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
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.
ReplyDelete