Out of the 94 U.S. DA offices, her office alone collected ~67% of the total criminal and civil fines in 2012, mostly owing to the successful prosecution of drug companies. Her success led to speculation that she would run for higher office:
http://www.mainjustice.com/2013/01/07/mass-u-s-attorney-carm...
She is no stranger to being part of a disenfranchised group, as she was the first Hispanic and first woman to hold the position of U.S. attorney in Boston. Her first internship was with the DOJ's public integrity unit, created after Watergate:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011...
She's not of the "evil prosecutor" mold as is commonly thought and her background, particularly her history of fighting white-collar crime and corporations, doesn't strike me as someone who is intent on screwing the little guy over. That said, the seemingly-excessive charges could stem from a result of misconception and, let's face it, technological ignorance (hacking sounds bad, period). But in solving the overall problem in the justice system, let's not attribute to malice what can be attributed to other issues just yet.
My intent is not to say that the petition is wrong, but to argue that if people are going to call for action, call it for the right and productive reasons, rather than simplifying cause and effect to just one main person (even if the buck technically stops with her).
Honestly I don't care if she spends her nights and weekends caring for orphans and war widows. She's a politician who treated Aaron Swartz as a pawn in the political game she is playing.
No doubt she intended for her campaign for governor to describe her as a "staunch defender of intellectual property rights" who, as prosecutor, put a "dangerous hacker behind bars" for "breaking into MIT and stealing millions of dollars of federally funded research."
The Obama administration has thrown better people than her out the airlock because they became political liabilities. We need to add a new rule to the political rulebook that she's playing by. Ending her career is necessary to send a lesson to every other prosecutor who sees a guy like Aaron the way a housecat sees a cornered rat.
I had the misfortune of having a wannabe-politician as prosecutor going after me. She didn't care that I was a first time offender, and she could care less about the destruction to my profession and my ability to support my family. I was lucky enough to have a judge who had the sense to realize what was going on, and a lawyer who, due to the simplicity of the case, didn't bankrupt me.
I'll never forget looking into the prosecutors eyes as she treated me like anything but a human being, and tried to needlessly destroy my life. Had she succeeded in her stated goals, I would have lost my job at a time when I couldn't possibly afford to. My consequences for my infant son and stay-at-home wife gave her zero pause, but thankfully the judge saw me as a human being, and was intelligent enough to conduct an instant cost/benefit analysis for society in her head.
I seriously doubt that any of this is unique to a few prosecutors. At the end of the day, their incentives are not for the social good. Individually, they want a flawless record as a victor, costs to their victims be damned.
I'll second this, if you stand accused of a political crime just watch out. They will stop at nothing to convict you, and redouble their efforts once they find out they've been duped into prosecuting you to support someone's agenda.
She was exceptionally pissed to have to agree to stay the charges.
I think you're missing the point vis a vis "fix the machine, not the person".
The tactics described in the petition are ingrained in the US justice system. Getting rid of a single prosecutor isn't going to change a damn thing because the injustices are systemic, not the product of a vindictive individual.
Like Aaron said, shouting at the gears isn't going to fix the machine.
I have to disagree, when people realize the risk is personal they'll take care to make sure what they're doing is right. Just following orders is never a valid excuse. Of course we should stop with the prosecutor we should continue on to try and fix the machine, but at the very least if prosecutors know they're responsible for their actions it'll add an additional check to the system.
It's been taken down by Pastebin, evidently Pastebin likes protecting assholes, here's another, but I only grabbed part of it before it went down: http://pastebin.com/WvY5RnjV
Like Aaron said, shouting at the gears isn't going to fix the machine.
But excising the broken, unfit, insidiously malicious gear from the machine will make said machine one gear short of harming the innocent-until-proven-guilty.
Ortiz comes across to me as a better than average human being who did something evil because she seems to have been morally confused about something. I don't think Ortiz is, say, as bad as Kissinger.
Maybe the evil justifies the revenge of removing Ortiz. But this petition striking me as an exercise in nastiness. Wouldn't an official, public reprimand be better?
If engineers started getting sacked for breaking the build, you can be damned sure people would get very scrupulous about only committing working code, whether they're fresh out of school or greybeards.
