The Department of Justice announced on Monday that they had dropped the charges against Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz after he died from an apparent suicide on Friday. Swartz, 26, had been accused of breaking into a computer at MIT and downloading 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, an academic-articles subscription service. He faced up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted. His trial was set to start in April. In a statement on Saturday, Swartz’s family blamed prosecutors for being overzealous in pursuing the charges against him.
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