You're the one who doesn't “get it”. This didn't happen in a vacuum. There is a damn good chance the guys involved felt the law would dismiss them and their concerns in this matter.
For 50 year's now the law has been made more and more abstract from the community it serves by people who have an agenda. The same people who would dismiss the inherent offensiveness of the act in question (and reduce it to a counting of dollars and cents and then JUST DISMISS IT ANYWAY) would lose their minds in OUTRAGE and throw the book at the perp if he had, say, called someone a “nigger” or a “faggot”. We live in an upside down world where a mean, angry epithet, a mere WORD, a mere THOUGHT trumps actual damage in the matter of sentencing.
I applaud these guys and I applaud the perp for taking his medicine like a man.
As a popular humorist (who's name escapes me at the moment) pointed out: “George Washington and the fellas’ opened fire on other men over a 2 cent rise in the price of a breakfast drink”. One of the definitions of a ‘Man’ is that he KNOWS when to take his hands out of his pockets. It involves PRINCIPLE not “$40.00 dollars” or a billion dollars.