No, it's not a perfect analogy, but I don't think it needs to be.
If you did it every time, sure. That's called changing the system. Sacking one engineer for breaking one build and then going back to encouraging all the other engineers for making as many commits as possible, and giving raises and promotions to engineers who make the most commits, while sweeping all the other broken builds under the rug, would just be scapegoating.
How many software engineers or their professional peers have been nudged, pushed or shoved into committing suicide because of a broken build? No, really?
When a person in position of authority is maliciously responsible for driving people to the brink of suicide and then some, they need to be held to a higher standard because of the very position they hold.
This episode is not an excuse for a witch-hunt of those in power, but the people who precipitated this episode need to be excised from their position precisely because of the irresponsible witch-hunt they carried out.
> How many software engineers or their professional peers have been nudged, pushed or shoved into committing suicide because of a broken build?
It wasn't my shitty analogy to begin with. You're missing the point: getting one prosecutor fired won't change anything, because everyone above and below that prosecutor will continue operating the exact same way.
getting one prosecutor fired won't change anything
Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. But de-throning that one prosecutor will, in her own words, serve as a message [0] to others of her kind that reckless, power-drunk actions have real-world repercussions.
> "But de-throning that one prosecutor will, in her own words, serve as a message"
No, it won't. People respond to risks and rewards, and we've shown amply over the years that the severity of punishment has little deterrent effect on future offenses if the odds of getting caught aren't high enough.
In other words, by throwing one prosecutor to the wolves, we have no inspired any behavioral change in other prosecutors, because we've shown that once every few decades we will punish one person - and that's stacked against the systemic pressures they face to prosecute as many people as vigorously as possible, every day.
This is the same reason why the death sentence, as severe as it is, has basically no effect on crime rates, because it's not handed out with enough regularity to be a deterrent (whether or not we should have the death sentence is another story altogether).
To achieve the "message sending" you want, we will have to regularly investigate many prosecutors, such that the odds of escaping their reckless prosecutorial actions are low. This is what most other people call "changing the system" ;)
Outlier one-offs is just compounding tragedy upon tragedy.
The federal government is more or less designed to function by sacrificing pawns over these kinds of controversies without ever addressing the policies, cultures, or root causes that led to those controversies in the first place. And this goes all the way up to the cabinet level. Sacking one federal prosecutor will do nothing. Even sacking Eric Holder wouldn't change anything--I can't remember a single attorney general who was worth a damn and the first one I remember is Janet Reno.
It is important to note; we don't and should not punish citizens, civilian or government employed, for being vindictive. We punish/rehabilitate them so that they won't hurt another human again. Unfortunately the courtroom can be a vicious, painful environment--aggressive behavior is awarded there. I think many parties are to blame--a public Government apology of any kind and promises to do better would at least be a place to start.
You can't break a few eggs when they are so valuable. And how can they not realize how sad this is? It makes me feel sick.
Perhaps not, but we should remove vindictive individuals who are charged with meting out justice. Ortiz is one of those individuals. And we do this so they can do no more harm.
Sacking one won't do it, no. But getting one sacked is a necessary step to getting them all sacked. You do it this time. Then you do it again. And again. Until they get the message.
My guess is she is just as vituperative and mean to people who work in in her office. She has done far more harm to this country in her mistreatment of Aaron Swartz than she can ever atone for.
Yeah, the result of ending her career is both to punish her, and to establish a precedent so all future US Attorneys are appropriately concerned that if they commit egregious violations of the public trust and their oath of office, even if technically in compliance with the law, public outcry will lead to their dismissal and a career working in food service.
treated Aaron Swartz as a pawn in the political game she is playing
Well, maybe. It's also entirely possible that she was just doing her job, and didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing.
This hits the nail on the head. If the government can form legislation in a domain, and have the power to prosecute in a domain it should completely understand said domain. Ignorance on many levels is the reason for much of the discontent and injustice occurring where government and internet coalesce.
> and didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing.
She had the resources to hire the types of experts who are what I call "executive whisperers." She doesn't need to know what a perl script is to understand what happened at JSTOR.
On top of it, when the "victim" JSTOR is saying "what the hell, why are you prosecuting this guy?" Then its pretty obvious we're looking at political motivations here. Sorry, but you have way too much faith in people if you think what just happened was one big 'honest mistake.'
