That wasn't intended to be a well-formed argument, but okay, I edited and removed 'political' - the judge may indeed have been personally looking for the best way to assure punishment.
But make no mistake, courts gradually widen the concept of jurisdiction out of convenience. A court inherently assumes that it will always reach the correct decision, so choosing to decide on an issue causes it little philosophical burden (meanwhile, saying that one's self is irrelevant to a situation requires some pretty well thought out framing and justification). As a result, another unlucky sap is put through agony - even if they end up prevailing years later.
If this was some random guy who poked at a website, found SQL injection, told the company, and then the company looked at the logs and found out that the guy had dumped their whole database (in the course of seeing whether the SQLI actually worked) and had the guy prosecuted for the equivalent of felony computer fraud or misuse, I'd sympathize.
That actually happened. This actually happened too. What happened here is not so sympathetic. If you pull down 6 figures off pirated first-run movies and get an ICE site takedown, maybe not so much with the "putting the exact site back up on a different TLD with a fuck-you to the police on it", eh?
Sympathetic? Not so much. But when a future plaintiff is looking to cite precedent, most likely their court isn't going to say "In that previous case, that guy was obviously guilty of something, so that decision was possibly made out of expedience and we're not going to use it".
In fact, I'll go out on a limb and argue that a majority of rule-of-law-preserving precedents must be made when the defendant is/appears guilty - for if they appeared innocent, a court would probably find this by easier means rather than spending much effort nitpicking the procedural issues!
But make no mistake, courts gradually widen the concept of jurisdiction out of convenience. A court inherently assumes that it will always reach the correct decision, so choosing to decide on an issue causes it little philosophical burden (meanwhile, saying that one's self is irrelevant to a situation requires some pretty well thought out framing and justification). As a result, another unlucky sap is put through agony - even if they end up prevailing years later.