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:

I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably. The prosecutors recognized that there was no evidence against Mr. Swartz indicating that he committed his acts for personal financial gain, and they recognized that his conduct – while a violation of the law – did not warrant the severe punishments authorized by Congress and called for by the Sentencing Guidelines in appropriate cases. That is why in the discussions with his counsel about a resolution of the case this office sought an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct—a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting.

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.

"Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars," Ortiz wrote in 2011. "It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away."

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.

"What happened in the Swartz case happens in lots and lots of federal criminal cases," said legal scholar Orin Kerr in a Wednesday blog post. "Yes, the prosecutors tried to force a plea deal by scaring the defendant with arguments that he would be locked away for a long time if he was convicted at trial. Yes, the prosecutors filed a superseding indictment designed to scare Swartz even more into pleading guilty (it actually had no effect on the likely sentence, but it’s a powerful scare tactic). Yes, the prosecutors insisted on jail time and a felony conviction as part of a plea."

But Kerr argued that the use of these tactics is actually common in the judicial system. "If you want to end these tactics, don’t just complain about the Swartz case," Kerr wrote. "Don’t just complain when the defendant happens to be a brilliant guy who went to Stanford and hangs out with Larry Lessig. Instead, complain that this is business as usual in federal criminal cases around the country—mostly with defendants who no one has ever heard of and who get locked up for years without anyone else much caring."