She is still responsible. There is a chain of command and she is the one getting the pats on the back if a lot of prosecutions go through and crime goes down in the country, but that means she also gets to respond for fuck ups.
Very entirely possible. However I have a hard time believing that someone smart enought to make it through law school and pass the bar is not be able to learn enough about technology and motivations behind the actions in this case.
As a tax payer I don't want a prosecutor who doesn't know who to go after or how far to go. From reading the thread(s) here and loosely following the case in the news I am not convinced that the money spent to prosecute this case was the best possible use of my tax dollars.
"However I have a hard time believing that someone smart enought to make it through law school and pass the bar is not be able to learn enough about technology and motivations behind the actions in this case."
Much of law is a very technologically backwards field. Up until recently, some law schools (and not backwater ones, but major top-tier ones) only accepted hard-copy, type-written (as in, on a physical typewriter) applications. Harvard's student library had several typewriters specifically for this purpose.
That does not mean that someone who goes to a law school like Harvard's is not smart enough to learn about the high level concepts driving things things outside legal education. This is especially true for someone who goes through said school and strives to become a prosecutor with political ambitions. For if they attain high level success as a prosecutor and in the political arena yet they cannot understand the fundamental difference between malicious intent and a prank rooted in activism then they are a scary person to be in a position of power. They will be making and implementing policy decisions with arbitrary and personal bias not hard facts.
Someone in a position of power is not strong unless they know when to apply the full amount of power entrusted to them and when to practice restraint; when and how to apply less so that the level of punishment is commiserate with the crime being prosecuted. It is bad for our society to give give someone a pass when they over prosecute a crime in both the short term and the long term.
Whether or not she totally understood the situation, she's just as liable. Either way, she'd be doing a horrible thing. You don't wield such power so haphazardly or harshly and still be a good person.
"We need to add a new rule to the political rulebook that she's playing by. Ending her career is necessary to send a lesson to every other prosecutor who sees a guy like Aaron the way a housecat sees a cornered rat."
Yes it's vitally important that there be a completely different and much weaker standard of justice applied to wealthy software developers then those other people.
"Ending her career is necessary to send a lesson to every other prosecutor"
Messaging that violating proportionality in such crimes is electorally unacceptable is necessary. Villainising a messenger of the law is not.
I do not doubt that Mme Ortiz believes, or at least believed, that what she did is right. Her sense of morality was reinforced by her institutional context and is not unique for a prosecutor. She simply failed to recognise when she stepped outside the bounds where her values are recognised - this is not all that dissimilar from Aaron Swartz. As she should have done in his case, if we intend to use her to send a message, there is no need to do so with such zeal.
I am highly conflicted about signing this petition. The call for bloodletting should never ring so clearly.
I signed, and posted on Facebook the following reason to do so: "Go sign this, if you haven't already. The description fits a lot of prosecutors, but this seems as good a place as any to start cleaning up." The job of a prosecutor is to prosecute, and if they aren't careful, they fall victim to the Iron Law of Bureaucracy (http://www.google.com/search?q=Iron+Law+of+Bureaucracy). Max Weber (1864–1920), a believer in the efficiency of bureaucracies, would also have a agreed with Pournelle; Wikipedia phrases it thusly: "Weber also saw it as a threat to individual freedoms, and the ongoing bureaucratization as leading to a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in the aforementioned "iron cage" of bureaucratic, rule-based, rational control. In order to counteract bureaucrats, the system needs entrepreneurs and politicians." That's what this petition is all about. It's a warning to the politicians that the prosecutorial bureaucracy has gone too far.
As the author of the petition, the most I hope for is that it reaches the threshold to deserve a response. I do not expect Ms. Ortiz to lose her position, although I clearly do think that such an outcome would be salutary for the legal profession as a whole and the current DOJ in particular.
However, even if that came to pass, she would still be a top flight lawyer with a broad set of connections; at worst she would move on to another position.
You say that "She simply failed to recognise when she stepped outside the bounds where her values are recognised - this is not all that dissimilar from Aaron Swartz." The difference, of course, is that Aaron Swartz merely published documents, she was trying to send him to prison for almost the rest of his natural life.
