"Justice Gorsuch's new book seemingly a potent pitch for criminal justice reform"

Douglas Berman has this post at Sentencing Law & Policy:

I believe that the new book co-authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze, which is titled "Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law," is not officially available until later this week. But this New York Times piece featuring an interview with the Justice by David French suggests that criminal justice reform advocates will want to check out the book when it becomes available. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

French: It struck me that some of the stories here in the book, of the way in which the complexity of criminal law has impacted people, are among the most potent in making the point.  Is there a particular story about the abuse of criminal law that stands out to you as you’re reflecting back on the work?

Gorsuch: I would say Aaron Swartz’s story in the book might be one example. Here’s a young man, a young internet entrepreneur, who has a passion for public access to materials that he thinks should be in the public domain.  And he downloads a bunch of old articles from JSTOR.  His lawyer says it included articles from the 1942 edition of the Journal of Botany. Now, he probably shouldn’t have done that, OK?

But JSTOR and he negotiated a solution, and they were happy.  And state officials first brought criminal charges but then dropped them.  Federal prosecutors nonetheless charged him with several felonies.  And when he refused to plea bargain — they offered him four to six months in prison, and he didn’t think that was right — he wanted to go to trial.

What did they do?  They added a whole bunch of additional charges, which exposed him to decades in federal prison. And faced with that, he lost his money, all of his money, paying for lawyers’ fees, as everybody does when they encounter our legal system.  And ultimately, he killed himself shortly before trial.  And that’s part of what our system has become, that when we now have, I believe, if I remember correctly from the book, more people now serving life sentences in our prison system than we had serving any prison sentence in 1970.  And today — one more little item I point out — one out of 47 Americans is subject to some form of correctional supervision (as of 2020).