The husband of the usa district attorney desirous about the Aaron Swartz prosecution has publicly criticised the activist’s family for accusing his wife of complicity within the suicide, amid claims the aggressive litigation was driven by their desire for a test case.
Tom Dolan, an IBM executive married to Carmen Ortiz, used his Twitter account to attack the family of Swartz, who died on Friday. One tweet, posted on his @TomJDolan feed, said: “Truly incredible that during their very own son’s obit they blame others for his death and make no mention of the 6 month offer.”
His comments, made three days after Swartz’s death, attracted outrage on social media. The account has since been deleted.
When asked about Dolan’s tweet and whether it was appropriate, Christina Sterling, a spokeswoman for Ortiz, told the Guardian she had “no comment” to make at present.
Swartz, 26, who helped create Reddit, have been facing charges of breaking into Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer system to access academic articles from the JSTOR digital library with the intention of creating them freely available.
His family have accused prosecutors and MIT officials of contributing to his death by pursuing a harsh array of charges for “an alleged crime that had no victims”. His death, and what critics have denounced as an over-reaching prosecution, have prompted requires changes to the pc Fraud and Abuse Act and for a halt to such prosecutions.
If he have been found guilty of the fees, Swartz faced as much as 35 years in prison and millions of bucks in fines, even though it has emerged that negotiations between his lawyers and prosecutors had included a possible plea bargain of six months in prison.
Condemnation of prosecutors over the litigation against Swartz continued on Tuesday. A petition to the Obama administration to take away Ortiz from office reached 28,188 signatures, past the crucial 25,000 signatures needed for a White House response.
In July 2011, Ortiz said in an announcement concerning the case: “Stealing is stealing whether you operate a pc command or a crowbar, and whether you’re taking documents, data or dollars. It’s equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you could have stolen or give it away.”
On Monday, academics paid tribute to Swartz by putting PDFs in their copyrighted work from JSTOR online, on their personal websites and on university databases. Many linked their actions on Twitter under the hashtag #PDFTribute.
Lawyers for Swartz said that, despite their best efforts, prosecutors had refused to barter a plea bargain which failed to involve jail time. One also said that MIT refused to comply with a plea bargain during which Swartz didn’t serve time.
Andy Good, Swartz’s initial lawyer, told the Boston Globe that he had warned one prosecutor, Steve Heymann, that his client was a “suicide risk”.
Good said: “His reaction was a normal reaction in that office, not unique to Steve. He said: ‘Fine, we’ll lock him up.’ i am not saying they made Aaron kill himself. Aaron may need done this anyway. I’m saying they were conscious of the danger, and so they were heedless.”
Lawyers for Swartz said that they had offered to simply accept a deferred prosecution or probation, in order that if he did it again he would serve time.
Marty Weinberg, who took over from Good as Swartz’s lawyer, confirmed to the Guardian that in negotiations for a plea bargain, MIT refused to invest which may have helped his client.
Weinberg said: “During pleas negotiations for Mr Swartz, he attempted to barter an agreement that might not subject him to any risk of going to prison. We asked them to support this initiative but they declined. On the contrary, MIT as an establishment communicated to myself that they wouldn’t take any position in ongoing pleas negotiations between Mr Swartz and the govt. .”
“There have been subsets of the MIT community who were profoundly in support of Aaron,” but that support didn’t override institutional interests, Weinberg told the Globe.
Another of Swartz’s attorneys, Elliot Peters, said on Monday that MIT officials were “very cooperative with prosecutors” in the course of the investigation.
“MIT may have handled things differently, instead of inviting law enforcement and turning it right into a federal criminal case,” Peters said.
Swartz’s funeral was caused by happen on Tuesday, in Highland Park, Illinois.
Westboro Baptist Church, which had threatened to picket the funeral, reportedly backed off after hacktivist collective Anonymous and other Swartz supporters promised to dam any protests.