I sure hope you can see the proportional difference between the two acts!
My Grandfather, who was the US Attorney for west Memphis, once explained that prosecuting the law was messy. It was messy because there was rarely a case which hinged on exactly one part of the law or that had circumstances that nicely isolated the principle at stake. He was talking about pornography, and the difficulty of a general consensus that pornography was "bad" and should be outlawed, with the challenge of defining exactly what it was and the actual "bad" part of it.
I see a lot of parallels between his struggle to enforce pornography laws with the current struggle to enforce copyright laws. These situations seem to arise when there is a fundamental disconnect between what "the people" think and what "the system" thinks. "The system" is represented by a codified set of strictures that are put in place by a variety of people representing what they assert are the best interests of "the people." Whereas the people themselves, act in what they consider a rational way given their understanding of or perhaps agreement to, the laws of the land. Finally our system of laws are a combination of written text, and argued cases, and the sum of those is an emergent thing thought of as public policy. When the rational acting people don't consent to the public policy, there is a rash of disobedience, and whether it is alcohol, porn, or copyright, the process of emerging to a consensus is challenging at best.
One possible explanation for the zeal in which this case was pursued may be the lack of confounding factors with respect to copyright infringement, as codified by law. I don't know of course so this is just speculation. Having a clear, published, decision on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of what Aaron was doing might have been seen as a way to clear up a confusing pile of statutes and other decisions. An unambiguous marker between fair use and infringement, or perhaps a litmus test for intent. We'll probably never know.
Sure, but I don't know if it would move the copyright reform question along. Copyright is very broken in a number of ways but there is broad consensus in people I've talked to that it is especially broken with regards to public records and science research. In the best of all possible worlds Aaron would have been acquitted with a landmark decision that said "this use of copyright in rent seeking behavior on documents of public discourse is unconstitutional."[1] Aaron was doing perhaps more than he knew to push this conversation along, had I known he was in such dire straits in his defense fund I would have helped in any way I could have. Clearly others would as well.
If you look at Carmen's career you will find that she has actually done a lot of good, in getting bad folks put behind bars. She, or her staff, blew it on this one. I wish I knew why. I doubt we'll get the actual story there.
So to what end would ending her career advance Aaron's goal of getting copyright on public records overturned? Making people "afraid" to prosecute it is the wrong answer, making it "not a crime" is the answer. There are only two ways to do that, one is to repeal the statute that makes it a crime in the first place, the second is to litigate the statute and find that the statute is invalid.
Firing Carmen doesn't help, although I completely understand the emotional appeal of doing so.
[1] I know that would not have happened it is illustrative.
All the good she's done doesn't matter, because when you're a prosecutor, all it takes is one mistake and you've could have blood on your hands. Firing her would send a message to other prosecutors that mistakes will not be tolerated.
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
If you get drunk, hop in your car, and accidentally kill some people, then guess what? It doesn't matter if it was an accident. If your "accident" is big enough, it becomes indistinguishable from malice and you get held accountable.
And yet, even given DUI laws of varying (arguably insufficient) harshness people still drive drunk. 20 years from now or so, when self-driving cars are the norm, DUI will thankfully be a relic of the past, and many lives will be saved.
I severely disagree with this, and find it one of the most destructive mentalities persistent in society.
I have a good friend whose father was abusive, and a perfectionist. My friend, as a consequence, holds everyone to an impossible standard - most of all herself - and it's sad to watch, especially given that she's one of the most brilliant, passionate, hard-working people I know. When you expect and demand perfection from people, you will only be let down.
I believe people are well intentioned, but fallible, and demanding retribution for every failing is just a pretty crappy way to go through life. I am very willing to forgive, and only hope that, in my life, others will forgive me when I don't do right (and I'm under no illusions that I always do the right thing)
If it is an accident, exactly what purpose would punishing them serve?
If it was due to negligence, then there is the issue of to what extent it has a preventative effect.
I'm Norwegian. One of the aspects of the Norwegian legal systems is short prison sentences. The legal maximum sentence is 21 years with a recent modification that allows for extensions (this must be included in the conviction, and is restricted to particularly severe crimes) if the prisoner is considered to still be a risk to society. On top of this, a prisoner is usually let out after 2/3 is served, assuming good behaviour, and will get time limited parole even before that (such as weekends with their family).
