Aaron Swartz’s grand jury: State-enforced betrayal

Writer Quinn Norton's painful account of accidentally betraying her friend is a lesson in grand jury manipulation

By Natasha Lennard

Aaron Swartz (Credit: Wikipedia)

When journalist Quinn Norton was presented with a subpoena in 2011 to appear in front of a federal grand jury, she “had to Google grand jury to find out what it was.” She did not know that in a small, closed hearing, federal prosecutors would push her to inadvertently help incriminate her dearest friend and then-lover — Aaron Swartz.

I have written at some length about how federal grand juries have been used as fishing expeditions to indict activists, breeding distrust and despair around those investigated or called as witnesses. Norton’s essay published in the Atlantic Monday on being a “reluctant witness” in the federal prosecution against Swartz bears out this point with a painful and important personal account.

Norton details the mind-set that had her agree to cooperate with the government’s questioning (“the mechanics of snitching”) with little understanding of what her testimony might mean for Swartz’s case:

I didn’t know anything the prosecution cared about, and I thought that maybe I could talk Steve [Heymann, the lead prosecutor] out of the prosecution, or at least into not being so harsh. This was so obviously a ridiculous application of justice, I thought. If I just had the chance to explain, maybe this would all go away. My lawyers told me this was possible. They nursed this idea. They told me Steve wanted to meet me, and they wanted me to meet him. They wanted to set up something called a proffer — a kind of chat with the prosecution

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http://www.salon.com/2013/03/04/aaron_swartzs_grand_jury_state_enfo...