absolute, that prosecutors have a moral duty to enforce all laws, opens us to a system where nobody is safe from the government.
If he had been accessing student's personal info, would you still be defending him?
Unauthorized access is unauthorized access.
I did not say that he thought he was doing something entirely legal, I said that he probably only expected a civil case for his actions, which is entirely reasonable. If I had to guess, I would say that whatever attempt he made to conceal his identity was done to ensure that he would not face a court order to stop until he had finished what he had set out to do.
If you are saying that concealing one's identity is evidence that a person is doing something criminal, then you are accusing a good friend of mine of being a criminal. He used proxy servers to download large numbers of patents, as part of his masters thesis project, to avoid bandwidth restrictions imposed by servers. In the end, he developed a system that helps locate patents, and could help people avoid violating patents or find prior art. Should he face a 50 year sentence too?
"If he had been accessing student's personal info, would you still be defending him?"
He did nothing even remotely similar to that. His actions were as close to accessing private information as posting to HN.
"Unauthorized access is unauthorized access."
His accessing was not unauthorized. MIT's network is open to the public, and JSTOR's archive is open to anyone on MIT's network. What access was unauthorized in this case?
(b) except as set forth in Section 2.1(e) and 5 of the Terms and Conditions for Use for Journals, Plants, GIS Data, Select Other Content Types, and Data for Research below, provide and/or authorize access to the Content available through Individual Access, the Publisher Sales Service, or other programs to persons or entities other than Authorized Users;
(d) undertake any activity such as computer programs that automatically download or export Content, commonly known as web robots, spiders, crawlers, wanderers or accelerators that may interfere with, disrupt or otherwise burden the JSTOR server(s) or any third-party server(s) being used or accessed in connection with JSTOR; or
(e) make any use, display, performance, reproduction, or distribution that exceeds or violates these Terms and Conditions of Service and the Content-Specific Terms and Conditions of Use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lori_Drew#Guilty_verdict_set_a...
Do you not comprehend that you've just restated the despicable fallacy that overzealous prosecutors use to rationalize their behavior?
Stealing is stealing, so stealing a tic tac = stealing a cargo ship. Breaking the law is breaking the law, so jaywalking = mass murder.
No, they're not the same. They're comprehensively, fundamentally, entirely different.