From reading other comments about the context surrounding these events, it sounds to me like this probably was an actual newbie who made an honest (if lazy) mistake and was then caught up in the controversy surrounding his advisor's past research.

Or perhaps it really is a second attempt by his advisor at an evil plot to sneak more buggy patches into the kernel for research purposes? Either way, the response by the maintainers seems rather disproportionate to me. And either way, I'm ultimately grateful for the (apparently unwanted?) attention being drawn to the (apparent lack of) security surrounding the Linux kernel patch review process.