David Kernell, the Tennessee student who "hacked" into Sarah Palin's Yahoo! account two years ago by correctly answering her easy password-reminder question — a crime that Palin has compared to Watergate — has been sentenced to a year in jail.

The guy who hacked Sarah Palin's email is in court and could be in some pretty deep shit. Daughter Bristol took the stand yesterday to talk about Fox News and crazy Alaska boys and losing her cellphone. It's a tear-jerker.

Will the punishment fit the crime? Migrant Blogger catches an important loophole in the punishment planned for David Kernell, the college kid charged with hacking into Sarah Palin's email:

The twenty-year-old son of Tennessee state representative Mike Kernell, a Democrat, plead not guilty today at a federal court in Knoxville. Prosecutors had charged David Kernell with breaking into GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's email by guessing the answers to her password-recovery answers, and then posted her new password, "popcorn," on 4chan. A judge released Kernell without bail, but forbid him to own a computer or to use the Internet for anything other than email and classwork. Compared to Kevin Mitnick's eight-year ban from the Internet, that's a decree as level-headed as it is unenforceable.