Lawyers Complain The Punishment Doesn’t Fit The Crime; Video Game Companies Disagree

After a long and fruitless legal battle Raymond John Sinclair will die by lethal injection next Monday for sharing video game ROMs on a Geocities website back in 1998.

Federal authorities arrested Raymond on Christmas morning and two years later a jury found him guilty.  A judge ordered him to die by lethal injection.

Now after 16 years, and four denied appeals Raymond has given up the fight.

In a letter to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Raymond wrote “I think this was absolutely excessive, and unnecessary.  They were just ROMs for Christ-sake!  Capital punishment is meant for murderers and rapists!”

“ROMs” is the common named used for files that contain the original computer code for various home and arcade video games.  By 1998 computers had finally reached fast enough speeds to emulate video games to near perfection which required the original ROM files to operate.  This encouraged various video game enthusiasts to share the game files on different websites.  Unfortunately some video game companies felt this was a form of piracy and intruded on their intellectual property rights.  While major video game companies now rely on emulation to allow access to vast libraries of their games, they do so at the expense of the consumer.

Its unlikely Governor Abbott will intervene on Raymond’s behalf prior to his execution, but human right activists and retro gamers are already organizing protests across the country including at popular gaming events and conventions such as E3 in Los Angeles and EVO in Las Vegas.