Double jeopardy, I was previously convicted of 50700 counts of unauthorized access to various coldfusion sites. Among those was linode.
The only evidence the prosecution had against me were a list of compromised sites and several coldfusion 0days I had in my possession.
They could never prove that I generated the list of compromised sites, but the judges felt that the possession of said list was enough evidence to convict me.
We would've appealed but there was no point as the sentence was essentially nothing.
But you do end up with a record, which is not 'essentially nothing'.