We previously discussed how the Justice Department hounded Aaron Swartz in a prosecution that sought 35 years in prison for his effort to make academic papers available to the public — even though MIT did not ask for such charges and later released the papers free of charge to the public. United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz and the Obama Administration were long criticized for the prosecution but remained committed to destroying Swartz — a move that clearly delighted copyright hawks that have tremendous influence over the Administration as discussed earlier. Given the high-profile nature of the case and the months of criticism, it is clear that Main Justice in Washington had to be monitoring the case. Now it appears that Swartz’s line prosecutor, Assistant United States Attorney Stephen Heymann was connected to a prior suicide of a defendant in a similar case. In 2008, Jonathan James killed himself while being pursued by Heymann in a criminal hacker case. Heymann then moved on to Swartz who also killed himself — complaining of the abusive treatment by the Justice Department. It is worth noting that the Justice Department could not come up with a single charge for anyone associated with the torture program, including the attorneys who facilitated the program. However, it wanted 35 years for a man accused of illegally gaining access to a university site and downloading academic papers to make available to the public for free. Those documents later released for free to the public but the Obama Administration still felt jail time was essential in the interests of justice.
Heymann secured a record by making James the first juvenile jailed in a federal cybercrime case. James insisted in his suicide note that he was innocent but that the prosecutors would not leave him alone. He wrote “I have no faith in the ‘justice’ system. Perhaps my actions today, and this letter, will send a stronger message to the public. Either way, I have lost control over this situation, and this is my only way to regain control.”
Heymann received the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service for “directing the largest and most successful identity theft and hacking investigation and prosecution ever conducted in the United States.”
Heymann is accused by a lawyer of using the Swartz case as a high-profile opportunity for himself and refused to accept a plea that did not involve a confession to all counts and a guarantee of prison time.
The Swartz case remains a serious concern with many of us. The extreme sentence sought in the case is troubling for an individual who was an advocate for public access and did not have a financial motive in his actions. He was a long-standing critic of the Obama Administration for its treatment of information under copyright and trademark laws as well as President Obama’s “hit list” policy.
Of course, it is doubtful that any serious investigation will come from the controversy. The Justice Department is notorious for whitewashing such controversies and the Administration has long followed the directions of industry and lobby groups on these laws, including criminalizing copyright violations. Both Congress and the White House have repeatedly yielded to increasing penalties and power for these groups. Swartz is simply the latest victim of this trend. Thousands of less well known citizens have been pursued for ruinous damages or criminal charges.
Source: Buzzfeed
Ortiz vs the Health ‘Care’ Multinationals:
In September, 2010, how Ms Ortiz led the pursuit of a settlement with Forest Pharmaceuticals became apparent. The company was accused of promoting its anti-depressant Celexa for use in adolescents and children. Such drugs have since been shown to increase the risk of suicide by such young patients, and this drug was only approved for adults. At the time, Ms Ortiz said, “Forest Pharmaceuticals deliberately chose to pursue corporate profits over its obligations to the F.D.A. and the American public.” Although the offense may have lead to use of the drug by many adolescents and children, and hence may have lead to some of them attempting or committing suicide, the case was settled only with fines. As is usual in such legal settlements, no individual corporate executive who authorized or lead the off-label and potentially dangerous marketing of the drug was arrested, or accused, and none suffered any negative consequences.
GlaxoSmithKline
In October, 2010, how Ms Ortiz led the pursuit of a settlement with GlaxoSmithKline became apparent (look here.) The company was accused of selling drugs that were not what they appeared to be, apparently because the wrong drugs were put in labelled containers. Obviously, taking one drug, like Paxil, GSK’s anti-depressant which has a number of known adverse effects, including suicide risk for adolescents and children as noted above, when a patient is supposed to be taking a wholly different drug could lead to patient harm. At that time, Ms Ortiz said, “We will not tolerate corporate attempts to profit at the expense of the ill and needy in our society — or those who cut corners that result in potentially dangerous consequences to consumers.” Again, while the settlement involved a guilty plea by a GSK subsidiary, again no individual corporate executive who had authority over the drug manufacturing was arrested or accused, much less suffered any negative consequences.
