CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: Aaron Swartz and Motel Caswell: Book ends to prosecutorial reform?

A judge this week struck down a US government scheme to seize a Tewksbury, Mass., motel because it had become a haven for drug dealers, bolstering concerns about whether US prosecutors in some cases have too much power. The decision in the long-running forfeiture case comes as the US attorney in Boston, Carmen Ortiz, is already under fire for her role in the death of Internet hacker Aaron Swartz, who killed himself on Jan. 11 as he faced a potentially long prison term for what many in the technology field have noted was nothing more than a breach of a contract involving Internet documents.

The two cases are feeding a simmering groundswell among constitutional law professors and others about the inherent discretionary powers of federal prosecutors, especially in an era of books like attorney Harvey Silverglate’s “Three Felonies a Day: How the feds target the innocent.”

Here, by the way, is a link to my Due Process When Everything Is A Crime piece, which is mentioned in the article.