So a few months ago, for example, a major newspaper published an interview with a woman convicted of a double murder a decade or so ago, carried out at a cafe while she was out of prison for the day on one of her first parole days. In this case still accompanied by a police officer.
And you know what? I'm happy about that, because we also have one of the lowest re-offending rates.
Vengeance is not a good basis for a legal system.
And if what you want is to minimize harm to the public (and that includes those you put in prison, before someone gets the bright idea that lifetime confinement is a solution), punishment simply doesn't work very well.
This isn't like like murder or robbery, where the criminal can more or less reoffend at will. You can't prosecute unless you are an official, government-recognized prosecutor. If she is removed from her job, she won't be able to prosecute anyone ever again.
Consider this allegory as a way to recontextualize the question.
Let's say that you have a software project, and one of the engineers on the project is fixing bugs. His bug fixes generally fix the bug but often are found to have performance impacts, or later when another problem is found his bug fixes require complex refactoring.
This person is doing their job, day in and day out. Will firing them make your system any better? No, it won't.
This is a management problem, the manager talks to this guy and sets guidelines and standards for his bug fixes, the manager creates policies around how bug fixes are evaluated and the way in which engineers are evaluated that fix them. And then if this engineer can't do the job, as the manager needs it done, then you let them go because you really need a better engineer in that slot.
Its always the manager's fault if someone is let go for just doing their job. If how they did it is an issue, the manager should fix it, and if they are incapable of fixing it then you let go the manager and replace them.
Now, let's say that his "bug fixes" actually result in someone's death, and that his definition of "doing his job" consists of working obsessively on trivial matters while ignoring more serious ones, and that his entire motivation appears to be to get his name in the papers rather than actually solving problems.
Ortiz IS the manager in this situation, by the way.
Better than just paying for mistakes is learning to prevent them the next time. If every major mistake anyone made was accompanied by an impartial failure analysis instead of finger pointing and scapegoating, society would advance much more quickly.
People make mistakes. Prosecutors who make mistakes ruin the lives of innocent people. If you ruin the life of an innocent person, then you're part of that broken system.
Just remember this: this is a Prosecutor who went after Aaron Swartz, even though the alleged victim didn't want to press any charges and had dealt with the matter outside of the court system, in a way that was satisfactory to both parties (Swatz and JSTOR).
My god, what a blatant appeal to emotion. You people complain about politicians pandering and the like, and then you say something as stupid as that. If you actually want a decent debate, it helps if you don't try frame your opponent as a sociopath.
The last sentence, while an appeal to emotion in the way it was phrased, actually made a reasonable point. The prosecution of Aaron Swatz should never have been treated like a test case to see exactly how far the prosecution could get away with.
The law should not be made by prosecuting someone to see where the boundaries of legislation lie.
Except it is, and always has been. Legislation is written by elected representatives, and then interpreted by judges when it is "tested in court". At least in the UK, we have had well meaning legislation that was universally condemned, simply because the way it was written allowed it to be interpreted in a large number of ways, some of which were very different to the original intention of the legislation. In the US, if we look at one of the most famous civil rights activists, Rosa Parks, she was seen as so successful because she was the perfect person to be used for a test of the city's segregation laws.
That said, I personally don't believe that was the case here. It seems that in many ways this prosecution was just a standard prosecution; prosecutors often ask for crazy sentences (and don't get them-, and I don't honestly believe that there was a particularly unprecedented amount of malice on the part of the prosecution.
The original party asked the Dept of Justice to drop the case. That sounds like a large amount of malice to me - they wanted to squeeze 35 years of the guy's life, even though the original "victim" decided not to go ahead with a complaint.
I thought it was only JSTOR that said that, and that MIT had not made that clear? Anyway, that wasn't really my main point. Prosecutions sometimes do define the law, that's the power of precedence.
Devil's advocate here. If Carmen actually agreed that Aaron's actions were not a crime, but wanted most of all to set a precedent, could that not explain her actions without malice? Maybe she was ideologically on Aaron's side, but recognized that a weak or cancelled prosecution would not yield a useful precedent. If she demonstrated a strong case and lost, it would send a message that Americans don't agree with strict enforcement of copyright in that way.