St Jude Medical
In January, 2011, Ms Ortiz led the pursuit of a settlement with St Jude Medical (look here). The company was accused of paying kickbacks to doctors to implant its cardiac defibrillators (ICDs) and pacemakers. Obviously, providing kickbacks to doctors may have lead them to plant devices in patients who did not really need them, yet the devices and the implantation procedures can have adverse effects. At that time, Ms Ortiz said, “The United States alleges that St Jude solicited physicians for the studies in order to retain their business and/or convert their business from a competitor’s product.” Again, as is usual, the settlement did not require any executive who authorized or directed the activities leading to the kickbacks suffered any negative consequences.
So in summary, in three major cases involving unethical practices by big health care corporations that could have put patients at risk, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz provided strong words, but did not apparently seek any punishment of any form of any of the corporate leaders who authorized or directed the bad, and potentially dangerous behavior. Yet in the sorry case of Aaron Swartz, Ms Ortiz charged a gifted computer activist whose alleged crimes certainly did not put any individuals at risk of adverse medical effects or any bad physical outcomes with crimes that if proven would have lead to years in jail and millions in fines for him as an individual.”
shano:
“I know he would still be alive if we had any real, true justice in the so called ‘justice department’.”
*************************
You “know” this to a moral certainty? Maybe you would you like a three day right of rescission to take back this statement like we do with in-home solicitations, consumer credit transactions, and mortgage loans?
ap:
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply they were yours.
DonS:
If I took liberties, I hope you will extend the benefit of the doubt as to my good intentions.
********************
I always do because people that always go around looking for fights have the uncanny knack of finding them
I would not give Heymann the benefit of the doubt because both cases were very similar. Young men driven to desperation by over prosecution of similar ‘crimes’.
Does anyone think Aaron would have killed himself if the case had been dropped 4 days before his death? That was when all the papers he ‘stole’ were released to the general public.
Does anyone think he would still be alive if he was not facing jail time, poverty, the humiliation of asking his parents to mortgage their home, being branded a felon for the rest of his life?
I know he would still be alive if we had any real, true justice in the so called ‘justice department’.
Mespo, I take you point about the headline, and your general thrust. I suppose it is admirable to give this prosecutor the benefit of the doubt. And the prosecutorial policies of the DOJ; yeah I suppose they should get the benefit of the doubt too. And Obamas’ multiple blown opportunities to advocate for the seemingly more constitutional alternatives; benefit of the doubt there too. Benefit of the doubt all around.
So, even though they all walk and quack like a duck, it is we who are the deluded ones! Perhaps I have extrapolated from what you no doubt meant as a narrow point. If I took liberties, I hope you will extend the benefit of the doubt as to my good intentions. 😉
mespo727272 1, January 15, 2013 at 4:23 pm
ap:
“Aaron is dead because the institutions that govern our society have decided that it is more important to target geniuses like Aaron than nurture them, because the values he sought – openness, justice, curiosity – are values these institutions now oppose.”
*************************
Ding! Senator Dr. Bill Frist to the long distance diagnostic center, please. Senator Dr. Bill Frist to the long distance diagnostic center. Ding!
So said mespo727272.
===================
Ah, the distortions! That quote is Matt Stoller’s, not mine:
Tuesday, 15 January 2013 14:22 By Matt Stoller,
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13940-aaron-swartzs-politics
I don’t agree with every word of the posting, but it’s an interesting one, for the open-minded.
ap:
“Aaron is dead because the institutions that govern our society have decided that it is more important to target geniuses like Aaron than nurture them, because the values he sought – openness, justice, curiosity – are values these institutions now oppose.”
*************************
Ding! Senator Dr. Bill Frist to the long distance diagnostic center, please. Senator Dr. Bill Frist to the long distance diagnostic center. Ding!
