Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by glyphobet 4902 days ago
It is a shame that the petition to pardon Swartz has 1/10th of the signatures that the petition to fire Ortiz has. Let's advocate for a government that forgives (alleged) crimes as strongly as we advocate for a government that punishes people like Ortiz.

http://twitpic.com/bvjjvz https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/posthumously-pardo...

1 comments

Swartz is dead, so I don't know what pardoning him now would accomplish other than securing a useless symbolic 'victory'.
He can't even be pardoned; the charges were dropped. Even if the charges were somehow still in effect, the proper thing to do would be to have the charges dropped entirely. A pardon implies guilt, it simply commutes the sentence of the convicted.