[cypherpunks2]

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.