Slashdot Mirror
Palin E-Mail Snoop Gets Year In Prison
netbuzz writes "David Kernell, whose prying into Sarah Palin's personal e-mail account caused an uproar two months before the 2008 presidential election, was today sentenced to a year and a day by a judge in Knoxville, Tenn. Kernell was convicted of misdemeanor computer fraud and felony obstruction of justice back in April. His attorney had argued for probation on the grounds that what Kernell did amounted to a prank that spun out of control."
What is the point of adding a day onto the sentence?
If you are rich, you get away with stuff. It is the American way.
http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20101104/NEWS/101109939/1078&ParentProfile=1062
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
This guy just got lucky and guessed a password. But he acted against a conservative in Tennessee, so he got a year in prison. James O'Keefe actually tried to physically bug the telephone of a sitting U.S. Senator. But O'Keefe acted against a liberal in Louisiana, so he walked with probation.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There was an interesting slashdot post I saw a while ago which is relevant here, and which I'll attempt to paraphrase.
Basically, there are three classes of people in America - the ruling class (politicians, CEOs, and the filthy rich), those who directly protect the interests of the ruling class (the police and military) and everyone else. Call these first, second, and third class respectively. To come to the right sentence, you take a reasonable punishment, and multiply it by 10^([class of victim]-[class of perpetrator]).
Case in point - BART cop kills relatively unimportant black guy. Class of victim minus class of perpetrator is 2 - 3 = -1. Multiplier is hence 0.1. A reasonable prison sentence for shooting an unarmed, handcuffed person in the back would start at about twenty years, but the multiplier pulls that down to 2 years, as was seen. Also, if you assault a police officer, you can probably expect a sentence starting at about ten times what you would get for assaulting someone random in a bar, unless that person turns out to be a member of one of the higher classes.
This is a rather extreme example. If you really got unlucky doing this to a member of your own class, the prank might get you a few days in jail. But by pissing off someone two classes higher than himself, our prankster earned himself a sentence multiplier of 100, or about a year in jail. Let this be a lesson to any third class person stupid enough to piss off a first class person. The justice^H^H^H^H^H^H^H legal system frowns on such a disruption of the natural order of things.
It was the DA, not the judge, who decided to seek two misdemeanor charges instead of a felony charge.
Googling for "Martin Joel Erzinger" and consulting the non-emotional news items [such as this one], it seems the DA thought this course of action more likely to (1) guarantee conviction [thereby resulting in damage to his permanent record and maybe prison time] and (2) guarantee restitution.
Perhaps the DA is a scumbag with a special place in his heart for rich people, but I'm so sick of media (and blogger) spin that I'm going to say that maybe, just maybe, he knows more about the ins and outs of Colorado felony hit-and-run convictions than I do and was acting in good faith.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
He "hacked" a single email account a handful of hours of community service and nothing on his record. There is nothing to show a pattern or even any real malice intent he guessed a trivial password for haha's
You're being every bit as disengenuous as he was. He was hacking into her account to look for dirt in an attempt to manipulate the outcome of a national election. Still, just a misdemeanor. But then he went on to deliberately obstruct the investigation, lying to investigators, attempting to hide evidence, etc. Most of his sentence (which doesn't involve prison time, but of course you know that, and you're just trolling) is a result of his dicking around with the law enforcement agencies, not with the hack itself.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.