Aaron Swartz’s Politics
Tuesday, 15 January 2013 14:22 By Matt Stoller,
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13940-aaron-swartzs-politics
Excerpt:
Aaron suffered from depression, but that is not why he died. Aaron is dead because the institutions that govern our society have decided that it is more important to target geniuses like Aaron than nurture them, because the values he sought – openness, justice, curiosity – are values these institutions now oppose. In previous generations, people like Aaron would have been treasured and recognized as the remarkable gifts they are. We do not live in a world like that today. And Aaron would be the first to point out, if he could observe the discussion happening now, that the pressure he felt from the an oppressive government is felt by millions of people, every year. I’m glad his family have not let the justice system off the hook, and have not allowed this suicide to be medicalized, or the fault of one prosecutor. What happened to Aaron is not isolated to Aaron, but is the flip side of the corruption he hated.
As we think about what happened to Aaron, we need to recognize that it was not just prosecutorial overreach that killed him. That’s too easy, because that implies it’s one bad apple. We know that’s not true. What killed him was corruption. Corruption isn’t just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It’s also people being punished for upholding the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There’s a reason whistleblowers get fired. There’s a reason Bradley Manning is in jail. There’s a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for torture is the person – John Kiriako – who told the world it was going on. There’s a reason those who destroyed the financial system “dine at the White House”, as Lawrence Lessig put it. There’s a reason former Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There’s a reason DOJ officials do not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as partners in white collar criminal defense. There’s a reason no one has been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or the war in Iraq. This reason is the modern ethic in American society that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. Corrupt self-interest, when it goes systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy, and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice.
More prosaically, the person who warned about the downside in a meeting gets cut out of the loop, or the former politician who tries to reform an industry sector finds his or her job opportunities sparse and unappealing next to his soon to be millionaire go along get along colleagues. I’ve seen this happen to high level former officials who have done good, and among students who challenge power as their colleagues go to become junior analysts on Wall Street. And now we’ve seen these same forces kill our friend.
It’s important for us to recognize that Aaron is just an extreme example of a force that targets all of us. He eschewed the traditional paths to wealth and power, dropping out of college after a year because it wasn’t intellectually stimulating. After co-founding and selling Reddit, and establishing his own financial security, he wandered and acted, calling himself an “applied sociologist.” He helped in small personal ways, offering encouragement to journalists like Mike Elk after Elk had broken a significant story and gotten pushback from colleagues. In my inbox, every birthday, I got a lovely note from Aaron offering me encouragement and telling me how much he admired my voice. He was a profoundly kind man, and I will now never be able to repay him for the love and kindness he showed me. There’s no medal of honor for someone like this, no Oscar, no institutional way of saying “here’s someone who did a lot of good for a lot of people.” This is because our institutions are corrupt, and wanted to quelch the Aaron Swartz’s of the world. Ultimately, they killed him. I hope that we remember Aaron in the way he should be remembered, as a hero and an inspiration.
In six days, on January 18th, it’s the one year anniversary of the blackout of Wikipedia, and some have discussed celebrating it as Internet Freedom Day. Maybe we should call this Aaron Swartz Day, in honor of this heroic figure. While what happened that day was technically about the internet, it should be remembered, and Aaron should be remembered, in the context of social justice. That day was about a call for a different world, not just protecting our ability to access web sites. And we should remember these underlying values. It would help people understand that justice can be extremely costly, and that we risk much when we allow those who do the right thing to be punished. Somehow, we need to rebuild a culture that respects people like Aaron and turns away from the greed and rent-extraction that he hated. There’s a cycle in American history, of religious “Great Awakenings”, where new cultural systems emerge in the form of religion, often sweeping through communities of young people dissatisfied with the society they see around them. Perhaps that is what we see in the Slow Food movement, or gay rights movement, or the spread of walkable communities and decline of vehicle miles, or maker movement, or the increasing acceptance of meditation and therapy, or any number of other cultural changes in our society. I don’t know. I’m sure many of these can be subverted. What I do know is that if we are to honor Aaron’s life, we will recognize him as a broad social justice activist who cared about transforming our society, and acted to do so. And we will take up his fight as our own.
I am a little surprised by JT’s headline that the prosecutor was “Linked To Another Suicide Of Defendant.” In my early days in practice, I found myself defending a man charged with manslaughter (a form of homicide) of his friend during a drunken brawl. Before trial, he committed suicide — possibly out of guilt though I will never know for sure. More recently, I represented a man in a civil case who unfortunately committed suicide for reasons unrelated to the case.
