I think the problem here is we're not lawyers. I have no idea how often this comes up. Is it an uncommon bug, or something that happens daily? I have no idea be

I think the problem here is we're not lawyers. I have no idea how often this comes up. Is it an uncommon bug, or something that happens daily? I have no idea because I am not a lawyer. But, thinking as much like a lawyer as I can: you're never charged for the same "crime" more than once. There are overlapping laws, and one action can cause you to break more than one law (each of these is a separate "crime"). So I believe that legally speaking, Aleynikov is not being charged twice for the same crime, because he is not being charged again with breaking the same law. So I'm saying that your simple tweak that "seems good" may have other problems, and may cascade in ways that we cannot predict (because we're not seasoned jurists). Also, I'm saying that lots of smart people who have dedicated their lives to the study of problems like this just may have stumbled on the simple adjustment you have stumbled across in 3 minutes of armchair quarterbacking, and thrown it out for a reason that is not immediately obvious to the layperson. You may have had similar experiences with non-programmers trying to redesign the guts of software; it's about as productive as this exchange. So you might not need to redesign the legal system from scratch, but step one in making adjustments is certainly deep knowledge and experience with the existing statutes and their application. (Similarly, you wouldn't be allowed to commit to the mainline branch of Git if you don't know C.) If I had more time, I'd grope for an analogy in computers where two things appear the same to a layperson, but is actually different to programmers. I'm sure you can come up with several if you try.