Is Justice Served When Prosecutors Pile On Charges To Ensure A Conviction?

The Internet’s Own Boy: the Story of Aaron Swartz isn’t a movie designed to leave audiences ambivalent about its subject. We mourn our martyrs, and we shake a fist at the powers-that-be that drive them to martyrdom. Swartz hanged himself 18 months ago at the age of 26, and director Brian Knappenberger wants that fist shaken. Swartz's cause was the untrammeled flow of information on the Internet, and he died awaiting trial on federal charges that he’d illegally downloaded millions of articles from JSTOR, an academic database. Swartz believed the information in these articles should be public property.

The one-sided argument waged by the documentary is between Swartz’s champions, who believe he did nothing criminal, and the federal government, which charged him with wire fraud, computer fraud, and two other criminal counts and threatened him with up to 35 years in prison, but offered him just a few months behind bars if he’d plead guilty. He wouldn’t.

The Internet’s Own Boy solicits our visceral sympathy, and there was a point in the movie, which I saw last week at the Gene Siskel Center, when I gladly gave it. It's when the government amends the indictment—now charging Swartz on 13 counts that could imprison him for as many as 50 years. Three months later Swartz kills himself...