I would not want anyone to say that I was “linked” to two suicides based on this connection though it is undoubtedly true. It’s a bit like the spiteful first mate aboard the Bounty noting in the ship’s log that “Capt. Bligh was sober today.”
What you you read is less important than what you infer from the statement.
“… we turn a blind eye to war criminals and corporate criminals we double down on human rights advocates and the defenseless …” (Justice Holmes)
They’re lazy and, more than likely, scared to death of the real bad guys.
Professor-While I am in complete agreement with you regarding the over zealous nature of this prosecution, it is beyond misleading to classify Mr. Swartz’s actions as “an effort to make academic papers to the public.” As you correctly pointed out in your earlier post, the underlying action stems from when he “broke into the computer system at MIT through a utility closet using a laptop and a false identity.” Just because Mr. Swartz believes (and again I agree with you on this) that information such as this should be readily available, it does not just justify his above-referenced actions. The over zealousness of the prosecutor is, without question, appalling, but let’s have an honest discussion about what he actually did.
All the papers Aaron ‘stole’ became public 4 days before his death.
No let up from prosecutor.
He stole nothing.
He made no profits, in fact the prosecution made him spend all his money on defense.
Drove him into poverty.
Aaron was going to have to ask his parents to mortgage their family home in order to go on to court.
Most high profile cases have an element of political influence in the charge/sentence. The more the defendant afronts or worries the powers to be the greater the punishment.
I don’t know if it is the case here but it seems to be at least to me. One trick that is often used is to stack up the number of counts and demand the sentences for each be served consecutively. But what in a copyright case constitutes a count? How granular is it?
One could argue that a defendant copied one single database of records, and one count was charged or the same prosecutor could claim the database contained 100 dossiers so 100 counts or even an aggregate of 10,000 pages and hence 10,000 counts. Yet, the defendant dowloaded and published the information in one act but can be charged as if he made multiple acts.
An argument to my above paragraph might be that a fraudster could download a database of 10,000 bank account numbers from 10,000 individuals so why would this not constitute 10,000 counts. I would say that in that case there were 10,000 individuals involved as victims. I don’t see in the copyright case the documents were independently owned, they were aggregate properties of the university.
Sometimes, a person who has been subjected to unbearable abuse simply commits suicide.
Sometimes, a person who has been subjected to unbearable abuse murders other people.
Sometimes, a person who has been subjected to unbearable abuse murders other people prior to committing suicide.
Sometimes, a person who has been subjected to unbearable abuse so effectively forgives the abuse and those whose actions were subjectively abusive as to never, never ever, retaliate, and, instead of retaliating, puts almost the whole of the person’s achievable effort into understanding why some people inflict unbearable abuse on some other people.
Since I was born, in May of 1939, I have been subjected to beyond-unbearable abuse many times. Emotional abuse in kindergarten. Physical abuse in second grade. Sexual abuse during the first half of my sophomore year in high school. Academic abuse during the writing and defending of my doctoral dissertation in graduate school. Financial abuse by the Door County Circuit Court following the deaths of our son and daughter-in-law when their Mercury Sable automobile exploded, at least in part because of many spot welds that were not properly fused.
What had become vividly clear to me prior to my starting kindergarten was people who are abusive being so in response to their having been abused, a pattern that I find can be traced back before the dawn of recorded human history.
I am autistic. My medical records at the North Shore Clinic (I have a copy for continuing care purposes) state, in part, “Autism. High Functioning.:”
The identity of public school employees is a matter of public record, therefore, public school employees do not have privacy as to their employment status. So, at least, is my understanding.
There exist many forms of stage theories of human personal and social development, Erik H. Erikson’s epigenetic chart of psychosocial developmental crises being an example.
in my work as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer, focused on public safety aspects of the structure of human society, as a theoretical biologist and practical bioengineer, I have also developed a human psychosocial development stage theory, albeit one that has two branches, one branch being the psychosocial development of people who are autism-inadequate, and the other being the psychosocial development of people who are autism-adequate.
