Criminal law, Lawyering, Politics, Society

Prosecutor of Aaron Swartz Linked To Another Suicide Of Defendant

600px-US-DeptOfJustice-Seal.svg DOJ220px-Aaron_Swartz_at_Boston_Wikipedia_Meetup,_2009-08-18_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

91 thoughts on “Prosecutor of Aaron Swartz Linked To Another Suicide Of Defendant”

  1. The Power Of The Prosecutor

    By Radley Balko Posted: 01/16/2013

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/the-power-of-the-prosecut_n_2488653.html?1358359916

    “Prosecutors have enormous power. Even investigations that don’t result in any charges can ruin lives, ruin reputations, and drive their targets into bankruptcy. It has become an overtly political position — in general, but particularly at the federal level. If a prosecutor wants to ruin your life, he or she can. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it.”

  2. “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….”

    Justice would have had better success with charging vis-a-vis the “torture program,” if they had Assistant United States Attorney Stephen Heymann assigned to those cases…

  3. Well the # 2 at DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility, William Birney, emailed to me ” it is the longstanding policy of the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) to decline to investigate litigation claims that have been raised, could have been raised, or still may be raised in litigation.”

    So that covers just about everything doesn’t it? — DOJ won’t self regulate

  6. Our legal system has been prosecuting the outliers — and there are myriad ways to do so — for as long as I am aware which, in my personal observation means since the 1960’s. Fine, you say, it’s either legal or it’s not. But the system and penumbra that surrounds the threat of bringing down the weight of the judicial systems to prospectively control behavior — not to simply pursue lawbreakers — turns our justice system on it’s head.

    The Congress enacts laws specifically intended to try to wield a deterrent effect. That’s questionable in itself in many instances (SOPA, e.g., from what I know about it). But for the enforcement/judicial functions to act prescriptively, violates my own understanding of these functions.

  7. Professor Turley – As much as I may agree that the prosecution may have been somewhat overzealous in the Swartz, this headline and story suggests that he was similarly overzealous and was wrongfully investigating Jonathan James. From what I have read about the James case, that is far from the truth. Jonathan James was a known criminal hacker convicted for breaking into and disrupted various defense agency and NASA systems. The later case Heynman was investigating was the hacking into of a department store chain’s system and the theft of millions of customers account information. James had known links to the ring of hackers that perpetrated this crime. While he indeed may have been innocent, it doesn’t seem to me that it was in any way overzeralous or unwarranted to be investigating James in that case.

    Unfortunately, both James and Swartz decided to end their lives rather than fight. Truly sad, that’s all.

  8. @DonS

    And my story is that DOJ locked me up without a criminal charge or a bail hearing because of what I filed in Federal Court — they didn’t prosecute me for obstruction of justice. I verified my documents under penalty of perjury and could have been prosecuted for perjury if I lied.

    They claimed I should be locked up for engaging in abusive litigation but there wasn’t proof that I was an abusive litigant and they sent an email saying they were opposed to an evidentiary hearing on that.

  9. Simply to repeat what so many here have noted, and linked to, there is a parallel between the ‘poster boy’ prosecution of Swartz, and the multiple other individuals who have been targeted and excessively charged for questioning the corporatist/militarist state.

    And as is typical when the power of government is used as a tool to crush questioning and certain non-conformity, the majority of the population are coopted; either in ignorance or in fear-based support.

    Restore some balance before it’s too late

    ————————-

    Boston Globe story:

    http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/01/15/humanity-deficit/bj8oThPDwzgxBSHQt3tyKI/story.html?s_campaign=sm_tw

  13. Credit to Elaine M. for the link.

    Breaking Someone With The Law

    By Charles P. Pierce
    1/15/13

    http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Case_Of_Aaron_Swartz

    “Back when rogue prosecutor Mike Nifong went crazy and ginned up a rape prosecution against several members of the Duke lacrosse team, there was a great deal of horror at how “the system” could have gone so horribly wrong. But it didn’t. It just got aimed for once at people with the financial and social wherewithal to fight back. There are minor-league Mike Nifongs in every precinct house and every federal law-enforcement operation and every DA’s office and all throughout the branch offices of the Department Of Justice. There are “Duke rape cases” happening every day in alleys and on streetcorners of every city, and on the dusty backroads on the outskirts of nowhere. They are there because we want them to be there. The cases happen because we want them to happen. Aaron Swartz ran into this culture here in Boston and now he’s dead, and people are angry at how the system operated in this case. They should be, but they should be angry not because the system failed, but because the system worked. It operated in exactly the way we have said as a society we want it to operate every time we cheer for “terrorist” arrests based on evidence produced by agents of the FBI. It operated in exactly the way we have said as a society it should operate every time we support warrantless wiretaps, or undercover provocateurs, or the denial of counsel to defendants who scare us the most. Our conduct, all of us, is accessorial to his death.”

