> 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.<p>> Still, Klayme was arrested and hit with three charges:<p>> Luring a person under 14 years of age by means of telecommunication<p>> Providing sexually explicit material to a child<p>> Possession of child pornography<p>> The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty. He then went to prison for 18 months.<p>What in the world happened in this case?<p>How can someone be convicted of these charges without any evidence?<p>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.<p>What defense did his lawyer even try? I'm so confused.
It all comes down to the jury, none of those things matter. The bigger issue here: he knew those messages weren’t him, so the lawyer should’ve gone full force to figure out how this happened. I would guess his lawyer didn’t really believe him
It was a judge, not a jury.<p>And yeah, the trial lawyer failed to make the case, but if the defendant couldn't raise money for a defense, they he likely didn't have any experts to refute the prosecution's evidence.
"the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username."<p>Out of curiosity and definitely not defending this prosecution, but if the chain "unique Kik username -> unique gmail address -> unique ISP user -> guy living alone, happens to have Kik on his device" weren't screwed up by the investigators submitting the wrong username, would you say that's enough for a jury to convict ? I don't know about Canada but in the US at least no judge would step in and say that's not enough for a jury to convict on. Convictions happen based on he said/she said. In fact that's probably what this boiled down to. The defense isn't hiring a computer expert to dispute the chain "validated" by Kik/google/etc. unless the guy is rich. They probably accepted that as fact and just argued it wasn't him using the account. And everyone charged with this type of crime says "It must have been someone else on my computer."
No, there are open wifi routers, there are WPA attacks, friends that were given wifi passwords, and a lot of other things. Convicting on IP address match should disqualify the trial judge.
It is Canada so a decent amount of the process is different and more English than American.
<i>Unless the article left something out, the only possible evidence they had was
the wrong username. </i><p>It did. The evidence against him were the messages sent to the girl and the unusual username. It's not like it was John_Smith. It was fairly unique.<p><i>They couldn't even find evidence that this person used Kik at the time of the crime.</i><p>The lack of digital evidence is not proof of innocence. It's not proof of anything either way.<p><i>the wrong username</i><p>It's very likely the extra underscore was simply glossed over, the way a double space is glossed over. Lawyers aren't generally known for their grasp of computer technology. The lawyer probably saw this a hundred times, thought it was a typo on the subpoena, and didn't put two-and-two together to realize that it was material. After all, the employee at the website could have made the same error but in reverse; assuming that the double underscore was a typo. It's not on the judge, as the judge doesn't go through every piece of evidence checking all the typos; they take the evidence at face value and evaluate its probative value.
It’s not an unusual username, it is actually quite unoriginal, there are probably thousands of users with variations of the same name.<p>It is the name of the headline magic ability in Skyrim, which is probably among the top ten most popular videogames of the last 20 years.
It would take anyone reviewing the evidence noticing the double underscore. Part of what makes this infuriating is that it's the type of error we as individuals are prone to making or not noticing on some days.<p>As the defendant, I'd have been terrified that all this seems to be me yet isn't.
Canadian prosecutors tend to bring charges with no basis in law or reality fairly frequently.<p>The conviction rate Canada wide is only like 50% because so many absurd cases are brought to trial.
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I wouldn’t think to much more on it if I were you. It’s not just this article. I’ve been getting the same feeling with other Arstechnica articles that recently trended on HN, so I think I’ll just pass when I see them for a while.
Yes, this is an atrocious article.<p>It makes no sense as presented.<p>The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages.<p>But even if the messages no longer existed, there was no actual evidence. Truly, what on earth did the defense argue? How on earth was the jury convinced he was guilty?<p>Everything important about this story is missing from the article.<p>Edit: from another article, it seems like the conviction was made by a trial judge, and didn't even involve a jury: <a href="https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-quashes-dartmouth-mans-convictions-in-internet-luring-case-enters-acquittals" rel="nofollow">https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-qu...</a><p>A single judge just <i>decided</i> that "his guilt was the only reasonable conclusion available". Scary. I like a lot of things about Canada, but I'm somewhat horrified at the idea that you can be sent to prison without a jury trial.
> The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages.<p>I think the point is that the message history <i>would</i> show incriminating messages.<p>He'd have been saying "this isn't me", but somehow no one noticed it was the wrong username.
