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MIT President on Aaron Swartz

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Re: MIT President on Aaron Swartz

#111

Post by stretchwithme »

jacquesm wrote: post #22
kristenlee wrote: post #7

Aaron Swartz was mentally ill and committed suicide as a direct result of his mental illness. He comtemplated suicide in 2007 long before any of this DOJ stuff happened. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dying Furthermore the "glorification" of his suicide is doing nothing more but encouraging other suicidal "hackers" to go over the edge so they have their "story" and inconsequential blog posts plastered all of Hacker Ne…

Yes, and if you looked carefully you'll notice that he didn't actually do anything until he was threatened with spending a life in jail and being bankrupted , without the option to get off without pleading guilty. And all that for trying to do something good. You describe yourself as a 'public interest lawyer'. I suggest you try to live up to that title and have the public interest at heart. The subject of your littl…

Even then, suicide is not the only option.

One could walk across a border, for example. Not the easiest course, not as easy as being released from responsibility for one's actions, but better than death for sure.

Re: MIT President on Aaron Swartz

#112

Post by [deleted] »

kristenlee wrote: post #7

Aaron Swartz was mentally ill and committed suicide as a direct result of his mental illness. He comtemplated suicide in 2007 long before any of this DOJ stuff happened. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dying Furthermore the "glorification" of his suicide is doing nothing more but encouraging other suicidal "hackers" to go over the edge so they have their "story" and inconsequential blog posts plastered all of Hacker Ne…

[deleted]

Re: MIT President on Aaron Swartz

#113

Post by [deleted] »

raganwald wrote: post #110
kristenlee wrote: post #7

Aaron Swartz was mentally ill and committed suicide as a direct result of his mental illness. He comtemplated suicide in 2007 long before any of this DOJ stuff happened. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dying Furthermore the "glorification" of his suicide is doing nothing more but encouraging other suicidal "hackers" to go over the edge so they have their "story" and inconsequential blog posts plastered all of Hacker Ne…

You're asking readers to grant you an awful lot of your assumptions. For example: "committed suicide as a direct result of his mental illness." Neither you nor I know that. Suicide is often precipitated by stressful incidents. Is the mental illness the direct cause? What if the stress is the direct cause and the mental illness simply prevents the depressed person from handling it, much as AIDS damaging the immune sys…

[deleted]

Re: MIT President on Aaron Swartz

#114

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

jacquesm wrote: post #22
kristenlee wrote: post #7

Aaron Swartz was mentally ill and committed suicide as a direct result of his mental illness. He comtemplated suicide in 2007 long before any of this DOJ stuff happened. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dying Furthermore the "glorification" of his suicide is doing nothing more but encouraging other suicidal "hackers" to go over the edge so they have their "story" and inconsequential blog posts plastered all of Hacker Ne…

Yes, and if you looked carefully you'll notice that he didn't actually do anything until he was threatened with spending a life in jail and being bankrupted , without the option to get off without pleading guilty. And all that for trying to do something good. You describe yourself as a 'public interest lawyer'. I suggest you try to live up to that title and have the public interest at heart. The subject of your littl…

He wasn't merely threatened with being bankrupted. He was bankrupted, and was having to rely on family for support as I understand it.

Re: MIT President on Aaron Swartz

#115

Post by buzaga2 »

kristenlee wrote: post #7

Aaron Swartz was mentally ill and committed suicide as a direct result of his mental illness. He comtemplated suicide in 2007 long before any of this DOJ stuff happened. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dying Furthermore the "glorification" of his suicide is doing nothing more but encouraging other suicidal "hackers" to go over the edge so they have their "story" and inconsequential blog posts plastered all of Hacker Ne…

I fucking hate this, put the "mental illness" stamp on someone and you can disregard everything else because the person "is sick", these abstract unscientific terms only serves to dehumanize people.

Re: MIT President on Aaron Swartz

#116

Post by mindcrime »

potatolicious wrote: post #38
objclxt wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"he was threatened with spending a life in jail and being bankrupted, without the option to get off without pleading guilty." ...I don't quite understand this. Surely he did have an option to "get off without pleading guilty" - to be found not guilty by a jury of his peers.

