> I'm not that familiar with the US Justice process, and nothing in that sentence makes sense to me :-/

Basically in the U.S. justice system you have a right to trial by jury, but this is expensive for both sides, takes a lot of time (both for the prosecution and defense, but also for the jury itself), so typically both sides will engage in a process of plea bargaining.

This is where the prosecution gives up on some things (such as their recommended sentence) in order to convince the defense not to pursue the trial by jury. Depending on the evidence involved (which hasn't been thrown out by the judge at this point) it may even be advantageous for the defense to pursue a plea bargain to try to get a reduced sentence on what looks to be an almost certain conviction. In this case there was an offer by the prosecution for a 6-8 month prison sentence plea bargain.

However, if the prosecution really wants to avoid a jury trial then generally they'll argue for a longer-than-normal sentence should they win a conviction (because otherwise the defense would simply always settle for jury trial and hope for a "Hail Mary" that overturns the case on a technicality). So the prosecution had announced that they would argue for a sentence of 6-7 years (or so) should the trial go to a jury phase and convict Swartz.

The "fair sentence" is independent of what the defense and prosecution think, and is determined by the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. It is based on these guidelines that Jennifer Granick estimated a sentence of 1-2 years, if convicted.

In any event the actual sentence is determined by a judge, usually based on the sentencing guidelines (1-2 years) and biased up or down based on how convinced the judge is of the arguments presented by the prosecution and defense. It's hard to say exactly what the judge would do, it really just depends on the judge.

As far as I know about Aaron, he wanted to plea bargain, but didn't want to plead to any charges that would make him a felon (but unfortunately the CFAA legal code is all "felonies" due to the way their maximum sentence is derived based on damages caused).

> By "trumped up loss", do you mean that the prosecution exaggerated the loss of the MIT/JSTOR?

It never got to that point, but basically the CFAA allows the victim to claim any costs that are reasonably associated with the crime committed by the suspect as damages. It's very open-ended, so you can claim damages even for functions you might ordinarily have been doing anyways.

For example, if MIT has 3 network techs looking into the network intrustion then their wages could be claims as damages, even if MIT would have had those 3 on work that day anyways. JSTOR shut off MIT's access for a few days while trying to block Swartz so MIT can not only claim the pro-rated value of their JSTOR contract for the time it was down, but they can also claim damages for all of their scientists and researchers who were delayed or otherwise affected by the loss of JSTOR services, even if it really could have waited a few days.

So that's what I mean by "trumped-up", the CFAA gives a very large book you can throw at the accused.

> At last, why is the 6-8 months plea bargain offer the worse? I thought it was the best one offered...

Way earlier in the case there had been a plea offer on the table that would have involved no jail time, but allegedly MIT did not buy off on that (this is kind of older data though I haven't seen anything refuting that).

At the time Aaron killed himself there was apparently two different pleas, one where the prosecution would ask for 8 months but the defense could argue to convince the judge to reduce it, and another where the sentence was more "dialed-in". It escapes me what the differences between the two would have been in practice though, I'm not familiar enough with the private discussions (at least until those details get leaked out too)

So everyone should stop throwing around this 35 number... because it was 2. ?

The 35 number was invalidated awhile ago anyways once the amended charges were filed (when the maximum sentence would theoretically be 50 years). So if you see 35 without qualification then they don't know what they're talking about.

The judge could assign more than 2 years (if convicted on all or most charges) so I'd be careful against suggesting that was the likely sentence. Given that the prosecution had mentioned pushing for 6-7 years I'd use that as the worst-case upper bound with 1-4 being the most probable band. However, both previous cases involving CFAA and the particulars of Aaron in particular (who had no malicious intent toward MIT) seem to argue against prison sentences as long as 4 years being a possibility in this case, but that's just my opinion.

Thanks a lot!