Like my dad always said! (you dont go to jail for doing the crime, you go to jail for getting caught!) I was 10 years old!........thanks dad!
Why should he Flee? The fundamental premise of the law is rather weak and he'll get off on the appeals. Although, he should have been smarter to hire better lawyers. This was a bunch of illiterate Jury members who heard how much he was making and got pissed because they are'nt smart enough to do the same thing. Spam is no different from the crap coupons they stuff into the mail boxes. Only the crap coupon senders are well organized enough to hire lobbyists to bribe the corrupt politicians to enact favorable laws to let them distribute their junk.
Well: I probably should be sleeping, but what the hell. First I am in favor of stiff sentencing for people who spam and for those who try to con the public by use of phones, mail or internet scams. In particular I think those who use these methods to scam old folks deserve the harshest sentence. I don't think the fact that the person is overweight has much to do with this. Perhaps I am sensitive about that because I need to lose weight myself. Based on what I have heard, I will bet that in prison, he will find that he loses weight because the food is so bad, and since there is nothing to do but read, watch TV and exercise, I will bet he gets fit (on our tax dollar). Also I would bet that he writes a book and tries to sell it to a movie producer. I wonder how the rest of you feel about that. Personally I favor amputation of a limb for each spam "event". See Ya Lefty.
9 years is nothing compared to the millions of hours and (billions of?) dollars spent by people in corporate IT who have to deal with the growing volume of spam through filtering, firewalling/blacklisting, virus-scanning, etc. While I don't generally believe that stiff penalties do much to stop violent criminals, I'll bet they would be significantly more effective in reducing spamming.