His family blames the pressure and mounting costs of the Massachusetts US Attorney's investigation against him.
Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.
Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.
His "crime", to recap:
Alex Stamos, the CTO of Artemis Internet and an expert witness who was working with Swartz's attorneys to testify in the the April US vs. Swartz trial, also wrote a long post detailing what he knew of the case. The Feds accused Swartz of logging on to MIT's network illegally and using that access, “to download a major portion of JSTOR's archive onto his computers.” The Department of Justice officially accused him of wire fraud, computer fraud, recklessly damaging a protected computer, among other charges.
Of course it's far too simplistic to blame a suicide on any one thing. I don't know what went through Swartz's mind in his final hours or days, what events, feelings, and thoughts drove him to despair and to end his life.
But I think any reasonable goddamn human being should conclude that the looming litigation was a factor, and, further, any reasonable goddamn human being should conclude that -- well, I'll quote Stamos one more time:
But for all those grandiose claims, expert witness Stamos wrote “I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail.”
It's disgusting and it's inhumane. Due process is clearly not working as intended when a man can be hounded, intimidated, and financially ruined over a period of years before he ever gets to see the inside of a courtroom. And the mere threat of a 35-year sentence over an alleged COPYRIGHT VIOLATION should and must flag Eighth Amendment concerns.
Again, I believe it is far too simple to lay Swartz's suicide at the feet of the US Attorney's Office or some other external villain. But every single goddamn person involved, either in this specific case or in any position to determine copyright policy in general, should hear about this, and should take a couple of sober minutes to consider that maybe this fucking thing has gone too far.
RIP.
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Topic: The new obituary thread (Read 74458 times)