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#2Well, he's wrong about this. Quoting the maximum statutory penalty is the standard in news releases, but tells you exactly zero about the negotiations in attorney conferences. US attorneys don't write the press releases, those are done by the most junior lawyers and quote the statutory maximum because it's factual without giving anything away about the government's courtroom strategy.
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#3Linus is dead wrong on this. We have independent confirmation of everything that Ortiz said from the Boston Globe's interview with Aaron's defense attorney.
The maximum statutory penalty for the original 4 indictments was 35 years. The prosecutor was planning to seek 6-7 years. There were two plea bargains offered, one was 4 months and no disputing the period, the other was 6 months but the defense attorney would be allowed to try to convince the judge to lower it. (The judge, of course, is not bound to follow the plea bargain.) And the average cost of defending one of these is $1.5 million, which is money Aaron did not have and could not raise.
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#4Linus is dead wrong on this. We have independent confirmation of everything that Ortiz said from the Boston Globe's interview with Aaron's defense attorney. The maximum statutory penalty for the original 4 indictments was 35 years. The prosecutor was planning to seek 6-7 years. There were two plea bargains offered, one was 4 months and no disputing the period, the other was 6 months but the defense attorney would be…
And the average cost of defending one of these is $1.5 million, which is money Aaron did not have and could not raise.
I thought that justice system was required to provide an attorney in the case that a defendant didn't have the means by which to procure their own representation? Is your comment only to suggest that a public defender wouldn't be capable of properly defending Aaron and thus he would need to pay for his own lawyer?
If that's the case, then there is really something seriously wrong with our system if the inability to pay a lawyer basically condemns you to being guilty (or pleading) while the rich and defend themselves with teams of the best.
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#5Linus is dead wrong on this. We have independent confirmation of everything that Ortiz said from the Boston Globe's interview with Aaron's defense attorney. The maximum statutory penalty for the original 4 indictments was 35 years. The prosecutor was planning to seek 6-7 years. There were two plea bargains offered, one was 4 months and no disputing the period, the other was 6 months but the defense attorney would be…
And the average cost of defending one of these is $1.5 million, which is money Aaron did not have and could not raise. I thought that justice system was required to provide an attorney in the case that a defendant didn't have the means by which to procure their own representation? Is your comment only to suggest that a public defender wouldn't be capable of properly defending Aaron and thus he would need to pay for h…
I pulled the $1.5 million figure from http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/01/12/aaron-swartz/.
The justice system is required to provide an attorney if you can't get your own. However if you look at http://www.innocenceproject.org/ you'll find that incompetent representation is one of the major causes of innocent people losing these cases. Furthermore in Aaron's case he's being charged under a fairly specialized part of the law, so his odds with a generic defense lawyer against a prosecutor who has specialized in computer crimes would be very poor.
And yes, there is a lot seriously wrong with our system.
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#6Well, he's wrong about this. Quoting the maximum statutory penalty is the standard in news releases, but tells you exactly zero about the negotiations in attorney conferences. US attorneys don't write the press releases, those are done by the most junior lawyers and quote the statutory maximum because it's factual without giving anything away about the government's courtroom strategy.
What if there was no mention of the penalty they were seeking in negotiations or it was left highly ambiguous? In that situation I could see a public press release announcing that you might face 35 years in prison as quite threatening.
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#7Until Aarons' lawyer speaks up with evidence to the contrary Carmen Ortiz statement stands unchallenged. Much as I would like her to carry (or at least acknowledge) some actual responsibility for what she has helped causing there is a lot of room for interpretation here and saying 'she lied' in a legal sense is premature and may end up to be simply untrue.
Linus is a very clever guy but he's dead wrong about this.
I'm happy Linus is speaking out about this because he's a high profile person but it would be nice if he did his homework first, his words would then carry far more weight.
Ortiz has made several easily falsifiable statements, the fact that this has not happened - yet - means that at least in a technical sense she is possibly 'in the clear'. In a moral sense she has a ton of explaining to do and quite possibly some real culpability but law and lawyers deal in technicalities all the time.
She's attempting to weasel through a very narrow crack here but that's precisely what her profession and the eco-system she's operating in deal with.
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#8Linus is dead wrong on this. We have independent confirmation of everything that Ortiz said from the Boston Globe's interview with Aaron's defense attorney. The maximum statutory penalty for the original 4 indictments was 35 years. The prosecutor was planning to seek 6-7 years. There were two plea bargains offered, one was 4 months and no disputing the period, the other was 6 months but the defense attorney would be…
And the average cost of defending one of these is $1.5 million, which is money Aaron did not have and could not raise. I thought that justice system was required to provide an attorney in the case that a defendant didn't have the means by which to procure their own representation? Is your comment only to suggest that a public defender wouldn't be capable of properly defending Aaron and thus he would need to pay for h…
The only good that has come out of this horrible episode is that more people are finally starting to understand the problems of CFAA and with the unbalanced situation in federal cases.
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#9Well, he's wrong about this. Quoting the maximum statutory penalty is the standard in news releases, but tells you exactly zero about the negotiations in attorney conferences. US attorneys don't write the press releases, those are done by the most junior lawyers and quote the statutory maximum because it's factual without giving anything away about the government's courtroom strategy.
> US attorneys don't write the press releases, those are done by the most junior lawyers
Does it matter who wrote it? It came from her office, she approved it, and therefore she said it.
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#10Linus is dead wrong on this. We have independent confirmation of everything that Ortiz said from the Boston Globe's interview with Aaron's defense attorney. The maximum statutory penalty for the original 4 indictments was 35 years. The prosecutor was planning to seek 6-7 years. There were two plea bargains offered, one was 4 months and no disputing the period, the other was 6 months but the defense attorney would be…
"planning to seek...not bound to follow the plea bargain"
So basically, if you don't want to confess (because you're innocent), all bets are off and you might get 35 years.
How is he wrong?