Good character letters sometimes backfire. The judge in the Ross Ulbricht case said that she sentenced him so harshly partly because she got many letters attesting to his good character, so she decided she needed to set a very public example.
I think the difference is probably that in the eyes of the American government, everything Ulbricht did was bad. Whereas Hutchins did some good at some point that could be weighed against the crimes he committed. Character letters don't mean anything if the acts that gave that person their standing in the community are seen as wrong by the court.
“IDEALLY”, said Jack Welch in 1998, when he was chief executive of General Electric, “you’d have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy.” Reality followed vision for Mr Welch, who was a pioneer of offshoring, setting up one of the first offshore service centres in Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi.
The programmers who maintain MediaWiki, the programmers who write the backend and frontend of Wikipedia, and the people who run the organization that raises money to fund Wikipedia, are all seperate organizations. Giving users the tools to view and edit Wikipedia in every language and on a variety of mobile devices is actually a lot of work.
This is incorrect.