According to the Wall Street Journal[1], the government would probably have asked for 7 years, and a plea bargain offer was made to reduce to 6-8 months in prison. The 35+ years was the potential maximum, would have required conviction on all charges, and ultimately would have required an independent trial judge to "throw the book at him."
And "checking out too many books at once" = allegedly hacking into a third party network to download 4 million articles from 1,000 academic journals without paying the required fees.
Allow me to rephrase that then: 6-8 months, for downloading articles that should probably be in the public domain? Well, that's not prosecutorial overreach at all.
"allegedly hacking into [...] without paying the required fees
"Crime against 'intellectual property', goddammit! Let him rot in prison, I say! That content was paid-for by tax dollars, and nobody lost a dime because he never redistributed it, but so what? It's the principle: if you break property laws, you should always go to prison."
