- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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This tweet has some serious inaccuracies. He was offered a six month plea deal, which he turned down. The charges he faced carried a maximum time of 35 years, but that assumes they were served consecutively and to their maximum extent. Even without the plea deal, a first time non-violent offender with little chance of reoffending would have gotten a quite lenient sentence. However, he was never sentenced because he committed suicide before it went to trial.
I remember how sad I was when he died. He was a talented young man who had already made a name for himself in Internet culture. He’s also very close to me in age, so I saw some of myself in him. But it doesn’t serve his memory well to surround his death with falsehoods.
His death was caused by that very revolutionary thing he made a name about. He was against locking of big chunk of humanity’s knowledge behind paywalls making it effectively inaccessible for everyone and mostly from third world countries.
You certainly are demeaning his sacrifice by insinuating his suicide didn’t had any thing to do with going against JSTOR and hence US capitalism.
You certainly are demeaning his sacrifice by insinuating his suicide didn’t had any thing to do with going against JSTOR and hence US capitalism.
I didn’t say anything of the sort. This tweet is simply stuffed full of oft repeated lies.
Why do you always feel the need to carry water for your regime?
Why do you always assume that I am either acting in bad faith or stupid? I saw something that is objectively false and corrected it. Simple. As. That.
It’s because you’re incapable of acknowledging basic facts about the nature of the empire. The tweet is objectively correct. You could argue it’s not nuanced, but it’s simply a fact that Swartz committed suicide as a result of being prosecuted by the US regime.
I’m not nitpicking. It’s simply objectively incorrect to say he was sentenced (he wasn’t) or that it was 35 years (off by 70x compared to the plea deal). Could you argue that a six month plea deal was itself too much? Absolutely, and I would agree with that, especially given that MIT never asked for charges. But you can argue that plenty well with the facts and not resort to repeating lies.
Sure, he likely wouldn’t have got the maximum sentence, but that’s just distracting from the point that prosecution by the regime was what led to his suicide.
Despite what the image says, Aaron Swartz was actually never convicted of a crime in a court of law, and hence never sentenced. He was harassed by prosecutors, who posthumously dismissed the charges against him they were hounding him with (possibly because they were annoyed by earlier legal conduct of his that got prosecutors reprimanded by judges for inappropriate inclusion of private data in unsealed filings).
Sounds like the prosecution only dropped it because people were blaming them for his suicide and there was a public outcry. More cowardly than generous for them to drop the charges TBH. I doubt they did it because they actually realized how asinine the charges were.