Of course this would be little solace to Aaron, as he probably would not be made aware until afterward, if ever.
I suspect that having a lost prosecution on her record would be more harmful to her own goals than helpful to the goals of any causes, so this explanation seems unlikely to me.
That falls to Occam's Razor. Prosecution is the way to conviction, so just publicly choosing not to prosecute would be a strong message.=, ad much lower cost.
Also, federal cases usually get settled in pleas, so there's less actual precedent. Going all the way to court would have been painful for him AND would have increased the odds of conviction.
You do realize, that you are suggesting we do "eye for an eye" right? She decided to drive a tack with a sledge hammer, and you are calling for us to do the same? I do think she is wrong, but attempting to do the same to her makes us no better than them.
"These situations seem to arise when there is a fundamental disconnect between what "the people" think and what "the system" thinks"
The system serves the people; the system's thinking should be subordinate to what the people think. Anything less is a sign that the system is broken and is immediate and desperate need of an overhaul (but that is pretty obvious at this point).
I agree especially with your last sentence. The torches-and-pitchforks crowd is missing the main point here.
However, whether or not she is "evil" is irrelevant. She clearly went after Swartz with a self-righteous zeal that was far divorced from the seriousness of the alleged crime. I don't know if someone in the US Justice Department had beef with Swartz they wanted to settle, or if they just wanted to make an example of someone, but one thing is certain and that's that until these prosecutors face actual backlash to their jobs and reputation when they go so far overboard, nothing whatsoever will change. They simply have no disincentive for this kind of irresponsible and unprofessional behavior at the moment.
Yes, it is possible she will have to be the proxy/figurehead towards which protest is directed...but if actual reform is the goal, then it's not a bad thing to examine fully what went wrong, if possible. Her office clearly has better things to do; who was the prime mover, if not her, in directing resources to this?
A young man is dead because Carmen M. Ortiz unambiguously railroaded him. Frankly the ignorance and tenor of her prosecution in this area makes me much less likely to believe that all those other people she fined and jailed were bad guys.
That is: in the one area we do know - computer science - we can see that she pursued trumped up charges. So maybe a forensic accountant would be able to explain that in her past rise to "Bostonian of the Year" she jailed some poor middle manager for making a mistake, or a legal aid guy could break down how she made some minority kid selling pot into a "mobster". Won't know till the Internet and the press does a thorough review:
Bottom line: she did not acknowledge any of Aaron's positive contributions when she decided to portray him as an evil hacker worthy of thirty five years in prison. Show her the same mercy she showed him by forcing her resignation. More, in fact, as I'm sure she'll be able to land on her feet as a high priced lobbyist. The RIAA/MPAA would love to have her.
She's way too toxic for business. She's got her federal pension and probably a long future in politics. Unless Obama throws her out, she's more or less set for life. Prosecutors don't get burned on stuff like this. Now if she cheated on her husband or said something bad about Jesus.
This is also further proof that you can attack leftist political activists with impunity. At his core Aaron was for liberalization of information and open government. If he was a Tea Party guy downloading PDFs from MIT to show "liberal bias" he'd be alive and have his own Fox New show and a book deal.
You're being sensational and honestly rather rude. The left has dedicated programs just as the right does. If he was a tea party guy, he would basically be fighting for the same cause: an open government. You ought to keep in mind that the tea party started from the Ron Paul movement before it was, for all intents & purposes, hijacked by the traditional right.
The right and left often come together when it comes to restraining the rights of citizens (patriot act?). Don't demonize the right and put a halo around the left, it only serves to propagate the right/left paradigm that the Americans are already trapped in. We need the right & left coming together on open government issues. I feel good when politicians such as Dennis Kucinich come together with the libertarian-wing of the Right to push for things like Audit the Fed.
Finally, I find your comment rather ironic since it was the left who put this woman into power in 2009 and God knows she is, as you say, "protected". If Obama ever does come about this (doubtful), he will have all the excuses in the book ready for her pardon. The right was vehemently opposed to just about anyone the left selected, but perhaps if the right had their way, it wouldn't have been Carmen M Ortiz in power and maybe Aaron wouldn't be dead. But that's the kinda what-if talk that's just immature at the end of the day.
