
Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz - geetarista
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/government-formally-drops-charges-against-aaron-swartz/
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pseingatl
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.

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spoiledtechie
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?

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tedunangst
_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?

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rauljara
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.

~~~
tedunangst
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.

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geetarista
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.

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

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rhizome
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.

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rprasad
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.

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

~~~
rprasad
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.

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jacquesm
That's 4 days late.

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bryanmig
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)

~~~
vacri
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.

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

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

~~~
mindslight
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>

~~~
pekk
Who would you like to rule instead?

~~~
mindslight
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.

~~~
pekk
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.

~~~
mindslight
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.

~~~
pekk
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.

~~~
mindslight
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_.

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

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nerdfiles
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.

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

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

