In the US you have two types of legal systems, the state and federal level. Within each, you have misdemeanors and felonies. Misdemeanors are the lower level and cover non-serious crimes (vandalism, theft, minor traffic violations), and typically are fines or imprisonment of up to a year. They have no bearing on your rights as an American on either level. Some federal misdemeanors exist (poaching at natural parks or defacing monuments) but most federal crimes are felonies, leaving misdemeanors to the state’s discretion.

Felonies, however, impact your rights as an American. You cannot own firearms, you cannot vote, you cannot hold public office, and you are a “high risk” economically and socially, making loans and employment difficult. State-level non-violent felonies can normally be expunged/sealed over time for otherwise lawful citizens, but federal felonies never go away.

He denied the plea deal because he, as an activist, did not want to suffer losing those rights. The prosecution wouldn’t budge and was adamant in making an example out of him because he was a figure of hacktivism. They also desperately wanted the CFAA (a poorly worded law written by tech illiterates in 1986) to maintain its broad power.

For further context, this was a response to Anonymous and other would-be hacktivists, coming right off the heels of Anonymous’s Arab Spring campaign and the hack of HBGary. The Obama administration targeted Swartz to make an example out of him and scare future hacktivists, coinciding with the arrest of Sabu (the co-founder of LulzSec) and him becoming an informant to round up the current group.

My assumption is he did not want to plea guilty to a bunch of felonies, I think I read that this was part of it. It's rather extreme to throw that many years at someone like him AND felonies, I don't think he should have gotten a complete slap on the wrist, but what he did was literally web scraping PDFs, the kind that OpenAI and Anthropic do all the time and get away with, only instead of them being some authors IP, they were publicly funded in many, many cases.

That’s a disingenuous presentation of why you added it. Stated clearly, you added it to discredit him, the severity of the contribution that the charges played in harm to him, up to and including contributing to his suicide and to shift the burden from the government and its use of selective coercion to what others are arguing is a victim.

The government was or should have been aware of his mental health history and could have tailored the punishment accordingly so as to not risk pushing him over the edge. The constitution protects against cruel and unusual punishment which includes punishment in excess of the underlying crime, no one would argue his crime warrants death but by proceeding with the threat of excessive punishment on a person know to have suicidal tendencies the government is culpable in the consequences.

To use your example, the government knew he had a history of saying he would drink poison and said “here’s our finest selection of artisanal poisons, we will leave them right here next to your bed”.

The consequences of 6 months house arrest also came with having a felony record which would permanently affect his life making it harder to get a job and a broad set of consequences. And most people wouldn’t think breaking into a broom closet would have resulted in that. I had friends break into the computer lab, use the teachers password to copy games off school computers and get caught: should they face federal felony charges? Definitely not.