She works for the people. If the people don't like her saying bad things about Jesus, Muslims, Jews or minorities, she gets the can. That's a good thing.
Lots of people in the USA like Jesus. If even a fraction of that number could be mobilized over this injustice, she's gone.
drzaiusapelord (great name, made me smile in spite of myself today) I think you have your heart in the right place. I'd ask you to hopefully see that at least some libertarians/Paul supporters are pretty different from your run of the mill corporatist Republicans, in the same way that the true left like Aaron Swartz or Alan Grayson is pretty different from run of the mill drone strike/drug war Democrats like Ortiz/Obama/Holder. I'm not saying there aren't legitimate differences here, but Rand Paul or Alan Grayson is a lot more likely to publicly condemn this travesty of justice than Obama or Boehner is. This is really authoritarians vs. civil libertarians, which is more cross-cutting than one might think.
Actually if they drained his accounts and froze his assets and promised to shove in him a prison with hardened criminals for up to 50 years, where he could face assaults, rape and abuse (more so probably than the average hardened street criminal) killing himself didn't seem like such an irrational choice.
The point remains that the prosecutor did not kill him. He killed himself. Just trying to bring down the hyperbole on this thread... Speaking of which:
In reality he would have gone to a while collar prison and would have gotten the counseling he obviously needed.
(edit spelling)
This is apologism for untrammeled abuse of power. He was being threatened with 35 years in federal prison for downloading some PDFs! He would have been 61 when he got out. They would have taken away 40-50% of his life.
Sometimes it is better to live free or die. The people who need "counseling" are Ortiz, Heymann, and the inhumane who'd defend or excuse this travesty. Just following orders, blind legalism.
Oh, right. He wouldn't have gotten 35 years, only a felony conviction with 5-10 years in federal prison for downloading some pdfs. So hyperbolic to be enraged about this!
Maybe we should be replacing prosecutors who remain technologically ignorant years after these issues come up. If her job responsibilities include prosecuting computer crime, she needs to understand the applicability of computers to crime, otherwise she's not doing her job. Being old and an appointed official is no excuse anymore.
It's not as if she's a holdover from the Reagan years. She was an early appointment by President Obama.
I know you're responding directly to the parent comment but for my part, I'll say that that's not my own accusation, just a possible speculation. Sometimes the reasons for terrible machinery to move ahead are rather banal.
I'll say for sure that a lot of the initial backing by legislators for SOPA/PIPA was just status quo informed by vague technical understanding of the issue, and not because everyone was in the pockets of the movie industry.
She has demonstrated either horrible incompetence or maliciousness.
Looking at the way the prosecution built its case, the hyperbole, misdirection, inaccuracies dealing with the technical aspects at least, I cannot but attribute at least one of the above attributes to them.
I agree. This makes it all the more important that we, as a community, "send a message" by calling out her actions as unacceptable and by peacefully petitioning for her removal from office.
I wholeheartedly agree. It's understandable that after a tragic, upsetting event like this people look for someone to blame. If you are looking for someone to blame, blame the law. Prosecutors take cases they think they can win. No prosecutor wants to lose a case. The decision to take a case is made based on the law and precedent.
Getting a DA fired solves nothing. What happens once you have achieved it? What have you accomplished? The law remains the same, and these type of cases continue to be brought.
Change is difficult. But I hope that if people really cared about this they would put as much effort as they can into changing the law, rather than trying to place the blame on a single individual - because the latter can easily result in even more misunderstandings.
Unfortunately this conflicts with the reality of Federal law in the US, where prosecutorial discretion is essentially the beginning and end of the criminal law system.
At any given time, any person and any company could be easily convicted of enough serious crimes to put them in prison for life or out of business. Prosecutors don't pick cases; they pick defendants, based on what are hopefully well-intended criteria. They then go through the extensive but essentially mechanical process of the justice system, which hopefully at least serves to shine enough daylight on the matter that prosecutor misbehavior is hard to hide.
Saying we should not pressure them to pick in a way we would prefer is to abandon the only actual influence over the system we have.
