“Man Who Stole Beyonce’s Hard Drives Gets Five-Year Sentence”

A man breaks into a rental car and steals a couple of suitcases that contained stuff valuable to Beyonce. I’m curious about what people here make of the argument going on in the comments, summarised as:

1) He stole highly valuable IP and should be prosecuted as such, ignorance of the contents is no excuse
2) There is no indication that this was a targeted theft for that information, so basically a guy breaks into a car, makes off with a couple of suitcases and because Beyonce is rich, the police pulled their thumbs out of their butts and found the guy, then the law threw the book at him.

IMO a fair punishment for the crime comes down to determining intent (but I’m not fully decided on the topic). Did the thief intend to target that high-value information, or was he looking to make a quick buck out of the kind of things that average people leave in their cars? If some random druggie breaks into a car looking for the equivalent of vouchers for his next high, is that the same as someone seeing their easy chance to grab the nuclear codes?

IMO the idea of throwing the book at this guy – assuming that this wasn’t a targeted theft – seems to me like the rich sending a “don’t fuck with us” message. If this IP was so valuable, why was it left in a rental car? I think it’s the hypocrisy that’s getting to me here, the idea that this guy gets the book thrown at him stinks to high heaven of that scene from John Wick: “It’s not what you did that angers me so, it’s who you did it to”. This (briefcase thief) guy stole from a rich person, big mistake. If they had stole a briefcase that might contain relatively high value stuff belonging a non-rich nobody, that would be a small mistake, barely investigated, and justice (if any) would have been less harsh.