…if it’s true that Swartz was offered a 6-month deal, as the prosecutor’s husband says, it’s support for one of the reform suggestions I make in my Due Process When Everything Is A Crime article: Requiring that all plea deals offered by the prosecution be disclosed to the jury if the case goes to trial. Let the jury wonder why if they were willing to settle for 6 months, they’re now asking, say, 35 years. 34 1/2 years in jail is a high price for putting the government to the trouble of trying a case.
I don’t know enough about Swartz and his crime to know exactly what punishment he deserved. However what I do know after reading Conrad Black’s recent book is that the US justice system operates in a worse fashion than what you would find in most third world dictatorships.
Mugabe could take lessons from US prosecutors. They are self-serving egomaniacs, and they are some of the worst abusers of law and justice in the world.
Their strategy is always the same: to cripple you, no matter what it takes. They couldn’t care less whether you are guilty or not, or whether the final punishment matches the crime. Crush and destroy should be their motto. They are thugs wielding far more power than they deserve, and they are all eager to get another tick on their resumes no matter what the cost.
Why Americans put up with it is beyond me.
The fall of the American empire continues…
35+ years is absurd, and so are these twisted plea deals. But so is a self-appointed “liberator” busting openlocked WalMart doors then inviting everyone to come in and help themselves.
Great commentary on this by Prof. Larry Lessig:
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully
Corruption percolates down when the top is corrupt – as it has been in the US ever since the 60s coup where security-pentagon-banking-industry controls the party system and political agenda through funding and intimidation. It is a special interest lobby-owned system and you can buy all the political influence you want/need. This has infected the justice system. The only semblance of the old republic that can usurp this endemic corruption is the Jury system – and the statists are doing their best to neuter that civil protection.
The old US constitutional republic is almost gone, supplanted by the 3rd world corruption of kleptocratic gangsterism as a political system.
An important point here which I learned from Black’s book. A prosecutor in the US can bring ten charges against you, and let’s say you successfully defend all but one of them. In the process it might have cost you your reputation and 10’s of millions of dollars in legal bills.
*Nothing* will happen to the prosecutor and you have little recourse in the law to get back the money you spent defending a barrage of useless charges. In fact the prosecutor will get a pat on the back and a promotion for financially ruining you.
No other profession works that way. Welcome to the new ruling class in America.
As I said, further decline of a once-great empire….
So depressing. Seems like look out for yourself is the only strategy to be employed. Confidence in most institutions is minimal. Where to invest? The LCBO is my favourite store! 🙂
Jstore is in the business of selling air.
The dissertations they sell on their web site are available from the authors for free.
If anyone needs a dissertation, they can email the author and if the text is not under any sort of contractual NDA, they will gladly email you back a PDF. And they will thank you for the interest!
I contacted numerous Ph.Ds for their thesis and not a single one refused to provide his paper yet.
Shcwartz committed minor transgressions the sentence is absurd. We should be very glad to have Canada’s flawed but superior justice system.
Canada was much like this up until the early 80’s….
Rev Canada would make an outrageous assessment and then declare ya have to pay it, to appeal it. Extortion.
Your lawyer/accountant would counsel it was cheaper to pay the extortion than fight it….Rev Canada would never pay costs….they would fight right up to the door of the tax-revue board and then drop it…you get nada costs.
They tried that on me and mine….I fought back politically…they discontinued that process.
Jon Corzine, former MF Global Chief, New Jersey Governor, and Top Obama Bundler.
The collapse of the now defunct MF Global vaporized $1.6 billion in investor’s money, according to James W. Giddens,trustee for the SIPA Liquidation of MF Global Inc. Even Democrats said “people should go to jail.” But disgraced former MF Global Chief Jon Corzine shrugged off charges of wrongdoing and appears to have gotten off with nary a consequence. How? Cronyism, pure and simple.
Corzine was a top Obama bundler who helped haul in $500,000 in campaign donations for the 2012 presidential election. And, as the Government Accountability Institute uncovered, MF Global was a client of Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer’s law firm, Covington & Burling. That’s right—Corzine’s company hired the very law firm Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer hail from.
No wonder Shcwartz hung himself.
sasquatch “Your lawyer/accountant would counsel it was cheaper to pay the extortion than fight it….Rev Canada would never pay costs….they would fight right up to the door of the tax-revue board and then drop it…you get nada costs.”
Been to tax court a couple times and won both times. The one time I asked for costs. The other time they dropped the case the day before trial. I had been telling the tax people for a year how utterly stupid their reasoning was but it never clicked until after I spent several days preparing for trial. CRA hires only really stupid people with a god complex.
Shawn, excellent point. As I said, Mugabe should come to the US to learn a few things. The racket he runs in Zimbabwe seems almost innocent in comparison to the sheer depth and breadth of corruption in the US justice and political system.
Aaron Swartz knew very well that prosecutor was making an example of him, the better to be owed favours by those she would need to help her get elected to Congress one day—and he knew he was unlikely to survive six months in prison, let alone 35 years.
For her, driving to suicide someone who (let’s remember) died an innocent man in the eyes of the law was a small price to pay.
Of course it was a very small price to pay, for Carmen Ortiz. Taxpayers would pay for his internment. If you, like she, have said in your heart that there is no God, everything is permitted if you think you can do it without getting your brains blown out. As it was, Carmen Ortiz knew very well that while Barack Hussein Obama was president she was never going to answer in any meaningful way for the death of Aaron Swartz—at least not in this world.
Of course the prosecutor’s husband is defending his monster of a wife. She obviously put him up to it, and he did what he was told. If he refused or spoke out of turn, he’d be next in line for a thirty-five year stint in federal prison on trumped-up charges of whatever she could make stick, while she walked off with every penny he ever made and lived happily ever after with the toy boys she’s been making a laughing stock of her husband with for years behind his back, all while maintaining plausible deniability.
Man or woman reading this—never, ever, EVER marry a lawyer. If you cross your lawyer husband, you’ll be flung out with the clothes on your back and be expected to count yourself lucky. And frankly, compared to what men can expect, you will be. If you cross your lawyer wife—you’ll be lucky to survive whatever she has in store for you.
Stealing information at MIT? Between taxpayer money and building on previous research, if there ever was a case of “you didn’t build that,” this is it.
I’m not familiar with law-type stuff and I’ve never been to court for any reason, but I’m told that in Canadian civil suits, the defendant’s legal fees can be reimbursed from the plaintiff should the case be made in their favour or something like that. This doesn’t apply in criminal cases.
Why, then, is the Crown not required to reimburse legal costs of the defendant who is proven non-guilty? Is it because the burden of proof is more strict? Shouldn’t there be a standard across all courts (and the HRC, for that matter) in discouraging malicious legal finangling?
Shouldn’t the headline read “The Persecution of Aaron Swartz” ?
Plea bargaining is a legal abomination for common law.
The prosecutors assume you are guilty (presumption of innocence? proving their case?) and offer you the devils choice of :
A. Being guilty for something you may or may not have done
B. Taking a risk of going to court against the government, with them throwing every damn thing they can think of against you which IF YOU win drives you to poverty, and if you lose, well bye-bye!
Especially now that there’s a law with massive mandatory penalties on everything & every little damn obscure thing is illegal.
TJ: That is why my fondness for Chris Christie was so short lived. The revelation that as a prosecutor he had a 100% conviction rate.
Occam: Too true about the descent of America into a 3rd kleptocracy!
Think of Eric Holder’s consistent refusal to prosecute regime friends.