Only a person of science or other black/white thinker would assume that law and procedure was an "essentially mechanical process." I once imagined it that way too. The very first thing a law student is taught is that everything is a grey area: laws are left vague deliberately in order to be interpreted by judges; evidence and procedure are negotiable; everything is subjective. The legal framework is only that, a framework. The legal machine is far, far from deterministic. It is designed from the top down to be discretionary.
Otherwise you'd more often run into situations where you couldn't prosecute someone because a statute didn't spell out their exact actions even though in spirit they had violated it.
What happens if you're in a grey area? You spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars defending yourself, and you might be found innocent of the more serious charges, but there's a good chance you'll be convicted on one or two minor charges. You're still out the money you payed to your lawyers, and the prosecutor gets to say, "We didn't get the outcome we wanted, but the evildoer was still held to account for his crimes."
Yeah, the reality for the accused is that the system is rather black and white. Either you are not on their radar... or you are fucked. How fucked you are is really the only gradient here.
I actually agree with both of you. The system is so subjective that if you are rightly or wrongly ensnared by it, you always lose at a minimum, money. Civil cases are even more likely to occur because effectively anyone from an employee to a patent troll can play "prosecutor" and again the question is only how much it'll ultimately cost.
That's not the argument here. The argument is that there may be some other specific point to apply activism towards. She is the head of her office but this is clearly not the most important case at the top of her caseload. It could've been a subordinate who made the calls and had the delegated authority.
Technically, President Obama has the power to install and remove U.S. attorneys at his discretion. Should we start a petition asking him to resign, too?
I'm the author of the petition, so allow me to explain my thinking; and why I don't expect Ms. Ortiz to lose her job over this.
1. Obama appointed her, and by many metrics she is doing a good job.
2. The DOJ under Holder is anything but Liberal in it's outlook, a DOJ that's onboard with killing civilians who are American citizens without requiring even a closed hearing from a judge does not care what you think about prosecutorial overreach.
3. Using outsize threats and the power of indictment to coerce defendants into pleading out is policy, and goes well beyond an individual D.A.'s practices in a given case.
That said; the purpose of this petition is to raise embarrassing questions in a way that demands an answer.
Justice in this country should aspire to be more than "the shadow cast by the powerful upon the weak".
note: I'm aware that I should have had someone else proofread the text and that my misedit of the first paragraph is now unfixable.
Doing the right thing so many times you've lost count doesn't excuse doing the wrong thing.
And the way this was handled, it feels more wrong than right, and she certainly had some considerable say in the way it played out.
Maybe she's had plenty of opportunities to reflect on the consequences of her actions, maybe not (if it was all mob bosses and drug companies, probably not). In light of what's happened, at the least, she needs to reflect and grow from this experience.
If you go to court and say "I didn't mean to break the law", he says "too bad." But evidently, you think she should get leniency from us for obliviously (you allege) ruining someone's life.
She was named "Bostonian of the Year" for her successful cases against mob bosses and drug companies: http://www.mainjustice.com/2012/01/03/massachusetts-u-s-atto...
Out of the 94 U.S. DA offices, her office alone collected ~67% of the total criminal and civil fines in 2012, mostly owing to the successful prosecution of drug companies. Her success led to speculation that she would run for higher office: http://www.mainjustice.com/2013/01/07/mass-u-s-attorney-carm...
She is no stranger to being part of a disenfranchised group, as she was the first Hispanic and first woman to hold the position of U.S. attorney in Boston. Her first internship was with the DOJ's public integrity unit, created after Watergate: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011...
She's not of the "evil prosecutor" mold as is commonly thought and her background, particularly her history of fighting white-collar crime and corporations, doesn't strike me as someone who is intent on screwing the little guy over. That said, the seemingly-excessive charges could stem from a result of misconception and, let's face it, technological ignorance (hacking sounds bad, period). But in solving the overall problem in the justice system, let's not attribute to malice what can be attributed to other issues just yet.
-- One edit: a link to a piece by Aaron on yelling at the machine, rather than the person: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nummi
My intent is not to say that the petition is wrong, but to argue that if people are going to call for action, call it for the right and productive reasons, rather than simplifying cause and effect to just one main person (even if the buck technically stops with her).