He stole $7-$70 million. That's depriving 7-140 people of their retirements. A life sentence for that is perfectly reasonable. We have a broken political system where money controls politics, and so many white collar crimes have minimal punishments.
People go to prison for 15 years for stealing $100. He did 70,000-700,000 times as much damage. Copyright violators face years in prison too, for doing a fraction of even that.
Whatever sentence he gets, I really don't feel like it's a miscarriage of justice. Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Hitler, Khan, and a swarm of others broke no laws because they controlled the laws of their countries. Yet punishing them for their crimes was not a miscarriage of justice. I'm not claiming his crimes are anywhere near the same order of magnitude -- stealing is much less than murder, and even 140 people is less than millions -- but the principle is the same. If a group of people creates unjust laws, and commits crimes legal under those laws, they deserve punishment proportional to the crime, not the laws.
People go to prison for 15 years for stealing $100. He did 70,000-700,000 times as much damage. Copyright violators face years in prison too, for doing a fraction of even that.
Whatever sentence he gets, I really don't feel like it's a miscarriage of justice. Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Hitler, Khan, and a swarm of others broke no laws because they controlled the laws of their countries. Yet punishing them for their crimes was not a miscarriage of justice. I'm not claiming his crimes are anywhere near the same order of magnitude -- stealing is much less than murder, and even 140 people is less than millions -- but the principle is the same. If a group of people creates unjust laws, and commits crimes legal under those laws, they deserve punishment proportional to the crime, not the laws.