The 26-year-old Reddit co-founder killed himself last week in his New York City apartment.
His family has blamed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and federal
And now Swartz's former lawyer Andy Good has claimed in an interview with The Boston Globe that prosecutor Steve Heymann knew the Internet activist was a
“The thing that galls me is that I told Heymann the kid was a suicide risk,” Good told the Globe. “His reaction was a standard reaction in that office, not unique to Steve. He said, ‘Fine, we’ll lock him up.’ I’m not saying they made Aaron kill himself. Aaron might have done this anyway. I’m saying they were aware of the risk, and they were heedless.”
Elliot Peters, Swartz's lawyer at the time of his death, said he encountered that same hardball attitude when prosecutors refused to negotiate a plea deal that would have resulted in no prison time for the 26-year-old, the Globe reported.
Peters says prosecutors demanded that Swartz plead guilty to 13 felonies and spend six months behind bars.
“There was such rigidity with the people we were dealing with,” Peters told the Globe. “I couldn’t find anyone in that office to talk about proportionality and humanity. It was driven by a desire to turn this into a significant case, so that some prosecutor could put it in his portfolio.”
Previously, Peters told Business Insider he believes he would have won the case, in part because the government didn't get a search warrant until 34 days after it seized his laptop.
"The gov was really in trouble there," Peters wrote in an email.
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