A Missing Underscore Sent an Innocent Man to Prison for 18 Months
A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
A single character error in a Kik username subpoena led police to the wrong person. Brandon Klayme, an innocent Nova Scotia man, was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for 18 months based on a typo that confused 'fus__ro_dah' with 'fus_ro_dah'. Despite no evidence of wrongdoing on his devices, the mistake persisted until his appeal, where the court finally overturned his conviction and declared him factually innocent.
Mr. Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted.
- Aurornis
> Nothing linked Klayme to the girl. No intimate images were found. Klayme did have a Kik account, but cops couldn’t even show that he had accessed the service during the period in question.
> Still, Klayme was arrested and hit with three charges:
> Luring a person under 14 years of age by means of telecommunication
> Providing sexually explicit material to a child
> Possession of child pornography
> The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty. He then went to prison for 18 months.
What in the world happened in this case?
How can someone be convicted of these charges without any evidence?
Unless the article left something out, the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username. They couldn't even find evidence that this person used Kik at the time of the crime.
What defense did his lawyer even try? I'm so confused.
- Macha
What the article doesn’t mention, since this was an incorrect conviction that led to a served 18 month sentence, loss of income from the loss of whatever job he had, and likely life long reputational damage (as this kind of conviction now needs to be explained and some people will adopt a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” attitude…) was there any compensation for this man? It sounds like all he got was voiding the conviction after he served the time. Not nothing, but seems pretty inadequate.
- marethyu
> To identify this person, the cops contacted Kik, but their subpoena accidentally requested information about the Kik user “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). Kik provided Klayme’s email address in response.
> Google records showed that this email address was used to access Google services from an IP address in Canada, so the Dane County investigators turned the case over to Halifax Regional Police. Halifax police took the IP address they had been given to local Internet provider Bell Aliant. Bell connected the IP address to the physical address of their subscriber, Brandon Klayme.
This is startling to me as it shows how easy to pinpoint exact location based on email alone.
- thephyber
If you read it carefully, the victim was in the US and the defendant was in Canada (I suspect a rural part).
I think everyone is rightly questioning why the defendant's lawyers failed to tear apart the prosecution's case. This generally requires that the defendant have money, the defendant hire a competent criminal defense attorney, and the attorney hires a team of experts to rigorously challenge all of the evidence.
Here is some additional Canadian news coverage: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...
- lefra
This is a mistake that shouldn't happen. It means that someone commiting crimes could trivially hide and get the wrong person accused by using homoglyphs [0].
- phoenixreader
Link with more complete info to this case: https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-chronicle-herald-metr...
- ttctciyf
We're really getting into Computers Don't Argue[0] territory here, eh?
0: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
(available in Best of Creative Computing Vol. 2 at https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ah... , p.133)
- binaryturtle
Stupid question: wouldn't a simple comparison with the body(parts) from the inappropriate pictures sent to the girl have helped the innocent guy? I mean those thingies all look different, no, like some sort of "fingerprint"?