Better to be a live dog than a dead hero. But had Aaron Swartz plugged his laptop into the Exxon internal network and downloaded everything Beelzebub knows about fracking, he would be a live hero to this day. Why? Because no ambitious Federal prosecutor in the 21st century would see a route to career success through hounding some activist at Exxon's behest. Your prosecutor would have to actually believe he was living in the Chomsky world. Which he can't, because that narrative is completely inconsistent with the real world he goes to work in every day.

But when you take on a genuinely respected institution - whether State or MIT - your "civil disobedience" has all the prospects of George Wallace in the schoolhouse door.

As far as it goes that he would have been less likely to have been persecuted as severely this quote is probably true, as are the reasons why this would be the case. But I'm not sure how big an impact the lawsuit has on the probability of him committing suicide in the first place.

But I'm not sure how confidently we can predict a less stressful lawsuit very much reducing his chances of suicide.