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A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

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Comments (84)

  • 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.
  • 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)
  • 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...
  • mvkel
    Now imagine dumping the corpus of this case into an LLM and asking it to find discrepancies. I'll bet your bollocks to a barn dance that it'd point out the extra underscore.This is yet another example of human confirmation bias leading to terrible outcomes for other humans. Our judgment is not so virtuous.Now the question is whether being fallible is a feature. It seems like society is interested in keeping humans in the loop FOR the possibility of mistakes; makes it feel more authentic. Meanwhile, innocent people suffer.
  • 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"?
  • codazoda
    > The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty.There’s a lot missing in this sentence. What evidence ended up convicting him?
  • a34729t
    Ultimately the prosecutor should then go to jail for say 10x the time. Maybe that would make prosecutors less zealous?
  • shen
    The premise of Brazil (1985)
  • leonvoss
    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).
  • firasd
    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)
  • koolba
    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.Catching typos like that would be load bearing for someone armed only with a public defender.
  • xnx
  • frozenseven
    "A crime so serious that not even innocence is an acceptable defense" type stuff right here.Honestly, this should be a gigantic scandal. The moment where you'd reevaluate how your entire justice system operates.
  • silisili
    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?
  • mlmonkey
    How tf could he be convicted without any evidence??!?
  • jokoon
    How could they manage to forget that underscore if that's their only evidence?
  • reenorap
    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?”Everyone needs to be investigated for this, this is absolutely unbelievable and sickening!
  • whiterock
    Perhaps there should be input fields that are paste-only, no typing allowed (or only with extra modal warnings).
  • ChrisArchitect
  • anon
    undefined
  • joeframbach
    How does one vacate a sentence that was already served?
  • ibudiallo
    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...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.What did the detective on the case have to say?> Detective: "Yep, that's the user name"> Partner: "What about the email, does it match?"> Detective: "Email? what's that? Is that like a fax machine?"
  • anon
    undefined
  • ButlerianJihad
    I had never heard of "Kik" so I looked it up:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_(app)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.
  • aussieguy1234
    This guy should sue
  • hunter2_
    At least nobody has figured out my password yet.
  • nkrisc
    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?
  • yieldcrv
    Remember when Saudi Arabia indicted Canada on its human rights and everyone laughed?Got to separate the message from the messenger
  • FrustratedMonky
    The article didn't mention any follow up. He actually served his full sentence.Did he sue after? Was there any accountability?.
  • rootusrootus
    The underscore is the least interesting part of this. That is a garden variety fuckup. Everything that came after that is the scandal.
  • anon
    undefined
  • Ozzie-D
    [dead]
  • arjie
    [flagged]