The judges in the UK have done it too :

Teen hacker escapes punishment
A judge has ruled that there was no case to answer after presiding over the trial of a teenager who allegedly flooded his former employer's email system with five million messages.

The defence argued that, since the firm's email server was set up for the express purpose of receiving emails, sending a flood of unsolicited emails could not be considered an act of unauthorised modification.
source

five MILLION
It's starting to get ridiculous, and the only ones who get banged up over here are 80 something Grandma's who refuse to pay taxes, and the ones the police want to hold without trial ..........[reading this, you CAN see their point ]