I think people who facilitate the sale of community destroying hard drugs deserve punishment, but this trial was a farce. The media ran ceaseless stories making it sound like he was selling guns to terrorists and child abuse material. There's no way he could have been fairly judged by a jury with how prevalent that type of reporting was.
What does 'deserve' mean?
How do you distinguish it from vengeance?
If the idea is that it has deterrent value, how do we measure that?
Also why are we trying to deter? What's the social cost of the behavior his platform helped facilitate?
How much did his being a party to that behavior contribute to its prevalence? Is there any evidence suggesting the behavior wouldn't have been enacted through alternative intermediaries?
Most importantly: Is there any unintended secondary cost to society, as a result of bringing punitive repercussions on intermediaries that are incidentally party to an undesired behavior?
In Policy Analysis one often sees a pattern where punitive policies exacerbate either the undesired behavior or associated antisocial behaviors
It's counter-intuitive but the correlation between criminalization and increased antisocial activity — and indeed net social cost — is quite strong.
In my view the only sensible approach to criminology is "consequentialism" with all punishments being informed by therapeutic approaches to reduce future harm — or "Harm Reduction"
When we allow ourselves to be guided by "scale balancing" rationales, it's just too easy for that to turn into sadism and worse "mob" sadism — where any view of proportionality (vague and aspirational to begin with) is abandoned until some "Lord of the Flies" moment of cruelty provokes social reflection.
Anyway thanks for considering my perspective.