You are right, but your parent is right too.<p>If the police logged into his Kik account from his device, they would have seen the lack of connection to the case. If they simply trusted the Kik account contents from the subpoena response, then it was up to the defendant/experts to identify the issue and rebut the evidence.
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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.
Probably no compensation. Under "English" law (Canada is a Commonwealth country), the wrongful conviction will probably to taken to be without malice and reasonable given the information the US provided, so tough luck.<p>He might be able to negotiate an ex gratia payment, but this will be entirely at the whim of a politician, who will be looking to avoid being criticised for giving away government money
Legal processes take time. The news doesn't wait until the entire process plays out before they start reporting on the news.<p>Apparently the appeal leading to the acquittal just happened last week.
We're really getting into <i>Computers Don't Argue</i>[0] territory here, eh?<p>0: see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue</a><p>(available in <i>Best of Creative Computing</i> Vol. 2 at <a href="https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ahld/bestofcreativeco00ahld.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ah...</a> , p.133)
> The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty.<p>There’s a lot missing in this sentence. What evidence ended up convicting him?
It’s not inconceivable that it was on those chat logs alone. In the us the jury instructions read something to the effect of “this is what beyond a reasonable doubt means. It is up to you to determine if the prosecution has met that burden and you choose to apply as much or little weight to any piece of evidence or testimony as you see fit”
They had the victim's device and logs from the messaging service. The issue was that the logs were attributed to the wrong user.
There's a lot missing in this article. Obvious follow-up questions unanswered.
If you read it carefully, the victim was in the US and the defendant was in Canada (I suspect a rural part).<p>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.<p>Here is some additional Canadian news coverage: <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-underscore-led-to-an-innocent-halifax-man-s-conviction-9.7283149" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...</a>
All of this boils down to an extra underscore in his username. It’s the type of thing I’d hope our LLM-powered future solves for the common man.<p>Catching typos like that would be load bearing for someone armed only with a public defender.
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"?
The prosecution certainly could have done a comparison, but it seems they just went with the matching username and figured it was a slam-dunk (which it turned out to be). It's very possible the defense was never even made aware of those photos, and thus had no recourse for challenging them.
Any number of things could have acquitted this man, including that. His lawyer, the judge, the prosecutors, the police and anyone else involved at any stage of this case need to be looked at very carefully and hard decisions should be made about whether it's appropriate for them to be licensed to perform whatever duties they were performing in the course of it.
Ultimately the prosecutor should then go to jail for say 10x the time. Maybe that would make prosecutors less zealous?
The premise of Brazil (1985)
This is always going to happen with these types of laws, because they can be broken with very little effort from anywhere. That directly causes it to be easy to frame people for breaking them, by accident or on purpose. If the crime is purely the transmission of the incorrect byte pattern, the evidence is always logs, server and local. Eventually a bug will lead them to people who did not transmit the wrong bytes, but they will just assume they wiped the evidence from their local storage. There is no other evidence to be had because the crimes in this category to not require any physical evidence whatsoever. Many of the laws in this category involve byte patterns with a sexual theme, but not all of them. Others include the laws against using the wrong REST API in the wrong way (unauthorized access) or speech restrictions including laws against empty, impossible, never acted on threats or improper ideas (popular outside the US).
Connecting 'this account belongs to you' to 'this account did these activities' seems to rely on a chain of high-integrity (in the sense of both ethics and precision) investigative work that clearly doesn't happen because of the system's lazy recourse to subpoenaing internet companies (here with a typing error)
You can assume "the system is lazy".<p>In practice, "the system" is a lot of humans. The police in rural Canada aren't used to challenging the word of Wisconsin police. Police and prosecutors need to have an incredible discipline to hear "we have a suspect in your community who preyed on a pre-pubescent girl in our neighborhood" and remain neutral and dispassionate during the investigation.<p>The stupid part is that the prosecution is supposed to be competent and ethical (but one of those failed). Then the defense attorney is supposed to be competent and ethical (but one of those failed). Presumably the jury got access to all of the facts of the case and simply ignored the lack of evidence tying the defendant to the offending Kik account. A chain of 3 errors shouldn't happen if everybody is diligent, but in practice "won't somebody think of the children?!?" Turns off cognitive skepticism and encourages moral panic.
