Jury Convicts Ex-Student In Palin E-Mail Case [View All]

[babsbunny]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126421161&f=1003&sc=igg2

by Matt Shafer Powell

April 30, 2010 from WUOT

A former University of Tennessee college student accused of hacking into Sarah Palin's personal e-mail account was convicted Friday on two charges and acquitted on another. The jury deliberated four days, but was unable to come up with a verdict on a fourth charge.

The most serious of the charges facing Kernell was felony wire fraud — a charge that holds a maximum sentence of 20 years. The jury found him "not guilty" on that charge.

It did find him guilty of trying to destroy evidence. And it convicted him of a misdemeanor for unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer.

But the jury was deadlocked on a final charge of felony identity theft, so the judge declared a mistrial on that one charge.