If you are interested, a few months ago the new yorker had a great article detailing exactly what happened here with first hand interviews with most of the players. You can then make your own decisions.
Requiem for a dream: the tragedy of aaron swartz
What I got out of the article was 1) He was not trying to "make a statement" with his "hacking" action, but that was how the government portraited it. 2) He was very ecentric, and primarily seems to have killed himself because of what the legal action would have done to his future career. He had aspirations of running a foundation or becoming active in politics, and he felt that having a criminal record crippled his future. 3) One of the tipping points was having many of his personal correspondences subpenaed, as he was a very private person, which the government did solely to embarrass him, by making him and his girlfriends correspondences over the years, public.
In the end though, I think he just over reacted. His suicide was his doing and no one elses. Sometimes life will try and break you down and if you give up, then you die. I think if he had more robust coping strategies he could have seen that this was just a speed bump on the road of life and not over reacted by killing himself. The "crimes" he committed were not really that bad, and prosecutors are going to be mean and aggressive - that is their job. However of course, I was not in his shoes, so who am i to judge.
It is really just a tragedy.
