A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

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?

shen

The premise of Brazil (1985)

whiterock

Perhaps there should be input fields that are paste-only, no typing allowed (or only with extra modal warnings).

hunter2_

At least nobody has figured out my password yet.

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?

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.

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"?

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?

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)

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!

FrustratedMonky

The article didn't mention any follow up. He actually served his full sentence. Did he sue after? Was there any accountability?.

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)

xnx

Source article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...

joeframbach

How does one vacate a sentence that was already served?

yieldcrv

Remember when Saudi Arabia indicted Canada on its human rights and everyone laughed? Got to separate the message from the messenger

rootusrootus

The underscore is the least interesting part of this. That is a garden variety fuckup. Everything that came after that is the scandal.

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...

a34729t

Ultimately the prosecutor should then go to jail for say 10x the time. Maybe that would make prosecutors less zealous?

aussieguy1234

This guy should sue