[free-sklyarov] Plea Bargin for Dima?!?

[Julian T. J. Midgley]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, Bob Smart wrote:

> On Wednesday 22 August 2001 16:27, you wrote:
> > According to News.com, Both the prosecutors & defense
> > requested an extra week to discuss a possible plea
> > bargin for Dimitry...
>
> I've been expecting that for a while.  It would make a lot of sense for the
> Forces of Evil to do this, too: if Dmitry pleads guilty, it establishes (if
> not necessarily legally, at least politically) that his arrest was proper and
> what he did was a crime, which was probably the main point of this whole
> fiasco from the beginning.  Holding him any longer does not further advance
> the agenda of legitimizing the criminal part of DMCA, and the longer this
> goes on, the more public attention is drawn to what I belive was intended to
> be an obscure little battleground that nobody would notice until it was too
> late.

Please note that all this talk of plea bargains is the result of some
gratuitous misrepresentation on the part of the News.com journalist.

The Reuters piece picked up by Yahoo quoted Joseph Burton, Dmitry's
Attorney, as saying "I would like them to drop the case against Dmitry",
and the article went on to say that "Burton said he was not specifically
interested in a plea deal, but would not rule it out".

Somehow, News.com has managed to turn this into "Burton asks for plea
deal"... which is good going, since that's about 180 degrees away from
what he actually wants.

That said, in the event that there were to be a plea bargain, all your
comments are valid.

What do you do now?  Carry on with the hard work.  It would be pretty
trivial to represent a plea bargain as "Russian programmer pleads guilty
in order to get home faster - after all, he's no particular reason to want
to waste his life in the US waiting for court cases and appeals, etc in
order to sort out a broken US law".  The precedent isn't that damaging and
the DMCA remains as flawed on fair use and other grounds as it always has
been.  Don't give up - go for the gullet.


The more factually correct yahoo article:

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010822/tc/tech_hacker_dc_2.html

Julian

-- 
Julian T. J. Midgley                    http://www.xenoclast.org
Cambridge, England.                       PGP Key ID: 0xBCC7863F
UK Free Dmitry Protest:              http://uk.freesklyarov.org/