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Comment by lm2s | Hacker News Reader

IMO it really depends on the cybercrime. Maybe in this instance 2-3 years should be sufficient. I can, however, imagine scenarios where much longer sentences should be applied. If a cybercrime results in human casualties, for (a more extreme) example.

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..and the board of directors of many major banks should all be in jail after the 2008 financial crisis. They're not only free, many of them kept their bonuses.

1% of Americans are in the incarnation system or out on parole. That's more than all of the other high income countries.

Our legal system is hardly fair, and this is another example of it.

I don't understand this comment. Are you saying that it's good that bankers didn't go to jail, but bad that malicious hackers do? If so, I disagree; bankers should have gone to prison for a period of time easier measured in decades than years.

What I have a problem with is all of the tears for the white collar, educated criminals, and the insistence that the people who really deserve prison are those poor, uneducated, violent criminals. Somehow everyone seems to think that the criminals that they could most easily see themselves as deserve the least punishment, so middle-class crime is seen as less criminal by the middle-class.

Unfortunately for this argument, the framers of the Constitution were pretty firm about the idea that for people to be sent to prison, they had to violate a law already on the books at the time the crime was committed, and that the burden of proof for establishing the violation was on the prosecution, not the defendant.

There are already laws against homicide, though. Use those.

What if the effects result in an estimated 12 suicides, 1,000 children becoming homeless, and 10,000 teenagers not being able to go to college? Probation, or not worth charging?

What if someone punches you in the face and steals your wallet, resulting in minor bruising, an adrenaline dump, the loss of $42 and at least three hours spent on the process of replacing your ID and credit cards?

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