Prosecutors (and lawyers in general) are all about drama and story. Everything is amplified. Reality is distorted. It's worse than cable television.
Ortiz framed a brilliant, selfless young man as a criminal who should be locked up behind bars. She and others inflicted mental torture on him until he couldn't bear to live any longer.
She is no doubt a wordsmith, but she is not a nice person, no matter what the gullible fools on HN say. She shouldn't be working with and against people anymore, or for the government.
To think that a carefully calculated statement could 'clear the deck' and make everything even-steven is ludicrous.
A sense of pride has long been important to Ortiz who “knew
all along [she] wanted to be a lawyer.”
“I never thought about doing anything else. Maybe it was
watching trials on TV, and thinking it was exciting to be
in front of a jury arguing a case. That fascinated me. (At
George Washington University Law School)
> She and others inflicted mental torture on him until he couldn't bear to live any longer.
That is an idiotic thing to say, and it only raises doubt about all of your other statements.
Aaron was chronically depressed for years. People who are chronically depressed tend to kill themselves, or at least try to. Their external circumstances are rarely the cause of their suicide. It's up to you to prove that this lawsuit caused him to commit suicide, and he wouldn't have otherwise.
For example, why did David Foster Wallace kill himself? He was at the top of his career, critically acclaimed author, had a loving partner, and yet he still took his own life.
1) his lawyer and his closest family seem to agree that the lawsuit was the driving force
2) he did it on the anniversary of the start of the lawsuit
3) the actual trial was to start shortly
4) So far when under outside pressure he held up pretty good, but this was pressure far exceeding his previous exposure
Now, none of that is conclusive proof. But I don't see any reason brought forward other than the lawsuit why he killed himself. Absent such proof I tend to believe strongly that this was the reason why he did it.
If you don't want to believe that then that's fine with me but it does mean that you are ignoring some evidence right in front of your eyes.
It's a lot easier to blame the attorney prosecuting your child for his suicide than to point to his chronic depression (which I've not really seen acknowledged by them)...
It's a lot easier to blame a defendants suicide on his mental state than on your prosecution.
Aarons parents are under no obligation to acknowledge their sons mental state because he has acknowledged so himself in lots of places. That does not mean that this absolves everybody else from blame.
He may well have done so, but it comes across as disingenuous to mention one very pertinent detail (a /highly/ aggressive prosecution), and leave out another (chronic depression going on for many years).
No-one is saying anyone is absolved of 'blame' or being a factor in Aaron's decision.
Aaron was indeed unusually vulnerable. This vulnerability does not excuse the prosecutorial overreach which triggered his suicide. This overreach would merely have been devastating and life-altering to a normal person, but for Aaron, it pushed him over the edge.
Consider a hypothetical example. I'm not sure if this ever really happened in the Civil Rights movement (or if it did, that it was reported), but you can imagine that a black man, on the brink of death, was refused care at a "white only" hospital. He dies on the way to the "negro hospital". The public, faced with this stark story, see the deep injustice of it, and clamor for segregation to end and for the resignation of the hospital personnel responsible for the man's death.
>Ortiz framed a brilliant, selfless young man as a criminal who should be locked up behind bars.
Law is about drama? There's plenty of drama and hyperbole in your post. He broke the law. Which means he is a criminal.
If you think the laws are retarded, then how you protest that is your prerogative. If you choose to protest by blatantly and purposely breaking the law, unless you are 99.999% certain that an obvious interpretation of the law violates the constitution, you should expect to get charged and convicted of breaking said law.
Prosecutors aren't hired to be nice, they are hired to represent the state and bring charges against people who violate the state's laws. If you seriously think that he shouldn't be charged with breaking the law because 'he didn't deserve it', 'he did not have malicious intentions' or 'the law is dumb', then by extension no one should be convicted of any crime, because there will always be some point of view where you could think that of anyone.
The prosecutor's case was pretty tenuous. Basically, by accessing a network that intentionally has no real access control in an unusual way, and accessing JSTOR in an unusual way through that network -- a network for which a JSTOR subscription is available -- Aaron supposedly committed a crime (or was it 13 crimes? Or 4 crimes?). Unless you want to make the argument that doing strange things is criminal, it is hard to see how exactly any law was broken here.
"If you seriously think that he shouldn't be charged with breaking the law because 'he didn't deserve it', 'he did not have malicious intentions' or 'the law is dumb', then by extension no one should be convicted of any crime, because there will always be some point of view where you could think that of anyone."
If you think every violation of the law should be prosecuted, prepare yourself for some jail time; it is a near certainty that you have committed at least one felony offense in your life, and it is likely that you have committed more. Can you seriously claim not to be a criminal -- have you actually read all laws that you are expected to follow?
This conservative "the law is right and absolute" perspective is truly scary. Laws are passed by people, and are often severely flawed. Laws are often misapplied -- laws meant to protect banks and the government from hackers are applied to people who download too much knowledge, laws meant to protect children from pedophiles are applied to comic book collectors, etc. The far-right law-and-order attitude is the reason America is the world leader in both arresting people and imprisoning them -- not just per-capita, but on raw numbers, we arrest and imprison more people than China, and that even accounts for the recent decline in the prison population.
He allegedly broke the law. According to network security expert Alex Stamos, an expert witness in the case, the worst thing you can say about Aaron's actions is that they were "inconsiderate", not criminal.
I've refrained from posting here as I'm in the UK, not my issue &c but I do work with young offenders and adults in retraining &c.
'criminal' is not a 'type' or irrevocable condition. It is a social status that exists in the mind of people and state records, especially in this case with little measureable damage to anything or anyone.
First of all, he hasn't been convicted of ANY law breaking. Secondly, if Ortiz wanted a lesser sentence and was 100% sure he was going to be convicted (the criminal part), she could have brought one count to avoid the stiffer sentencing.
Ortiz framed a brilliant, selfless young man as a criminal who should be locked up behind bars. She and others inflicted mental torture on him until he couldn't bear to live any longer.
She is no doubt a wordsmith, but she is not a nice person, no matter what the gullible fools on HN say. She shouldn't be working with and against people anymore, or for the government.
To think that a carefully calculated statement could 'clear the deck' and make everything even-steven is ludicrous.