Autism? What is Autism? The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision, defines Autism in terms of diagnostic criteria, which criteria I find to be of the nature of “clinical signs,” by which I intend to mean the internalization of the overt conduct of the person being labeled by a clinician, hence clinical signs are of the clinician and not the clinical subject person, such that palliation of clinical signs (which are internal only to the clinician) is regarded as healing the clinical subject person. Thus, medications which so damage human brain function as to render an abused person incapable of expressing having been abused are regarded as curing mental illness. I was prescribed such medications during a personally horrid encounter with bio-psychiatric ideology, as an exercise of iatrogenic disease, and those medications took me all the way to an oriented-times-zero dementia, but never stopped me from expressing aspects of how I had been abused.
Having learned, in second grade, at Marshall School, in Eureka, California, during the first about-three-quarters of second grade, what it is to be paddled into agitated catatonia for not lying and not lying by admitting to lying when I was not lying, something about the way I am autistic allowed me to understand that my teacher and principle simply did not actually know how to treat me any better than they were treating me, were not familiar with how to treat me better than they were treating me, and did not understand how to treat me any better than they were treating me.
Since I never wanted to be treated as I was being treated, and never accepted that the way I was being treated was in any meaningful way, actually about me, I took being paddled into agitated catatonia at seemingly random intervals as telling me something about my teacher and principal that they could not otherwise tell me about. So, I forgave them instantly, and forgave them so completely as to never have an impulse to retaliate.
When I got to third grade, we had moved to Wisconsin to escape from the California schools where paddling in public schools was not a violation of law until, as I understand, 1972.
Early during third grade, I went to work to understand what had happened to me in Eureka and why. As I was able to read and understand college level stuff by third grade, I searched my parents’ library for information, and came upon Wllliam S. Sadler, “Theory and Practice of Psychiatry,” C. V. Mosby, St. Louis, 1936.
While reading that book, I came upon the word, “autism.” I looked up “autism” in the Glossary at the back of the book, where I found, “Autism. The state of introversion. A mental state characterized by a tendency to turn away from the outside world—to become self-centered.”
That definition of autism is, in my view, far more based on Eugen Bleuler’s notions of autism than those of Leo Kanner or Hans Asperger, both of whom were yet to publish their work on aspects of autism when Sadler wrote his book.
Well before I was 18 months of age, and, to the best of my recall, before I began talking in English language sentences of two or more words, I had recognized that making mistakes and learning were the same process, the only difference being whether what is learned is deemed acceptable learning or unacceptable learning, and I had recognized that there are many ways to do something poorly for every way to do it well, and I had recognized that the mistaken notion of people making avoidable mistakes was, itself an unavoidable mistake whenever it happened to happen.
No one has ever been able to demonstrate to me that the notion of making avoidable mistakes is other than a form of psychotic delusion. No one has ever been able to demonstrate to me that the notion of tort liability is other than a psychotic delusion. No one has ever been able to demonstrate to me that the social convention of the notion of guilt is other than a psychotic delusion. No one has ever been able to demonstrate to me that punishing people for making mistakes is other than abusive. No one has ever been able to demonstrate to me that holding people accountable, in terms of overt conduct, to the hypothetical standard of the legal fiction of “a reasonable person” who can not only readily do unreasonable things with legal impunity, but can easily do impossible things without impediment of any form of objective reality, is other than abusive, and sometimes shatteringly abusive.
No one has ever been able to demonstrate to me that it is possible for any avoidable accident to ever happen, and no one has ever been able to demonstrate that any avoidable accident has ever happened.
How do I, as an autistic person, recognize an avoidable accident? If an accident was actually avoidable, it, inescapably, was actually avoided, therefore, it never happened,and it is impossible to know what the avoidable accident was because it never was.
If an accident is unavoidable, it necessarily happens because of the lack of any way to avoid it; therefore, the only accidents that ever actually happen are the accidents that were actually unavoidable when they were actually unavoided.
In my world, tort liability is the essence of any and every model of a tortious (and comparably torturous) “hell” that I can ever yet imagine.
