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Prosecutor as bully

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Re: Prosecutor as bully

#101

Post by lazyGeneral »

agwa wrote: post #18

From the article: For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. Remember, this was on HN just a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?…

I can imagine and believe that defending yourself against the US government is costly, what I don't understand is what the breakdown of all expenses would look like.

What services do you need to purchase/hire that you wouldn't get in a normal court case?

Is it because you spend a lot more time in court or in preparation?

Do you need to choose among lawyers with special certification? What type of paperwork do you need to produce?

In the Latin America (where I am) I could easily see the biggest expenses being bribes and it is in general what I think of when you need a problem solved. (Not a good thing at all...)

P.S. Making an infographic about a case like this vs a regular court case would be an interesting project and could help us make the case for Aaron...anyone want to help by looking for data / making one on your own?

Re: Prosecutor as bully

#102

Post by SoftwareMaven »

olefoo wrote: post #50
agwa wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is business as usual. Naming the prosecutor isn't going to accomplish anything - the whole system needs fixing. Just a week ago this was on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5003335 I don't think they seized Swartz' assets in this case but they didn't need to - they made his defense as expensive as possible and bled him dry.

Make no mistake, this means she will always be facing serious opposition should she choose to run for public office. And since she was appointed by President Obama, it is entirely appropriate for those of us who feel strongly that she misused her position; to ask him to remove her from office for failing to exercise her discretion appropriately.

Because Obama has shown so much interest in listening to those who voted him in, right? Copyright maximalists are exstatic about this prosecution, and that's the trough Obama feeds from. That slop doesn't smell any better than the Republican's trough.

Also, remember that Swartz was a key player in the SOPA/PIPA campaign. Do you think anybody in the government is sad about this? There will be no support from Obama on this. I doubt you could get an acknowledgement of any kind out of him.

Re: Prosecutor as bully

#103

Post by drzaiusapelord »

larrys wrote: post #56
temphn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naming and shaming Carmen M. Ortiz for destroying the life of a young man is exactly what is necessary. She brought 13 felony counts against him for downloading articles that should be freely available, after JSTOR itself had dropped the charges. Destroying her career and seeing her fired in disgrace will send a message to all other overzealous prosecutors, in the same way that she surely thought her prosecution of S…

"after JSTOR itself had dropped the charges" From a practical matter a prosecutor might decline to prosecute if they can't get the cooperation of someone (needed to testify or provide evidence) but this should have no bearing on whether to prosecute or not. You could have a crime committed and the crime is worthy of prosection. The fact that someone believes (as an extreme example) that a person who committed assault…

>but this should have no bearing on whether to prosecute or not.

"We were just following orders" and "We were just doing our jobs" and "We were doing what the law told us to do" aren't the indefensible moral positions you seem to think they are. Laws are written by men and enforced by men. Just the idea that all prosecutors are slaves to these laws is so incredibly naive I almost don't know what to say to you, but I'll try to sum it up:

At best, this was a simple copyright issue that the two parties chose to work out. At worst, this was a white collar crime, and with all white collar crimes, your political capital determines what happens to you. Aaron had no political capital. The support of people like Lessig or Doctorow or the EFF is meaningless in DC. Carmen Ortiz understood this. Now here we are.

Re: Prosecutor as bully

#104

Post by lazyGeneral »

dmix wrote: post #54
temphn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naming and shaming Carmen M. Ortiz for destroying the life of a young man is exactly what is necessary. She brought 13 felony counts against him for downloading articles that should be freely available, after JSTOR itself had dropped the charges. Destroying her career and seeing her fired in disgrace will send a message to all other overzealous prosecutors, in the same way that she surely thought her prosecution of S…

How do we go about getting this message across to her and other key people (legally)? I'm interested in helping.

Make an infographic that attracts attention.

I unfortuantley do not know how I would even start doing one, but some comments have data like "97% of all people plead guilty" we could see what the average number of time in Jail is, pull out some quotes.

I posted abt it here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5048729 and the types of question we would need to figure out relating to court costs and things like that.

Re: Prosecutor as bully

#105

Post by JumpCrisscross »

lilsunnybee wrote: post #48
spindritf wrote: post #15

> architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House Is this empty rhetoric really necessary? There were no architects. It took over two decades of government (mis)regulation, whole banking ecosystem of incentives and repackaging, not to mention plenty of people willing to take loans they knew they wouldn't be able to pay back to bring about the crisis. Same with some great moral wrong of downloadin…

Magnetar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar_Capital

Asset managers wanted exposure to certain credits.

CDOs created a liquid vehicle for those credit exposures.

Because of market inefficiencies the prices of the liquid CDOs went much higher than the underlying mortgages (equivalent to you adding up the constituents of the S&P 500 and finding the index trades much dearer than the stocks because of, say, a financial transactions tax that makes trading the stocks individually difficult).

