by Timothy Lee

Carmen Ortiz, the Massachusetts US attorney whose office was prosecuting Aaron Swartz at the time of his suicide, has issued a statement defending her actions in the case.

If Ortiz thought that six months was an appropriate sentence for Swartz's crimes, she didn't say so in her 2011 press release touting Swartz's indictment. "If convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison," the press release said.

And not satisfied with that 35-year sentence, Ortiz's office obtained a second indictment against Swartz in 2012 that increased the number of charges from four to 13. In this second indictment, Ortiz's office broke Swartz's actions up into five different date ranges and charged him under two different provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for each time period. Each of these ten counts was theoretically punishable by five years in prison.

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Source: Ars Technica