Legal Case Strained Troubled Web Activist - WSJ.com

Just days before he hanged himself, Internet activist Aaron Swartz's hopes for a deal with federal prosecutors fell apart.

Two years ago, the advocate for free information online, who was known to have suffered from depression, allegedly used the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to download nearly five million articles from a fee-charging database of academic journals. To some in the Internet community, it was a Robin Hood-like stunt.

Prosecutors disagreed and threatened to put him in prison for more than three decades.

Mr. Swartz's lawyer, Elliot Peters, first discussed a possible plea bargain with Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann last fall. In an interview Sunday, he said he was told at the time that Mr. Swartz would need to plead guilty to every count, and the government would insist on prison time.

Mr. Peters said he spoke to Mr. Heymann again last Wednesday in another attempt to find a compromise. The prosecutor, he said, didn't budge

Mr. Heymann didn't reply to requests for comment Sunday.

With the government's position hardening, Mr. Swartz realized that he would have to face a costly, painful and public trial, his girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, said in an interview Sunday. The case was draining his money, and he would need to ask for help financing his defense; two of his friends had recently been subpoenaed in the case. Both situations distressed him, she said.

"It was too hard for him to ask for the help and make that part of his life go public," she said. "One of the things he felt most difficult to fathom was asking people for money."

On Friday, Mr. Swartz was dead. The 26-year-old was found by Ms. Stinebrickner-Kauffman in their Brooklyn apartment. He was hanging from a bedroom window with a belt around his neck, said a law-enforcement official familiar with the matter.

There was no suicide note, the person said. A spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner's office said an autopsy was conducted Saturday, and the death was ruled a suicide by hanging.

The reasons why someone might take as drastic a step as killing himself are complex and rarely boil down to a simple trigger, experts say. But Mr. Swartz's family and Ms. Stinebrickner-Kauffman are convinced that what they believe was an overzealous government prosecution played a role.

"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy," they wrote in a statement published on the Web. "It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach."

The Massachusetts U.S. attorney's office declined to comment Sunday, saying it wanted to respect the family's privacy. But in a news release from July 2011, when the charges in the case were announced, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said, "Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar."

That pressure weighed on Mr. Swartz, who friends said had long suffered bouts of depression. Cory Doctorow, a friend, and writer at Web publication BoingBoing, said in a lengthy post there that Mr. Swartz had struggled for years with depression and had written about the subject publicly.

One grim blog post written by Mr. Swartz in 2007 described "the day Aaron killed himself" and worried a colleague, Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the website Reddit, enough that he called the police, Mr. Ohanian said.

Mental-health experts cautioned against trying to settle on an explicit cause when someone kills himself. "I'm sure he perceived that as a stressor," Gregory Eells, director of counseling and psychological services at Cornell University, said of the criminal charges. But, he said, "It's always a stretch to say that's the only cause." Mr. Eells wasn't familiar with details of the Swartz case.

Mr. Swartz's life got off to a promising start. As a teenager, he helped create the technology called RSS that allows websites to broadcast updates to subscribers across the Web. He dropped out of Stanford University and founded a startup, Infogami, that was acquired by Reddit, a site where readers post links to articles and the most popular rise to the top of the page.

A few years ago, Mr. Swartz caused a stir by downloading some 20 million pages of court documents from the fee-charging Pacer website by exploiting free access given to libraries. No charges were ever brought, and no crime was committed, his lawyer said. But his efforts to make online content available for free ultimately brought him into conflict with federal prosecutors.

He was arrested in 2011 and charged in a scheme in which he allegedly logged into the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and using it to download millions of academic journal articles from a database called JSTOR, owned by a nonprofit group.

According to the indictment, Mr. Swartz bought an Acer laptop in September 2010 and hooked it up the same day to the MIT network, registering as a guest under the name Gary Host and computer name "ghost laptop." Over the next few months, he allegedly used that computer and another to automatically download journal articles, playing cat and mouse with the university and JSTOR as they tried to shut him down.

Mr. Swartz's goal, friends said, wasn't to steal the material for personal gain, but to make it publicly available. On Wednesday, after a 10-month trial program, JSTOR opened its archives to free reading by the public.

"We are deeply saddened to hear the news about Aaron Swartz," JSTOR said on its home page Saturday. The organization said it had told prosecutors that it wasn't interested in pursuing charges against Mr. Swartz.

The trial was set to begin April 1. Mr. Swartz faced charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer. He faced as many as 35 years in prison, in addition to up to $1 million in fines.

In a superseding indictment handed up in September, prosecutors expanded the original charges to include 13 criminal counts that could have carried an even lengthier prison sentence.

The government indicated it might only seek seven years at trial, and was willing to bargain that down to six to eight months in exchange for a guilty plea, a person familiar with the matter said. But Mr. Swartz didn't want to do jail time.

"I think Aaron was frightened and bewildered that they'd taken this incredibly hard line against him," said Mr. Peters, his lawyer. "He didn't want to go to jail. He didn't want to be a felon."

Ms. Stinebrickner-Kauffman started dating Mr. Swartz in June 2011, the month before he was indicted, and had lived with him in Brooklyn for a few months. She said she hadn't noticed any depressive episodes until the past week, when she said the pain Mr. Swartz was experiencing was "too much too contemplate."

In addition to the concerns about money and his friends, he became upset when he concluded MIT wasn't going to stand up for him, according to Ms. Stinebrickner-Kauffman. Mr. Swartz's father, Robert, in an interview Sunday, said it was a "tragedy" that MIT didn't try to stop the prosecution.

MIT President L. Rafael Reif sent an email to the university's community Sunday expressing sadness for MIT's role, and saying he had commissioned an analysis of MIT's actions in the case.

With legal concerns looming, Ms. Stinebrickner-Kauffman and Mr. Swartz went about their daily routines. Last Wednesday, the young couple attended a private gathering of activists from around the world, including some friends he hadn't seen in a while. The next day, they went to happy hour after work.

On what would prove to be the morning of his death, Ms. Stinebrickner-Kauffman said, the couple had a tickle fight before she left for work. Mr. Swartz said he was going to stay home and rest.

She texted him a few times during the day, but his phone was off, which she said wasn't unusual. Still, she knew he was really down and was worried about him.

Mr. Swartz had a phrase, she said: "lean into the pain." When something was hard, he thought it was better to deal with the pain rather than run from it.

"He fell into the pain this time," she said.

Write to Spencer E. Ante at spencer.ante@wsj.com and Anjali Athavaley at anjali.athavaley@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared January 14, 2013, on page B1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Legal Case Strained Troubled Activist.