rprasad

I have 3 sudoku apps on my phone; I can tell you what you are missing: scratch marks. At higher difficulties, it is absolutely necessary to be able to note eliminations or possibilities within a square. Without that, the best you can hope for is casual sudoku player, but soduku is by nature not a game for casual players.

The Piers Morgan petition was only a softball to those capable of rational thought. To the many people who signed it, it was a legitimate petition. The purpose of raising the signature limit was to prevent petitions like that from reaching the point at which the WH has obligated itself to respond.

America is not a democracy. It is a republic. The states are also republics, though feature some democratic traits, i.e., the initiative process.

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.)

Two weeks after the Secret Service raided his house in conjunction with the investigation led by Heymann into the theft of tens of thousands of credit card numbers, James was found dead.

Innocent people do not kill themselves when confronted with the possibility of a trial. They kill themselves after they have lost at trial. This other hacker (Jonathan James) didn't even wait until they pressed charges.

It's not a matter of the prosecutor being overzealous. It's a matter of hackers being far more susceptible to suicidal tendencies than others in the face of extreme social conflict.

California became a one-party state in 2012. Prior to 2012, it was very much a two-party state, and the problems date as far back as the 1990s, when it was still considered a swing state.

You are. You're skipping the most important part of the criminal process: the trial.

* don't bet on a fair trial, even if you're completely innocent. *

Hyperbole, and dangerous exaggeration. The "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard is a very high standard. I've won jury trials where the evidence all supported the prosecution's case (seriously, I had no evidence) but was not sufficient to reach this standard. Federal judges are even stricter at forcing federal prosecutors to satisfy this standard--they'll frequently dismiss the case without even letting the jury deliberate.

If you think jury trials are patently unfair, you need to actually go down to a courtroom and watch the jury trials. You'll learn a lot, and you'll discover that the justice system is not even remotely as lopsided as you think it is...once you get to the trial stage. (But yes, it's definitely lopsided in favor of the prosecution at every stage before trial.

That's not how criminal procedure works.

Pursuant to constitutional law, you are required to start with the charges first, so the defendant knows what they are being accused of and can prepare a defense.

In some but not all jurisdictions, prosecutors may offer "plea bargains" that reduce the sentence, or reduce or drop some of the charges, in lieu of proceeding to trial. In some jurisdictions (i.e., large portions of Texas), there are no plea bargains; you always go to trial.

Maximum sentence is set by law, as a matter of constitutional rights. Thus, your solution would simply restrict plea bargains to not being any shorter than 1/2 of the maximum sentence (in Aaron's case, 16 years).

Making the counts non-severable is a legal and constitutional impossibility. Double jeopardy requires the prosecutor to charge you with all possible crimes arising from a single act (or intertwined set of acts) in the same criminal proceedings. Once those criminal proceedings have been adjudicated (i.e., a guilty plea, a conviction, a not-guilty verdict, or charges dismissed with prejudice), the prosecutor cannot ever charge you again for any other crimes arising from that act. Your solution would either require them to choose which charges to pursue and which charges to drop forever. That's fine in cases like Aaron's, but that's not something you want when you're dealing with a rapist or a murderer (i.e, cases far more common than Aaron's).

Finally, the last suggestion, is not simply politically unpalatable, it is economically impossible. Most criminals are actually guilty; making the prosecution pay for every defense would increase the costs of the criminal justice system 1000fold. A better solution: make the prosecution pay the defense costs where (a) a defendant that is found not guilty or actually innocent, (b) a hung jury trial, if the prosecution does not refile, or (c) the prosecution drops charges before trial. This would accomplish what you want in a realistic manner (and is actually already the law in some jurisdictions).

Getting rid of plea bargaining doesn't make the problem better; it makes it worse by removing any compromise between walking away and the maximum sentence.

From my own experience: in mental committment proceedings, there is no halfway point between letting the defendant stay free and committing them to a mental hospital. Consequently, the prosecutor's office simply never negotiates; they take every case to trial.

When a legislator say they will "look" at something, it means they don't intend to actually do anything about it but are simply attempting to pacify their constituents by promising something.

Wrong country. If they had pulled those stunts in America, 2 of them wouldn't be sitting in a prison cell right now.

This petition is guranteed to fail. The domain of writing, passing, and modifying laws is the domain of Congress, not the President. You can pester the President all you want, but it is not within his Constitutional powers to do anything about the law. (Indeed, even announcing that the DOJ should not enforce the law is a potentially impeachable offense depending on the political environment.)

If you want the CFAA reformed, call, write, and/or meet with your Congressional Rep and Senator and tell them what you think of the law.

