It sounds like the real guy’s story was quite sad. He was apparently mentally ill when he was thrown in jail, and (not stated in the article) possibly freaked out instead of being able to deal with the LE and administrative bureaucracies about the name misuse. So they decided there was nothing to his story and locked him up. Obviously this was triggered by the ID theft, but it also seems like a system failure in that the discrepancy wasn’t solved and the fake guy caught, at that time. The real guy instead went through a court case and served 2 years after pleading no contest for the “ID theft” of using his actual real name.
The fake guy on the other hand did the identity theft in his early 20s, bouncing some checks to steal a car under the other guy’s name (the other guy got in trouble over that, but it’s unclear how much). He got a fast food job under the fake name, and eventually worked his way up to a high paying hospital IT job where he worked and paid his taxes for 10 years til the ID theft fell apart. It’s not stated whether he got up to other bad stuff using the fake name.
The fake guy now faces 2 years in prison for aggravated ID theft and 30 years for “false statement to a National Credit Union Administration insured institution”. That is a pretty surprising difference betwen the two. I wonder what his actual sentences will be. He is 58 now.
It’s worth reading the article in this instance as covers a fair amount of detail. It’s hard to tell whether it’s a story of a mostly-reformed ex-scumbag trying to escape from his past, or if he continued to be up to other stuff as well.
Added: I got confused, the real guy’s arrest was in 2019, not decades earlier. So the fake guy lied to the police with false documents relatively recently resulting in the real guy getting locked up, not so good.