What my life circumstances allowed me to do is to reject from my life every form of socially-mandated delusion that I have been able to recognize.
Yes, I am aware that socially conventional definitions of delusion prohibit the existence of socially mandated delusions, but, for me, that prohibition itself is only one more socially mandated delusion.
With enough people and enough independent assortment of genotypic and phenotypic traits, sooner or later, if the core of the enigma of human hateful destructiveness ever rises to conscious awareness, sooner or later, someone will become aware enough of the mechanism of human hateful destructiveness as to become capable of understanding, designing, and implementing a remedy for hateful destructiveness.
Is it possible that I may have a chance, as a bioengineer, to accomplish the necessary design and development of a remedy for human hateful destructiveness that will bring the epoch of humanity’s war against itself and its environs to an end without first bringing humanity to an end?
My playing around with system dynamics suggests that someone may yet accomplish that life-sparing task. Whether I will be able to do that, I find it yet ambiguous.
What I find is not ambiguous is my lifelong observation to the effect that no mistake (all accidents are forms of mistakes, just as all mistakes are forms of accidents, to me) ever made either could or should have been avoided, this being true regardless of the nature of the mistake made or its consequences.
Therefore, the legal notion of avoidable accidents and tortious liability is itself an unavoidable accident regarding the nature of accidents.
It would take actually demonstrating only one tangible accident that actually happened that was actually avoidable to render my life work tangibly moot.
Why is no such actual, tangible demonstration extant?
My wife, for one, has promoted the notion that, for my bioengineering word to be useful to the legal profession, I need to not only demonstrate what is apparently, from a biological perspective, in error regarding the legal profession’s model of reality, but I also need to have developed the remedy for that error.
The remedy for the error of the Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence is to remove adversarial aspects from the System of Law and Jurisprudence, for it is those aspects which corrupts the legal profession via the deception and dishonesty of time-corrupted learning.
I surmise that the only really significant factor that distinguishes me from Aaron Swartz, Carmen M.Ortiz, Stephen Heymann, James Holmes, Adam Lanza, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, J. Edgar Hoover, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Louis Slotin, Benjamin LIbet, and almost every other human person to live during the past 20,000 or so years is my being so profoundly autistic as to have never been able to learn to “think in words or pictures, and perhaps thereby being uncommonly able to recognize socially mandated delusions with apparently uncommon acumen.
Actually, tangibly, demonstrate the actual, tangible happening of one actually, tangibly avoidable accident (hypotheticals don’t count), and I will admit to the error of my lifelong ways and the error of my lifelong work.
Given the number of court cases in which judgment was rendered for the plaintiff in a tortious liability case, liability on account of the cause of liability having been adjudged to have been avoidable, it ought to be simple to accomplish that actually tangible demonstration of an actual tangibly avoidable accident, unless such accidents cannot have actually tangible existence.
It is my observation that profoundly truthful people tend to have formidable social difficulties. It is my observation that profoundly autistic people tend to have formidable social difficulties. It is my observation that profoundly genderqueer people tend to have formidable social difficulties.
Courtesy of some caring and capable physicians, my sex hormones changed, surgically, from testosterone supplied by testicles to no such hormones for a little while, Then a caring and capable endocrinologist prescribed Premarin and Provera. Then I got to the typical age of menopause, and the caring and capable endocrinologist prescribed a form of alendronate for osteoporosis minimization.
For a time, I was an active member of the Chicago Gender Society, a group of TV/TS folks whom I found to be wonderfully decent. At one meeting, another member asked me, “Why don’t you cross-dress?”
For lack of funds, I never bought clothes deemed socially appropriate for someone taking Premarin and Provera who has minimal (adrenal-only?) testosterone levels.
To, “Why don’t you cross-dress,” I replied, “What makes you think I am not cross-dressed now?”
At that time, my inner identity was predominantly female, my hormones were female, and I was cross-dressed in supposedly male clothes.
I cross-dress in more than one way, not merely with fabric in the form of conventional clothes, I cross-dress as someone who can pass, in casual encounters, as not being profoundly autistic.
