Palin email hacker sentenced to year in custody

A man who hacked into Sarah Palin’s email during the 2008 US presidential campaign was sentenced today to a year and a day, with the judge recommending a halfway house instead of prison.

US District Judge Thomas Phillips also said David Kernell, 22, should get mental health treatment, based on defence comments today that he has had conditions including depression since he was 11.

Kernell hugged family members and friends after hearing the sentence.

He was an economics student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville when he deduced the answers to security questions and read e-mail in Palin’s private account.

The Republican former vice-presidential candidate and her daughter Bristol testified at the trial in April that the hacking, followed by Kernell’s online bragging and providing the password and Palin family telephone numbers to others, caused them emotional hardship.

The prosecutors’ pre-sentence filings said Kernell, a Democratic legislator’s son, had posted online that he found “nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped, all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor ... And pictures of her family ... I read everything, every little BlackBerry confirmation ... all the pictures, and there was nothing...”

Kernell apologised during the hearing.

“I am not going to make any kind of excuses,” he said. “I’d like to apologise to the Palin family.”

Kernell said that “for the rest of my life I am going to be ashamed, feel guilty for what I have done”.

A statement on Palin’s Facebook page after the trial compared the case to the 1972 Watergate break-in at Democratic headquarters that eventually led to Republican President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

“As Watergate taught us, we rightfully reject illegally breaking into candidates’ private communications for political intrigue in an attempt to derail an election,” the Facebook posting said.