I see the line you are drawing and in a way I don’t disagree. It’s important not to boil down a person’s decision to commit suicide to a single, simple cause (The CDC identifies this as a contributor to suicide contagion). Still, when we talk about people being responsible for other people’s death, “responsible” doesn’t mean “sole cause” - especially when the person we are saying is responsible is responsible through their work as a civil servant. I might say a municipality’s chief build inspector is responsible for deaths if a parking lot roof collapses, even though they had no direct role whatsoever.
If a prosecutor hounds someone and that person commits suicide, that person was probably very vulnerable to suicide before the prosecutor showed up. But the fact that a prosecutor wouldn’t even think of the position they would be putting a vulnerable person in by their actions doesn’t speak well to the compassion of the justice system or the individual. The reason Swartz was hounding was to cause him intense distress. When we go around treating people like that, there will be a body count. When it’s public policy to treat people like that, people who set that policy and implement that policy are responsible.
Is this her only bad decision, though? I don’t know, it just seems highly unlikely that she was an exemplar of judicial restraint until this one anomaly.
I’m totally with you here. If I punched a person and it just happened that he had a medical condition that made my punch fatal, I might say I ended up in prison for that one mistake. On the other hand, given no other knowledge, you’d have to think I probably punched a bunch of other people too, and I didn’t end up in prison for one mistake but for a pattern of behaviour that was likely to result in serious harm to other if continued.
You know who needs an injection of empathy? Every prosecutor in America who thinks “making their numbers” outweighs the human lives that are destroyed by the prison industrial complex, they should have some empathy. That empathy should apply to every single human being, not just the ones in suits nicer than theirs, not just “the innocent”, not just the ones with lawyers, all the people.
So, yeah, I’ve got some venom for her, and every other prosecutor who thinks that if the person wasn’t guilty, they wouldn’t have been arrested, or that the jury will sort it out. I have even more venom for those who think more about their building their career than the human lives that are nothing but grist for that mill.
Authoritarianism isn’t some new thing since election day. Authoritarianism has been boiling in the USA for quite some time now.
My personal recommendation to anyone who lives in Massachusetts and may get called for Federal Jury Duty - and what I fully intend to to myself should I be called: Refuse to take part in this hypocrisy and allowing yourself to facilitate these ongoing crimes against innocent people, and refuse to be seated on any Federal jury in Massachusetts.
Ortiz may be leaving but her lackies will still be there, and as documented elsewhere the Swartz case was hardly the only incident whereby they prosecuted innocent people to burnish their own reputations.
When asked for what reasons you cannot serve, explain that due to the well-document prosecutorial overreach in this case and others that you find it impossible consider any charges brought by the Massachusetts Federal Prosecutor’s Office to be legitimate under any circumstances, and you unfortunately cannot consider any evidence they may provide with an open mind. Make it CLEAR you are very familiar with all the questionable prosecutions that have taken place in the last decade, and being able to list some of them from memory would be advantageous.
I can tell you that this strategy has been recently been used successfully in the exact manner described above.
My hope would be to distribute this information as widely as possible and thereby contaminate their potential juror pool, forcing them to overhaul the department and force changes in policy.
The objective here is to force change in the US Attorney’s office by making it impossible for them to function. Being seated on a jury and taking part simply allows them to continue what they are doing.
Alternatively I could never suggest someone allow themselves to be seated with the intent of returning a not guilty verdict regardless of the truth of the case - there are monsters in the world who should not be allowed to go free, and the office does deal with federal murder charges on occasion.
