The developer stole code without understanding it, happened to be in India, and then attempted to play for sympathy by saying he couldn't feed his family - there are a lot of tech jobs in India, and the vast majority are not on odesk, if he is any good, he could easily feed his family, and furthermore, the fault was his, the offence was his, and then he has the gall to complain to the person he stole code from, who did not even punish him or pursue him, but simply reported what he did. Workers in India with an education have a lot of options which are nothing to do with manual labour, it's a vast and increasingly rich society.

The person reporting a crime is neither responsible for the original crime, nor for the punishment decided on by a third party (odesk in this case), nor for the situation of the criminal, and the dev ejected from odesk should have thought about the consequences of breaching their terms.

He was bound to get caught when being so sloppy, it was just a question of time, and he could have fared far worse (been sued by a client for example). Hopefully this experience will make him question his methods and pursue his career but without carelessly copying work.