The appeal seemed half-hearted to me. His answers were basically "no", "no", "no idea", "i don't know"... Maybe he doesn't really care to be reinstated. Although he cared enough to write an article and post it to Hacker News...
If I were in that position, I would have done research and posted details in the answers. "I checked my log files, and received an average of X visitors over December, which compares to Y visitors over November. I also noticed IP Address K was crawling my site daily and I can't determine who they are, so I blocked their access. Perhaps that was the source of the abuse."
A little effort might have gone farther. Or who knows, maybe it would have had no effect.