Unfortunately, because they can. Though generally, "loser" cases are handed off to younger lawyers as training exercises. The lawyers aren't expected to win the case but get the experience of trying a case before a real jury. It's a lot more ethical on the defense side than it is on the prosecution side (because prosecutors are theoretically ethically obligated not to bring a case to trial if they don't think they have a better than 50% chance of winning).

My perspective probably differs, since I used to work for the public defender and never lost a jury trial, so I can see how most people would find the situation very stressful.

But I do stand by my point that most defendants do not commit suicide.

For conflicting evidence, I would point to the California initiative process, which is the reason California's government is nonfunctional and almost bankrupt right now.

The Death Star petition and the Piers Morgan petition were the straws that broke the camel's back, according to a friend in the WH PR dept.

It's likely that Ms. Ortiz would choose to fight such charges, i.e., go to trial, and would triumph before a jury. This is generally the outcome when the government tries to pursue outlandish charges -- it loses in court.

Thus, the desired effect of putting a senior prosecutor in jail for a ridiculously long time would not occur. Note however, that prosecutors have lost their jobs where clear misconduct took place (see, for example, the former Alaska federal prosecutors who took down former Sen. Stevens). Misconduct in this sense means something unconstiutional, i.e., hiding or destroying evidence. Playing rough in plea negotiations is not misconduct, since the other party does not have to play along and has the constitutional right to go to trial.

Note that there is no constitutional right to a plea bargain; that is an administrative convenience offered by the prosecutors to avoid going to trial. If a prosecutor offers you a really good plea bargain (i.e., 6 months on a charge that carries a max penalty of 35 years), you always go to trial. A generous plea bargain means that the prosecutor has a weak case. (This is part of the reason so many lawyers on HN having been defending Ms. Ortiz--based on the charges and evidence publicly known, nobody would have expected Swartz to commit suicide because he would likely have prevailed at trial and should have been advised of this by his lawyer.)

That's like saying that if your father raped someone, you raped that person too. It's the same logic that was applied to Jews, Gypsies, and slaves for centuries (and is still applied in the Middle East today). It has no place in modern discourse.

America's population is also larger than the combined populations of those (all European) countries, and the is significantly larger geographically, making the provision of health care much more difficult.

The outcome changes when you only compare similar regions of America to their European counterparts.

Marching down the middle of the street is not illegal. Indeed, many fundamental cases of constitutional law note that the street is a "per se" public forum, i.e., the most public a forum can be, and is thus subject to the highest protections for speech.

Marching down a street and merely disrupting traffic is thus quite legal, however, if your marching causes dangerous disruptions to traffic (i.e., accidents), then it is not.

Well, unlike most defendants he chose not to find out how well it would work out, so we'll never know.

It's not easy to check: PACER does not provide that sort of functionality and the courts have not bothered to record death of defendant as a data field. You're welcome to attempt this project by hand; it will probably take you the rest of your natural life.

PACER was designed and implemented in the days when AOL and Compuserve were the Internet. It doesn't have an API.

According to the WSJ, about 6-7 months, which is what the prosecutor actually sought against Swartz. 35 years was the maximum potential prison sentence allowed by the law; it was not the prison sentence that the prosecutors were seeking.

USG, having become entirely inconsistent with its founding philosophy, the purported highest law of the land, and the People's will, has ceased being a legitimate government by or for the People.

I suggest you read up on your U.S. history. Despite its problems, the U.S. is the closest to its intended purpose than its ever been in history. Women, minority, and slaves were not citizens when this nation was founded; people did not directly elect their senators for several decades; free speech and freedom of religion was generally regarded as an "ideal," not an absolute right, until the start of the 20th century (or in the case of religion, until nearly WWII).

You're overthinking it.

It's a pro forma activity that takes all of 30 seconds, and doing it now means they can close the case file sooner rather than later.

The state is not a person, and ergo cannot be your friend. However, the state is a collection of persons, both elected, appointed, and hired, and many of those persons can be your friend. Indeed, I count a number of such persons among my friends.

In a democracy, the state is what you make of it--it is your family, friends, and neigbhors. It is not some monolithic evil construct.

Cruel? He hasn't been excuted for exposing private government communications, including internal communications on national security issues and correspondence with foreign governments. That is potentially treason, and just a few decades ago he would have been summarily executed after a quick, brief trial.

Pvt Manning was a member of the armed forces at the time of his alleged crime, and thus is not subject to most of the procedural protections afforded to civilian defendants.

In some countries they do (take a guess), but not in the West.

Rayiner's writings are some of the most informed writings on this topic that I've seen this week. They are all far more informed and intellectually honest than anything you've written.