Does anyone here seriously believe that she's going to be fired? And that Carmen Ortiz is such an exceptional case?
There are hundreds of prosecutors in the US who routinely - even though against predominantly non-white and non-prominent defendants - seek much harsher sentences for much lesser "crimes", often with much more dubious evidence, and much lower chances for defendants to ever have their personal situation considered in a public forum like this one.
The need to "start somewhere" doesn't exempt you from seeing things in proportion. ("Proportion" with regards to Ortiz. Aaron's death must not enter equations or comparisons. It's absolutely out of proportion.)
Charles Pierce wrote an exceptional blog post on the issue of Aaron Swartz along those lines:
"Which brings me to my second conclusion — Aaron Swartz ran facefirst into a law-enforcement and prosecutorial culture that we have allowed to run amok for far too long. It began with drugs. It intensified with the "war on terror." Preventive detention — though they don't call it that — has been mainstreamed, due process sacrificed to efficiency. Investigation without cause has been normalized in our daily lives, through mandatory drug testing and roadblocks and a dozen other ways we barely think about any more. Personal privacy has been rendered less important than official secrecy in the general scheme of things. We want — nay, demand convictions, and all barriers to them be damned."
"Back when rogue prosecutor Mike Nifong went crazy and ginned up a rape prosecution against several members of the Duke lacrosse team, there was a great deal of horror at how "the system" could have gone so horribly wrong. But it didn't. It just got aimed for once at people with the financial and social wherewithal to fight back. There are minor-league Mike Nifongs in every precinct house and every federal law-enforcement operation and every DA's office and all throughout the branch offices of the Department Of Justice. There are "Duke rape cases" happening every day in alleys and on streetcorners of every city, and on the dusty backroads on the outskirts of nowhere."
2% of American men are currently in jail. Among black men 30 to 34, 7% are currently in jail. We just don't notice the vast injustice of our justice system until we think it might affect us.
Attacking a single prosecutor who was doing her job and obeying the law won't change anything. Attacking the laws she enforced will.
>Attacking a single prosecutor who was doing her job and obeying the law won't change anything.
That's definitely wrong.
Prosecutors go after crimes like this in a public way partly to deter others. The theory is that if they make a clear example of one transgressor, it will scare others into line.
If that theory is good enough for hackers, who aren't particularly good at responding to social pressure, I'm sure it's good enough for career federal employees, who are notoriously risk averse. And the government will certainly fire people who have attracted sufficient negative media attention; Shirley Sherrod is a clear example.
I'm with you on fixing the other injustices as well, but that's no reason not to go for a win with Ortiz. Indeed, getting a win here means you'll have a bunch of people feeling victorious who can be motivated to move to something bigger.
"Doing her job and obeying the law" is not an excuse. "Doing her job" would have been to tell MIT (or whoever was responsible for this affair to end up on her desk) to go away. Even though I am aware that's not how becoming a "career prosecutor" in the US justice system works.
Remains the fact that none of the bright minds that congregate under news.ycombinator.com seems to have the slightest idea how "attacking the laws" is supposed to work. Apart from maybe a vague theory of erosion that appears far less convincing than pretty much anything most people here would dare to argue in the context of, say, a business plan.
It's essentially a problem of corruption. If you want to 'beat the system from within', for instance by joining the political stage or by becoming insanely wealthy through some corporate scheme so you can use your power to lobby you will end up being such an integrated part of the system that arguing against it will argue to a large extent against your own interest. That's why the situation persists. If you could convince large numbers of voters to vote their own interests instead of being tricked into voting based on inconsequential talking points you'd end up with Ralph Nader for president instead of a democrat or a republican. Fix that and you can fix everything else with relative ease. But that's a very hard problem to fix, if it is even possible. So you get individual fighting windmills at a level that they can relate to instead.
So if that was the venture you wanted me to support ("convince voters to vote their interest, and thus for a very different type of president" - seems to be a venture with a "media" or "campaign funding" angle, and I agree, it's a hard problem), then my question would be:
How do you assure that president will not be corrupted or compromised as well? How will he be able to tell every single person who is invested in the laws you're trying to attack (from corporate interests that are so huge that they're usually awarded cabinet posts to the sheer drag of gigantic bureaucracies invested in existing career paths) to go away? How can he practically reach the most powerful political position without sacrificing this very ability?
Plus: Imagine what would be the smartest, most malicious attacks on your plan. How would you counter them?
(Edit: None of these are rhetorical questions, of course. I do believe these laws have to be attacked. But if you asked me, maybe I'd rather invest in something like the study of political tectonics, earthquakes. Why do they happen so rarely, what makes them so destructive, and how can one provoke them?)
It's not so much corruption as an inevitable extension of the incentive structure.
If you tried to change a DA's office from the inside, you'd get about as far as if you tried to change an investment bank from the inside: you'd be fired, because your moral approach would have a definite negative impact on the number they use to measure your productivity.
You'd never get past making copies unless you assimilated. And even if you went 'deep undercover' and didn't assert your morality until you reached a position of influence, you'd simply be bounced from that spot, as you (and now your entire office or division) continued to deliver 'worse' numbers than those who would replace you.
>Attacking a single prosecutor who was doing her job and obeying the law won't change anything.
I disagree, if Ortiz was looking for a future in politics, she's finished. At the very least, she'll have to change her party affiliation. This is a good thing. Otherwise she could've possibly carried on at a higher level.
Although the various public reactions have yet to make any change in law; recent events may discourage similar prosecutions, at least in the near term. Also, a good thing.
But just putting a temporary cap on Ortiz' career doesn't seem like a big win to me, in the grand scheme of things. I know nothing about Massachusetts politics. Who knows she's not the "good cop", compared to the person whose career, as a result, will advance faster?
I also know nothing about Massachusetts politics; and you're right, it is a small win. Perhaps she would have made a future in national politics. Now she probably won't.
How she compares to the next guy (who won't make the same mistakes) I can't say. There are an infinite number of possible outcomes.
There are hundreds of prosecutors in the US who routinely - even though against predominantly non-white and non-prominent defendants - seek much harsher sentences for much lesser "crimes", often with much more dubious evidence, and much lower chances for defendants to ever have their personal situation considered in a public forum like this one.
The need to "start somewhere" doesn't exempt you from seeing things in proportion. ("Proportion" with regards to Ortiz. Aaron's death must not enter equations or comparisons. It's absolutely out of proportion.)