Lawrence Lessig (© Joi Ito via Wikipedia)

Professor slams prosecutors for helping drive Aaron Swartz to suicide

1/12/2013

A Harvard professor and friend of Aaron Swartz says prosecutors should feel shame for their role in driving a "kid genius" to suicide. In an angry, grief-stricken Tumblr post, activist and legal scholar Lawrence Lessig condemned "the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior" in hounding Swartz for the alleged theft of online academic articles, even though the articles' owner, JSTOR, declined to pursue the case. Lessig also wrote that any prosecutor who thought Swartz’s treatment was appropriate "is either an idiot or a liar," adding that the government had pursued the open-source activist "as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed." [Source]

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