If it was beyond scandalous that Aaron Swartz was facing 35 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines for downloading a bunch of obscure academic treatises without a subscription, it is beyond tragic that he is now dead.
Swartz, 26, a computer prodigy and open Internet activist, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment last Friday. While we will never know for sure why, many who love him and know him best believe that prosecutors bullied him to the grave.
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I have personally benefitted from some of Swartz's inventions, and I am very disappointed that prosecutors ruined his life as some sort of legal tactic! We all lose when prosecutors lack perspective: ie. destroy the lives of kid geniuses who improve society with their inventions.
'I’m too much a student of human nature to ascribe a 26-year-old’s suicide to any one thing,” Peters said. “Only God and Aaron know why that happened.” I'm also a student of human nature and when pushed to fear as was done to this kid, who was known to be weak emotionally... Is nothing short of murder by prosecutors and MIT... This is another example of prosecutors overstepping their bounds using the force of power they hold in "our" justice system... They forget, they work for us, not themselves...