Reached at his home in Winchester, Massachusetts, Heymann referred all questions to a spokeswoman for the U.S. "She asked that they not pursue the case," Peters said. Peters said JSTOR's attorney, Mary Jo White - the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan - had called Stephen Heymann, the lead Boston prosecutor in the case. Attorney's office in Boston had overreached in seeking prison time for Swartz and insisting - two days before his suicide - that he plead guilty to all 13 felony counts. Peters said even the company took the stand that the computer crimes section of the U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death," his family said.Įlliot Peters, Swartz's California-based defense attorney and a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, told The Associated Press on Sunday that the case "was horribly overblown" because Swartz had "the right" to download from JSTOR, a subscription service used by MIT that offers digitized copies of articles from more than 1,000 academic journals. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. In a statement released Saturday, Swartz's family in Chicago expressed not only grief over his death but also bitterness toward federal prosecutors pursuing the case in Massachusetts against him. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a fortune in fines.
He had pleaded not guilty, and his federal trial was to begin next month.
In 2011, he was charged with stealing millions of scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an attempt to make them freely available. The 26-year-old had fought to make online content free to the public and as a teenager helped create RSS, a family of Web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for users. NEW YORK (AP) - The family of a co-founder of the social news website Reddit who committed suicide weeks before he was to go on trial on federal charges that he stole millions of scholarly articles is blaming prosecutors for his death.Īaron Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment Friday night, his family and authorities said.
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