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The Spam King

By Kent Scheidegger et al.

Doug Berman at SL&P solicited comments regarding what sentence is appropriate for the "Spam King." He has gotten a lot of comments, 60 as of this writing. What is fascinating to me is that the commenters on this blog, who overall tend to lean toward a more lenient sentencing policy, as the host does, have absolutely no mercy for this guy. Why not? In part, I suspect it's because his crime is one that every user of the Internet (and hence all the commenters) has personally been a victim of. People tend to be more lenient when we have not been victims ourselves. But we shouldn't. One really weird thing, as I note in a comment there, is that this 28-year-old man is claiming Oppositional Defiant Disorder as a mitigating circumstance. First, these kinds of "disorders" are just medical-sounding names for misbehavior and should not be considered mitigating...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime and Consequences on July 11, 2008 (boomark / email).