> Can you back that up? I thought that Weev joked with friends about doing that but never took it anywhere or did anything that I would regard even as "attempting" to blackmail or extort instead just told Gawker.
There are words on an IRC transcript. Whether those words constitute a "joke" is a matter of interpretation, and that's something we leave up to juries. For various practical reasons, we do not just trust criminal defendants when they say they are "joking." Weev's jury, which returned a verdict after just a few hours, apparently did not think he was joking.
At the end of the day, this is the sort of thing that got Weev convicted, not some "corrupt prosecutor." If you do something at the edge of the law, and do it in a way where a jury of your peers is likely to find you unsympathetic or not understand what you did, you're going to have a bad time. Maybe this isn't fair, but it's a natural property of criminal law systems based on jury trials. The law isn't enforced by robots, it's enforced by people, and if people don't like you, that diminishes your odds.
Whether a joke or a real suggestion there seems to be nothing suggesting it was taken forwards and it isn't like they didn't get chance to go through with something because the police knocked down the door that minute.
Without further evidence of any concrete action I don't see how it could be regarded as an "attempt" at anything. That he was convicted on the basis of that[0] strikes me as a failure of the system (including the prosecutor, the court and the jury) and that hopefully an appeals court would correct the error.
[0] Assuming that was the extent of the evidence in this aspect as there may be other evidence of which I am not aware.
There are words on an IRC transcript. Whether those words constitute a "joke" is a matter of interpretation, and that's something we leave up to juries. For various practical reasons, we do not just trust criminal defendants when they say they are "joking." Weev's jury, which returned a verdict after just a few hours, apparently did not think he was joking.
At the end of the day, this is the sort of thing that got Weev convicted, not some "corrupt prosecutor." If you do something at the edge of the law, and do it in a way where a jury of your peers is likely to find you unsympathetic or not understand what you did, you're going to have a bad time. Maybe this isn't fair, but it's a natural property of criminal law systems based on jury trials. The law isn't enforced by robots, it's enforced by people, and if people don't like you, that diminishes your odds.