I bristle as well when essays like this state that he "was effectively assassinated by our legal system"

While I think there are a lot of good arguments that the prosecution was excessive and meant to create a chilling effect, it is a huge leap to say they assassinated him. He was clearly already vulnerable when this happened, or he would have never resorted to taking his own life when there were still so many avenues before him to try to get out of the situation. While this does not make it any less tragic, it does make it a lot less of an 'assassination'.

I don't find it rhetorically useful to use language like that in these situations. It distracts from the real issues at hand.

It's completely illegitimate to say he was "assassinated". Words mean things, and unless the government sent someone who personally killed Aaron, it wasn't an assassination. That doesn't mean what happened to him was right. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about the situation. But one doesn't get to misuse a word where it doesn't apply just to make a rhetorical flourish.