And yet, my affective aspects writhe in yet-unspeakable agony as I observe the flagrantly abusive insensitivity of many people to the sort of life-changing events that took Aaron Swartz to such socially imposed pain as made his suicide his final recourse to pragmatic mercy.
Is the inner agony of Stephen Heymann any less? My best guess so far, is that his inner agony, socialization trauma generated agony may be vastly greater than what killed Aaron Swartz. Swartz got to kill only one person. In my view, people like Heymann are far more actively murderous than Swartz could ever have been.
I grieve no less for those who, however wittingly or unwittingly, effectively tortured Aaron Swartz to death than I grieve for Aaron.
I grieve no less for those kindergarten classmates (perhaps about a third of my classmates) of mine who treated me so abusively for being out as an autistic and transgendered child that, on the third day of kindergarten, walking home beside my mother her right hand holding my left hand, when we reached Rainier Avenue walking east on the north side of Ferdinand Street, in Seattle, it came to my mind that those children could never hurt me again if I pulled my left hand from my mother’s grasp and dove under the rear wheels of a Seattle electric bus that had stopped in front of us, let off and picked up passengers and, still having a green light, pulled in front of us. A tiny fraction of a moment after I realized that I could stop those children from ever again hurting me, it came to me that my diving under the back wheels of that bus would hurt my family a thousand times more than those other children could ever hurt me.
More than 65 years later, I am slowly getting a sense of a mental model of why the theories espoused by many prosecutors in courts of law so starkly violate their theories in use.
Blouise,
I haven’t seen the name “Fearless Fosdick” in a long time!! 🙂
“What a country we have become.
Sad, very sad.” -Justice Holmes
Yep. And most still don’t know the half of it…
Limitless immunity, won loss stats to prove you Are good prosecutor and the current trend to go after defenseless defendants with charges that are beyond any reason basis all contribute to the culture that allowed this prosecuter to cause Mr. Swartz’s death. Is Obama at fault? Yes, his continued belief and policy that whistleblowers, advocates, liberals, protesters of the human rights and workers rights variety should be treated like murders has lead to this state of affairs. Mr. Swartz’s treatment is not abnormal and is not confined to federal prosecutors. While we turn a blind eye to war criminals and corporate criminals we double down on human rights advocates and the defenseless. Well, it looks good that we are putting someone in prison., right? What a country we have become.
Sad, very sad.
Lanny Breuer Rewards DOJ Lawyers for Winning Impunity for Prosecutorial Misconduct
Posted on December 13, 2011 by emptywheel
http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/12/13/lanny-breuer-rewards-doj-lawyers-for-winning-impunity-for-prosecutorial-misconduct/
From the link posted by DonS:
Jesslyn Radack…notes that the real remedy to prevent more people from experiencing what Swartz did is to start fixing DOJ.
“What might be more realistic is for citizens to demand that the Senate Judiciary Committee exercise meaningful oversight over the out-of-control Justice Department, which has waged an unprecedented, unaccountable, brutal war on whistleblowers and hackers, and to create something akin to the Church Committee to investigate the improper monitoring and targeting of hackers, whistleblowers, Occupy participants, journalists, and a numerous other groups of non-violent “offenders” who’ve done nothing to harm anyone or the country, and have been acting purely in the public interest.”
It would be a good start (though SJC Chairman Patrick Leahy has been lax in examining any Obama Administrations abuses).
But there is one action Obama could take today that would both address some of the problems with his dysfunctional DOJ and attest he means to change things systematically: Fire DOJ’s Criminal Division head, Lanny Breuer.
Lanny Breuer is not the only reason Obama’s DOJ has been so aggressive (though he has been instrumental in ensuring it ignores bank crimes). There are far more senior and far less senior people who have fostered DOJ’s overreach. But Breuer runs this system. Moreover, as the head of this system of prosecutorial overreach, he has actually explicitly rewarded abuse.
If we want to fix the injustice that was done to Aaron Swartz, we need to fix the aspects of the system that rewarded such behavior. We need to fix the law that empowered the prosecutors gunning for him. We need to put some breaks on DOJ’s power. And we should start by getting rid of the guy who has fostered this culture of abuse for the last four years.
(DonS, Thanks for the link.)