... is that first paragraph saying that Aaron couldn't actually have entered a plea on good faith? That, after accepting the plea, things could be flipped on him?
With the hardball already being played against Aaron, he'd probably be held for contempt of court for pleading guilt! He certainly couldn't have believed any of it -- all a lie, on its face.
Judges can too. In fact, even in my very limited experience, I can think of only two judges I've met that I'd consider "fair". Judges get elected and promoted as politically as prosecutors do, and, like prosecutors, benefit more from a "tough on crime" platform than they do on a "fair to guilty people" platform.
My favorite memory of this is the time that a judge and the public defender were openly mocking a defendant in the court room.
It's an uninformed comment by some woman taking advantage of the case to burnish her own image.
However, if he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for me. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies.
Technically, this is correct, since federal sentencing laws limit the judge's discretion to raise or lower prison sentences. They actually have a table indexed by "points" which the judge must use to determine the length of the sentence. Thus, in order for the prosecution to honor a plea for 6-7 months, it would necessarily have entailed that all of the (other) charges either be dropped or reduced to their misdemeanor equivalents. (Note that if you read her CV, she hasn't handled a case in the federal courts since the sentencing guidelines were issued.)
"Some woman"? Jennifer Granick was a friend of Aaron Swartz's, the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and more or less the go-to lawyer for #hack for something like a decade. That in addition to the fact that she has actually defended computer crime cases against this exact US Attorney's office.
Seriously: find any DMS-100-hacking member of the Masters of Deception from back in the 1990s and ask them to name a lawyer. Jennifer Granick's is the only name you'll hear from more than one person. She represented Kevin Poulson, for fuck's sake.
It seems very unlikely to me that her analysis is less informed than yours. I think you've made a mistake in your analysis here.
