from the prosecutorial-discretion dept
Things
just keep looking worse and worse in the Carmen Ortiz/Stephen Heymann
vendetta against Aaron Swartz. Now it's come out that state
prosecutors, who were originally looking into the case
had no interest in pursuing felony charges or prison time...
until Carmen Ortiz and her team showed up. Instead, state prosecutors
had focused on the initial charges: "breaking and entering in the
daytime" which they expected "would be continued without a finding, with
Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue
his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner."
Instead, the report notes:
Tragedy intervened when Ortiz’s office took over the case to send “a message.”
In case you were wondering what "continued without a finding" means, Harvey Silvergate (author of
Three Felonies a Day) explained to Declan McCullagh:
"Continuance without a finding" was the anticipated disposition of the
case were the charge to remain in state court, with the Middlesex County
District Attorney to prosecute it. Under such a disposition, the charge
is held in abeyance ("continued") without any verdict ("without a
finding"). The defendant is on probation for a period of a few months up
to maybe a couple of years at the most; if the defendant does not get
into further legal trouble, the charge is dismissed, and the defendant
has no criminal record. This is what the lawyers expected to happen when
Swartz was arrested for "trespassing at MIT." But then the feds took
over the case, and the rest is tragic history.
The report above also notes that Ortiz is in some additional hot water,
as another one of her overreach cases, involving an attempt to seize a
family-owned motel in Massachusetts by claiming that it was
"facilitating drug crimes" has
failed miserably,
tossed out by the magistrate judge. Not only was it noted that there
were only 15 drug-related incidents over a 15 year period (during which
196,000 rooms were rented out), but also, the motel owners worked
closely with local police to deal with drug issues
and that other local businesses that had drug incidents were not targeted by Ortiz.
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