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."
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.