  14. What made me so overwhelmingly angry yesterday was the same thing that has been boiling in my gut for the last two years. When the federal government went after him – and MIT sheepishly played along – they weren’t treating him as a person who may or may not have done something stupid. He was an example. And the reason they threw the book at him wasn’t to teach him a lesson, but to make a point to the entire Cambridge hacker community that they were p0wned. It was a threat that had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with a broader battle over systemic power. In recent years, hackers have challenged the status quo and called into question the legitimacy of countless political actions. Their means may have been questionable, but their intentions have been valiant. The whole point of a functioning democracy is to always question the uses and abuses of power in order to prevent tyranny from emerging. Over the last few years, we’ve seen hackers demonized as anti-democratic even though so many of them see themselves as contemporary freedom fighters. And those in power used Aaron, reframing his information liberation project as a story of vicious hackers whose terroristic acts are meant to destroy democracy.

    Reasonable people can disagree about tactics and where and when a particular approach pushes too far. Like Lessig, I often disagreed with Aaron about his particular approach to freeing the world’s information, even if I never disagreed with him about the goal. And one of the reasons why so many hackers and geeks spent yesterday raging against the machine is because so many people in power have been unable to see past the particular acts and understand the intentions and activism. So much public effort has been put into controlling and harmonizing geek resistance, squashing the rebellion, and punishing whoever authorities can get their hands on. But most geeks operate in gray zones, making it hard for them to be pinned down and charged. It’s in this context that Aaron’s stunt gave federal agents enough evidence to bring him to trial to use him as an example. They used their power to silence him and publicly condemn him even before the trial even began.

    Yesterday, there was an outpouring of information about his case, including an amazing account from the defense’s expert witness. Many people asked why people didn’t speak up before. I can only explain my reasoning. I was too scared to speak publicly for fear of how my words might be used against him. And I was too scared to get embroiled in the witch hunt that I’ve watched happen over the last three years. Because it hasn’t been about justice or national security. It’s been about power. And it’s at the heart and soul of why the Obama administration has been a soul crushing disappointment to me. I’ve gotten into a ridiculous number of fights over the last couple of years with folks in the administration over the treatment of geeks and the misunderstanding of hackers, but I could never figure how to make a difference on that front. This was a source of serious frustration for me, even as SOPA/PIPA showed that geeks could make a difference.

    So here we are today, the world lacking a prodigious child whose intellect scared the shit out of everyone who knew him. He became a toy for a government set on showing their strength. And they bullied him and preyed on his weaknesses and sought to break him. And they did. All for the performance of justice. All before he was even tried in a society that prides itself on innocent until proven guilty. Was depression key to what happened on Friday? Certainly. But it wasn’t the whole story. And that’s what makes it hard for me to stomach.
    http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2013/01/13/aaron-swartz.html

  15. Once again, arrogant prosecutors set out to destroy a human life, knowing full well that they faced no accountability whatsoever. All they needed to do was “expand the law” a bit to accomplish their horrifying goal: no human being can be expected to withstand such pressure. Those who did nothing to stop this, including academics, the media, and members of the current administration, should be deeply ashamed of what they have done. Their silence in the face of another disproportionate assault on reason, this time focused on academic whistle-blowing and satirical “Gmail confessions” in New York, is equally troubling. For documentation on this latest case, see:

    http://raphaelgolbtrial.wordpress.com/about/

  18. The family and friends of this young man will now have to live with that phantom limb ache … pain in an empty space.

    Oritz and Heymann will also live lives newly and completely defined by the manner in which this young man died. It is a cell of their own construction and an act that will follow them beyond their own deaths through the obituaries that others write about them.

  20. Nope mespo, if Aaron still had a healthy bank account and a real secure future as a free man, most likely he would still be living and working as a leader of his generation.

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