This tweet has some serious inaccuracies. He was offered a six month plea deal, which he turned down. The charges he faced carried a maximum time of 35 years, but that assumes they were served consecutively and to their maximum extent. Even without the plea deal, a first time non-violent offender with little chance of reoffending would have gotten a quite lenient sentence. However, he was never sentenced because he committed suicide before it went to trial.

I remember how sad I was when he died. He was a talented young man who had already made a name for himself in Internet culture. He’s also very close to me in age, so I saw some of myself in him. But it doesn’t serve his memory well to surround his death with falsehoods.

Despite what the image says, Aaron Swartz was actually never convicted of a crime in a court of law, and hence never sentenced. He was harassed by prosecutors, who posthumously dismissed the charges against him they were hounding him with (possibly because they were annoyed by earlier legal conduct of his that got prosecutors reprimanded by judges for inappropriate inclusion of private data in unsealed filings).