Source article: <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-underscore-led-to-an-innocent-halifax-man-s-conviction-9.7283149" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...</a>
Previously: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045335">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045335</a>
"A crime so serious that not even innocence is an acceptable defense" type stuff right here.<p>Honestly, this should be a gigantic scandal. The moment where you'd reevaluate how your entire justice system operates.
How tf could he be convicted without any evidence??!?
This is completely dystopian. Did he have the worst legal defense possible, or are Canadian laws such that an IP address is sufficient for any claimed charges to just stick?
This is absolutely insane, if the article is truly accurate they literally had NO evidence besides the user name (which was wrong.)
I hope this guy gets better lawyers when he sues everyone involved.
I am betting the judge accepted all the messages as evidence, and that was enough to convict.<p>Theres no one technical in a court room.
The messages ARE evidence for a case. They are the proof that a crime happened. The problem is that they don't tie the defendant to the acts.<p>The lawyers aren't supposed to be technical, but they should know their limitations and hire technical experts. But that also assumes the defendant can afford the defense, which is insanely expensive.
>The messages ARE evidence for a case. They are the proof that a crime happened. The problem is that they don't tie the defendant to the acts.<p>Yep,<p>So they have a cop stand up in court.<p>"We read X messages" (Here they are look how exceptionally heinous they are)<p>"We then asked the service for the IP."<p>"We then asked the ISP to deanonymise it. "<p>"Heres the guy we found at that IP"<p>He signs a stat dec that using his brilliant super techno crime brain he has correctly attributed the messages to this human.<p>It sounds like the defense from there was: But your honor, there's no history of these messages etc etc.<p>Judge is not technically capable of reviewing the evidence. Defense probably not technically capable of reviewing the evidence either. Prosecution probably not capable either. They are all just playing out parts really.<p>After probably having dealt with hundreds of these, on the balance of probability like most courts do they just backed in the statement by the cop.<p>The end unless you can find some way to challenge the technical evidence. Which he did after some time.
does Canada not have public defenders? I know they're overworked but, c'mon, surely they can do better than they did?<p>I want to see the transcripts.
How could they manage to forget that underscore if that's their only evidence?
Holy fuck! How can someone without no evidence and completely innocent be convicted of an offense like this in Canada? What in the fuck is going on?? What happened to “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?”<p>Everyone needs to be investigated for this, this is absolutely unbelievable and sickening!
I'm guessing there are LOTS of poor/rural parts of Canada (and the US) where convictions happen on less than convincing evidence.<p>Also, the legal system is made up of humans who are ALL fallible and subject to cognitive biases. Canadian police received the case from Wisconsin police, so there was likely too much trust and not enough verification. Same with the prosecution bringing a weaker case with very high confidence.
The missing underscore didn't send an innocent man to prison. In this story, an incompetent lawyer, an incompetent judge, and an unjust system walked into a bar...<p>When the article says "he was found guilty" what does that even mean? "found" implies there was evidence. Throughout the article, it clearly says there was no evidence from all searches. What did they find? Not a pixelated picture, not an ip address, not even an AI auto classifying him as prime suspect.<p>What did the detective on the case have to say?<p>> Detective: "Yep, that's the user name"<p>> Partner: "What about the email, does it match?"<p>> Detective: "Email? what's that? Is that like a fax machine?"
Perhaps there should be input fields that are paste-only, no typing allowed (or only with extra modal warnings).
How does one vacate a sentence that was already served?
I had never heard of "Kik" so I looked it up:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_(app)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_(app)</a><p>In 2016, CBS News called it "a predator's paradise", and Wikipedia notes that it lacks E2EE while permitting sign-ups without providing any valid contact information.
This guy should sue
At least nobody has figured out my password yet.
How on Earth was he convicted? They couldn’t find any evidence (because it didn’t exist) and yet he was still found guilty? Is there a similar presumption of innocence in Canadian legal doctrine?
Remember when Saudi Arabia indicted Canada on its human rights and everyone laughed?<p>Got to separate the message from the messenger
The article didn't mention any follow up. He actually served his full sentence.<p>Did he sue after? Was there any accountability?.
The underscore is the least interesting part of this. That is a garden variety fuckup. Everything that came after that is the scandal.
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