I am European and heavily against punitive justice. But I think one year of prison for a crime almost universally considered among the worst is not enough for rehabilitation, and I find this opinion validated by the lack of understanding or even remorse shown by the guy in public statements
As others have stated, water in trees gets up thanks to two processes. The first is indeed capillary action. The tubes carrying the water are rather thin, and it clings to the sides of it. But this is a rather small part of the total energy carrying the water. The main mechanism is a negative pressure inside the vascular system of the tree. Basically, tree leaves sweat water all the time (more or less depending on temperature). The water leaving the tree kind of sucks up the water following inside the vessels (this is a simplification to not go into the physics behind). In some larger trees, the negative pressure inside the vascular system can be exceptionally strong, requiring exceptional strength of the tree’s components.