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Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

Here are some questions raised by this case:

(1) The circumstances under which hyperlinking to material posted and hosted by others is, or should be, a crime.

(2) If it is a crime, whether the proposed sentence is proportional to the alleged offense.

(3) Whether the prosecutor is trying to exert pressure for a plea bargain. E.g., if they offer him 100 days in jail if he pleads guilty, or 100 years in jail if he's convicted, it would make sense to plead guilty from a pure risk management perspective, even if he has an enormously strong case.

(4) If this length of sentence for this behavior is authorized by statute, whether the statute falls foul of the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

(5) Whether the First Amendment protects hyperlinks to unprotected speech.

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if they offer him 100 days in jail if he pleads guilty, or 100 years in jail if he's convicted, it would make sense to plead guilty from a pure risk management perspective, even if he has an enormously strong case.

I'm not so sure about that. Imagine the terrible precedent you'd set. EDIT: Risk aversion is sometimes toxic to society.

How many people are idealistic and generous enough to take that kind of risk with their own lives? It's not (a quick) death, but life in isolation in the penal system for... not setting a precedent?

I don't think I would be that idealistic or generous.

And that's just the thing. When cops pull you over and point a gun at you, telling you to get out of the car, do you get out of the car or not? Even if you don't have to get out of the car, you won't take that risk with your own life.

Same with cops asking for anything else at gunpoint etc.

Before your edit, you wrote about risk aversion and how it's toxic for a society.

I disagree, mainly because this case is an asymmetric risk scenario - his gains from pleading not guilty are extremely miniscule when compared to his losses(compared to the 100 days he'd have to spend in jail, if he were to plead guilty).

What if it's a charge you know to be bogus, or that you really didn't do anything wrong? Would people willingly go to jail for a crime they know they didn't commit?

If it's hazy about whether what they did was a crime, that's a different matter though. And it's a little frustrating to see prosecutors trump up charges to get an easy plea bargain. Maybe there should be some limit between the max sentence and the min plea sentence, so that they can't throw 50-year threats around without at least a 5-year plea bargain.

Minorities have to put up with this all the time, especially blacks in the South.

I don't see why being a white male hacker makes Barret Brown a special case. If anything, it's a good sign that a white male is being subjected to the same overhanded treatment that minorities have to deal with, because it makes people aware of the problem and creates pressure to fix the system.

He's not the type to plead guilty. I think he's taking this to trial on the principle that he believes he didn't do anything criminal. Also, the defense has a very good case, and the government's appears to be full of holes.

Pleading guilty doesn't set a legal precedent.

If you're talking about piling on charges to make a plea deal look attractive, I'm pretty sure that's been done before.

This case is not without precedent. The Supreme Court decided a relevant case in 2001, involving an illegal cell phone intercept. Speech won: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-1687.ZO.html

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