Look, the bigger problem is spending 10 years in jail and coming back to a society that has called you a con artist in national newspapers after the DOJ gets to talk with the press. He went from being a respected and loved person who have a big career opportunity to being despised. I went through this and you know that it is almost impossible to find a girl to date after getting in this kind of trouble. They Google your name and say "Fraud" no way. He was facing 20 years in jail and feds do get sentences this long (probably would not have in this case) but Aaron was still a kid and doesn't understand that the government is not going to get 20 years on him. 20 years means no family, no children, probably no marriage, no work prospect, a life of shame. It's like having leprosy its awful.
No I disagree with your statement entirely. He was trying to download scientific and court documents that were paid for with taxpayer money that are supposed to be FREE to the public. The controlled distribution of these free documents to private companies is a scam by the US government to generate revenues for friends of the government. Yes the government was going to win their case because Aaron had to break the law in order to try and make these documents available. However, what he could have done, was brought action against the government and continued to violate the law in order to bring attention to it. But he was too young and too scared by the weight of the prosecutorial charges. They weren't going to get 30 years agains the poor kid for trying to right a government wrong. They were going to get house arrest and probation. Aaron should have stuck in there but having been falsely acused of a federal crime once in my life I know that the desire to commit suicide is strong.
Federal criminal charges don't get thrown out. That is very rare. The way the laws are written the feds were going to win. Aaron was trying to do something that should be legal, but the feds were going to get their win. The problem is that what they report to the press and what they actually win on at court can vary widely, so Aaron was going to be ruined and he was going to serve hard time in prison. He shouldn't have killed himself though. He could have had a prosperous life after prison, but his public reputation was destroyed forever.
The presence of a quota system that requires that the government bring a certain number of cases and provides bonuses and rewards connected to "bringing more cases" means that honorable and honest prosecutors fall behind and cannot compete and dirty and heartless prosecutors are able to meet their goals and get ahead. It is not possible to fight the federal government, only a man of enormous strength and enormous balls can successfully do this. Most capitulate, the others lose because the government burden of proof is a joke.
