The prosecution was apparently in the business of annihilation. Swartz faced spiritual annihilation and financial annihilation, with no viable means of escape. To my mind, our justice system is out of control. The prosecution took leave of their senses. Unfortunately, this kind of tragedy is all too commonplace, and most of the time goes unreported.

The suicide of Aaron Swartz in the face of the appalling over-reach of unchecked discretionary prosecutorial power highlights a much larger problem that pervades our legal system.

The entire US legal system (including criminal, civil, and family court divisions) is routinely used in an outrageously abusive manner.

Those who are traumatized, stigmatized, or victimized by such shenanigans within the legal system may suffer what has come to be called Legal Abuse Syndrome.

In the field of Medicine, every proposed treatment or cure has to be carefully studied and reviewed to ensure that it has demonstrated therapeutic value, and does not inadvertently spread, exacerbate, or even cause the malady it sets out to treat. In the medical literature, a treatment is called “iatrogenic” if it is counter-productive to the primary objective of curing disease.

The field of Law does not employ such safeguards, and as a result a substantial fraction of our public policies and practices, operating under the color of law, turn out to be iatrogenic — ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst.

Alan Simpson, the retired Senator from Wyoming, spent some three decades in Congress, during which time he helped craft and enact a great deal of legislation. But after he retired, he remarked that during his tenure in Washington politics, he discovered a law, the way a scientist would discover a natural law. Simpson said he discovered the Law of Unintended Consequences, meaning that the actual outcome of legislation, passed in good faith with an expectation of curing one of society’s ills, frequently turned out to have unanticipated, unexpected, and undesirable consequences. In science, if one is relying on a theoretical model, and the actual outcome of an experiment does not jibe with that predicted by the model, one is obliged to discard the model as unreliable.

Our governmental systems are rife with unreliable models which give rise to unwise practices, many of which are ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst. We have built governmental systems that lack viable safeguards against iatrogenic treatments of many of our most problematic social ills.

Here is an example of the kind of scholarly article one might find on JSTOR (which recently relaxed its policies to make many more of them freely available without a costly institutional subscription).

“Punishment and Violence: Is the Criminal Law Based on One Huge Mistake?” by James Gilligan, Harvard University; published in the Journal of Social Research, Fall 2000.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40971409?uid=3739696&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101594367703

Indiscriminate adherence to ideals above working to achieve those ideals shows a lack of sound judgement and sincere commitment. The issue of the ACLU defending the KKK has been raised. How many hundreds of millions of dollars in donations and votes for the candidates that the ACLU supports did that cost them? Sure, the KKK can march in Skokie, but how many more blacks are in jail than whites in proportion to the number of their crimes, and what has the ACLU been able to do about it since they went that route?

If you want to neuter the effectiveness of any public testimony you ever give by equating someone who devoted his life to achiving greater income equality with someone who has repeatedly gone on about how to murder the non-white two thirds of the Earth’s population, that’s your decision, but if you let your blind adherence to ideals get in the way of achieving them, what does that say about your trustworthiness? What does it say about the esteem in which you hold the ideals you claim to uphold?

Weev is really good at seeming likable for someone who repeatedly advocates murder of jews and blacks. He uses every opportunity to try to ingratiate himself with anyone with whom he thinks he has a chance. But I reject the idea that his conviction was unjust even as I fight for reform of the unjust law he was convicted of breaking, because of his history, goals, means, and the state of his mind during the events in question. And more importantly, I can think of no example of CFAA abuse for which exposure in the media is more likely to entirely prevent CFAA reform this decade.