Tuesday, January 15, 2013

James Allworth — Aaron Swartz's "Crime" and the Business of Breaking the Law

Lawrence... Lessig characterized what had happened as a legal and societal form of bullying:  
"[Swartz] is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don't get both, you don't deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you."
That explanation — of an over-zealous prosecutor — certainly seems reasonable at face value. But something kept gnawing at me about that word: "proportionality." What does it say about us — about what we value — if this is exactly the proportionality of the legal system we have created?...
It seems to me that there's a new way of thinking about proportionality. Unfortunately, it's being determined much less by any notion of justice than it is by a broken political system corrupted by the influence of money.
I really don't like it, but I just can't see any other way of explaining how else it could happen.
Harvard Business Review | HBR Blog Network
Aaron Swartz's "Crime" and the Business of Breaking the Law
James Allworth


1 comment:

Ryan Harris said...

Courts have scraped away at the 8th amendment to where cruel and unusual has no practical meaning.( In Rummel vs Estelle the supreme court upheld a life with parole conviction for $230 fraud.) Any concept of proportionality of punishment enshrouded in the law has given way to the wide latitude of " prosecutorial discretion" for most crimes not involving murder.