Except he was guilty, and didn't stand a chance in an actual trial. This part's not even controversial - Aaron was evidently fighting laws that he believed were unjust. The fact that he violated them is not in question. And a court would have no choice but to find him guilty, as that is the purpose of the judiciary. A court cannot let someone walk after a crime simply because the law itself is unjust.

A court cannot let someone walk after a crime simply because the law itself is unjust.

Yes they can.[1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

Re: MIT President on Aaron Swartz

#117

Post by Illychnosis »

rprasad wrote: post #97
dialtone wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong and it is intentionally designed in the system. Why then have the verdict of a jury be final, with impossibility of re-trial, even in the eyes of Congress, if not to defend the Constitutional Right of Jury nullification? From the same article[1] I quoted in another reply: Theophilus Parsons, first Chief Justice of Massachusetts, explained: The people themselves have it in their power to resist usurpatio…

As a former defense attorney, I would have loved it if jury nullification was intentionally designed into the system. Unfortunately, it's not. It's just a great side effect of the right to a trial by jury. In the American legal system, the modification of laws is left to the legislature. A jury can express its displeasure with a law by nullifying, but this has no legal import, since a different jury could easily conv…

> As a former defense attorney, I would have loved it if jury nullification was intentionally designed into the system.

Jury nullification is part of law. Design is the part that dictates that you, as a defense attorney, cannot inform juries of their power. The prosecutors certainly won't.

Every American jury has the power* to ignore the law and make their own verdict if they decide that's how justice would be served.

Last year, it became part of New Hampshire law to protect the right of the defense to inform juries of their power:

http://reason.com/blog/2012/06/29/new-hampshire-adopts-jury-...

*edit: changed "right" to "power"

Re: MIT President on Aaron Swartz

#118

Post by ChristianMarks »

Contrast the MIT statement with the distancing of JSTOR: http://about.jstor.org/statement-swartz

They write, "The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset..."

But in Lawrence Lessig's http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bull... he writes, "Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its."

According to Lessig, JSTOR was hardly "drawn into" their case against Swartz: they withdrew their own legal action against Swartz.

Re: MIT President on Aaron Swartz

#119

Post by newbie12 »

rprasad wrote: post #97
dialtone wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong and it is intentionally designed in the system. Why then have the verdict of a jury be final, with impossibility of re-trial, even in the eyes of Congress, if not to defend the Constitutional Right of Jury nullification? From the same article[1] I quoted in another reply: Theophilus Parsons, first Chief Justice of Massachusetts, explained: The people themselves have it in their power to resist usurpatio…

As a former defense attorney, I would have loved it if jury nullification was intentionally designed into the system. Unfortunately, it's not. It's just a great side effect of the right to a trial by jury. In the American legal system, the modification of laws is left to the legislature. A jury can express its displeasure with a law by nullifying, but this has no legal import, since a different jury could easily conv…

The don't teach enough constitutional history these days, apparently. Trial by jury and the jury's ability to nullify the prosecution's factually correct case are part of the same, intentional design of the American judicial system.

Re: MIT President on Aaron Swartz

#120

Post by todayiamme »

rprasad wrote: post #103
kristenlee wrote: post #7

Aaron Swartz was mentally ill and committed suicide as a direct result of his mental illness. He comtemplated suicide in 2007 long before any of this DOJ stuff happened. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dying Furthermore the "glorification" of his suicide is doing nothing more but encouraging other suicidal "hackers" to go over the edge so they have their "story" and inconsequential blog posts plastered all of Hacker Ne…

Kristen, please ignore jacquesm, he is a known troll. Public interest lawyers are far more valuable contributors to HN, and especially to this discussion, then the histrionics and hyperbole of him and his ilk.

I don't usually engage with people in this manner, but may I ask why you feel that jacquesm is a troll? Especially a "known troll?" He seems to be a rather passionate person who is willing to stand up for his views.
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