Arbitrageurs attempted to correct/take advantage of the mis-pricing by turning the underlying assets into CDOs.

Sometimes, due to the difficulty of procuring the underlying assets, synthetic CDOs were created that quacked like regular CDOs but were made of plastic. Synthetic CDOs use swaps to amplify the underlying assets' credit exposures - these swaps need two sides, a long and a short.

In the midst of the housing boom it was difficult to find people willing to bet against the housing market. Issuers decided to let the short side help construct the reference portfolio of the synthetic CDO on the assumption that if houses are safe as houses it's the same as letting a gambler choose which of the casino-provided dice are rolled.

It's easier to say Magnetar was evil, but as usual, the truth is substantially more nuanced (or, banal, from higher up - market inefficiencies and artificially advantaged participants, i.e. federally protected banks, mixed to produce enormous yet fragile superstructures).

Re: Prosecutor as bully

#106

Post by temphn »

andrewtbham wrote: post #99
temphn wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously very important to stay on the bright white side of legal here, as we are dealing with a prosecutorial bully. Emailing her directly is unlikely to produce results and likely to get your name on some kind of terrorist watch list. But going to her superiors and the Boston media to call for her resignation in disgrace over an overzealous prosecution is the right tactic. 0) Start with background: http://www…

I do like these tactics and... I am in favor of naming and shaming. I think she should be made the poster child for overzealous prosecution of a outdated law. However, it is a story that could serve a larger purpose than just ruining this woman's career. I would like to this effort put into something more constructive like the decriminalization of copyright infringement. It could be relegated to a civil issue, especi…

Very much agree. Getting her out of office is the beginning of that conversation.

Re: Prosecutor as bully

#107

Post by agwa »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97
anon3456 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/Statistics/JudicialBusiness... No, it actually isn't. You have to look at convictions, acquittals, and dismissals to form an accurate assessment of the outcome of criminal prosecutions. When you factor in dismissals, the conviction rate, whether by a plea of guilty or no contest, or as a result of a trial, drops to 90-91%.

So 97% is "absurd" but 90-91% is well within reason? Moreover, in many cases the cause of a dismissal is that the prosecutor requested it, e.g. because the entire charge was a farce meant to intimidate the defendant and it by that point had either failed or (more likely) succeeded to do so and no longer needed to be maintained.

Right - dismissals of some counts often happen as part of a guilty plea.

Still, wording is important: both I and the parent poster should have said 97% was the percentage of convictions which resulted from pleas, not the percentage of indicted defendants which plead guilty. I think taking percentage of convictions is the correct metric to use - given the ideals of innocent until proven guilty and the right to trial, you would hope that most convictions were the result of a trial rather than a vanishingly small (and getting smaller) 3%.

It's also quite telling that even with statistics haggling, the anonymous poster still conceded a whopping 90%.

Re: Prosecutor as bully

#108

Post by csense »

Assuming he did it -- or he didn't but was going to be found guilty anyway -- wouldn't fifty years for this nonviolent crime, done in the Martin Luther King Jr. spirit of civil disobedience, by a person with (I assume) no prior criminal record, be Unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment?

Re: Prosecutor as bully

#109

Post by AnthonyMouse »

agwa wrote: post #96
olefoo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make no mistake, this means she will always be facing serious opposition should she choose to run for public office. And since she was appointed by President Obama, it is entirely appropriate for those of us who feel strongly that she misused her position; to ask him to remove her from office for failing to exercise her discretion appropriately.

> Make no mistake, this means she will always be facing serious opposition should she choose to run for public office. Beware, given the people's love of tough-on-crime politicians, drawing any attention to her career as a prosecutor, even if negative, might only help her. Most people outside of HN probably see Aaron Swartz as a criminal and this tragedy isn't going to have serious sway. Consider that factually innoc…

A huge part of the problem is that there is no lobby for largely innocent people who are stripped of all their assets and locked in prison indefinitely, but there are strong lobbies for "tough on crime": Police unions want more "resources" (i.e. cash in their members' pockets) for crime fighting, especially if the "crime" involves suspects who are very unlikely to harm investigators, like "computer" crimes. Private prisons want more prisoners so that they grow their "business" -- and if they're innocent all the better, because good, honest people are less violent inmates. Victims' groups suffer from "what have you done for me lately" disease, where to get support from their constituencies they need to continually be making it harder for anyone accused to not be convicted and anyone convicted to ever see the light of day again, with no real incentive to care whether those accused and convicted are guilty or innocent.

And, of course, there are no strong "innocent convicts" special interest groups because their constituencies, though numbering in the millions, have no money and can't vote.

Re: Prosecutor as bully

#110

Post by arbuge »

Well said. The prosecutor seems to be the party acting criminally in this case. What balance is there in the system to prevent such blatantly evil prosecutorial excess from occurring?
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