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Aurornis 2 days ago [-]
> 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.
shusaku 2 days ago [-]
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
thephyber 2 days ago [-]
It was a judge, not a jury.
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.
qingcharles 2 days ago [-]
I don't know about the Canadian justice system, but it's very hard in the USA for defendants to get expert witnesses. The state is supposed to pay, but it's almost never done, and when it is they pay bottom rate for the defendant while having unlimited funds for their own experts.
OsrsNeedsf2P 2 days ago [-]
Oh something I can comment on!
A friend of mine was facing a mountain of criminal charges. Photo evidence proved the cops lied. We needed an expert testimony explaining the camera angle and why the photo explained how the cops lied.
I think we called every service qualified for providing such a testimony in Ontario, and a good portion of them across all of Canada. Some were even happy to work with us, until they found out we were testifying against the police. We ended up going international but without luck, and ended up with no expert testimony
pinkmuffinere 1 days ago [-]
> I think we called every service qualified for providing such a testimony in Ontario, and a good portion of them across all of Canada. Some were even happy to work with us, until they found out we were testifying against the police. We ended up going international but without luck, and ended up with no expert testimony
This is absolutely horrible to hear!! I know you probably don't want homework, but would you ever consider taking this story to news outlets? I suspect there'd be no compensation, but the uproar might (eventually) result in change.
leni536 1 days ago [-]
This is insane. I guess this is because of economic incentives, and expert witnesses risk losing work coming from prosecutors if they ever testify against them?
thephyber 20 hours ago [-]
Interesting.
I was actually dismissed from a jury panel partially because I said I don't know if I could trust the experts because my perception is that individual experts either repeatedly testify for only the prosecution or only the defense.
e40 1 days ago [-]
You can’t leave is hanging like that! What happened?
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
There are a gazillion federal prosecutions in the US that go something like
1) Pile of evidence that someone is guilty.
2) Federal "expert witness" allowed and funded to testify it points to X person
3) Defense is broke
4) If defense not broke, judge finds reason why defense expert witness can't present their full argument
5) Prosecution offers plea deal or a gazillion years in jail
6) Person folds when they realize none of their defense is allowed or will be funded, or goes to trial and gets a gazillion years for daring to go to trial.
If you already have a pile of evidence for a crime and an expert witnesses you can keep piling on it's not much of a stretch to dump it on some random person, as we saw here, quite easy actually.
voakbasda 1 days ago [-]
I have heard prosecutors say that innocent or guilty doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether they can convict.
qingcharles 1 days ago [-]
I've known and hung out with a lot of prosecutors. I've never heard one say anything like that outright, but, one of the main issues is that in 99.9% of cases the evidence will not be looked at. They are just not given the time and resources to even take a single glance at the police reports, never mind any forensic evidence. They literally have no idea whether the person is guilty or innocent when they offer a plea deal.
Even your paid defense attorney might never look at the case files at all. Jared from Subway's lawyer got into hot water because he got Jared to take a plea and it turned out he was factually innocent of one of the many offenses he was charged with, and that fact would have been uncovered quickly had the defense attorney ever looked at the evidence, which he said he had not.
thephyber 20 hours ago [-]
In the US legal system, the defense isn't given access to the prosecution's evidence used in the case immediately. In fact, lots of plea bargains happen before the defense attorney knows for sure what evidence there is to tie their client to the crime.
qingcharles 19 hours ago [-]
Absolutely. Defense usually has to file a motion, then god forbid the evidence is something like an obscure-format security video; nobody will ever figure out how to get it to the defense or how to play it back.
Most plea bargains are done simply based on the charging instruments.
thephyber 20 hours ago [-]
I doubt any professional prosecutors would say this out loud. This is likely a disciplinable or disbarrable statement.
This is effectively a truth, but prosecutors are generally held to high ethical standards, where they are expected to drop cases / not bring cases if the evidence doesn't point specifically to the defendant.
That said, there are occasionally times when prosecutors have been caught hiding / burying / not sharing exculpatory evidence (something the police / prosecution found which would help the defense's case against the prosecution). The only reason to do so would be to sandbag the case against the defendant even when there is a shadow of a doubt in the prosecution's case.
expedition32 1 days ago [-]
Weird in my country we have a culture were scientists love going after eachother- its what they live for! Nothing gives you more fame than destroying other people's reputation.
And overturning convictions gets you straight into the history books. It gets so ridiculous that people make their life work out of redoing cases from the 90s.
thephyber 20 hours ago [-]
Overturning convictions presumes that the defendant was wrongfully convicted and that the scientist has the technical skill which is relevant in the case.
The problem is that these intersecting conditions make the number of relevant cases small, while having experts testify for defendants for cheap during mundane cases has MUCH higher demand.
nightowlnetwork 1 days ago [-]
If you dont mind, which country is that?
helpfulfrond 20 hours ago [-]
"Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" is a French game, (the user's name is expedition 32) and this sounds like something the French would love, so I'm thinking France, but I'm only hypothesizing.
throw383949 2 days ago [-]
Canadian justice system is under stronge pressure to bring rate of conviction up. Only 0.001% rapist end in prison and bs like that.
Some corners must be cut, to reach quotas!
thephyber 20 hours ago [-]
Rape is unfortunately a difficult crime to prove compared to lots of other crimes.
But I also suspect your statistic is not accurate and designed to make your point, not represent reality.
notabotiswear 1 days ago [-]
Uh, how many rapists do you guys have trolling about to even manage to produce a percentage like that?
1 days ago [-]
throw1234567891 1 days ago [-]
Judging by how many children bodies they find under old orphanage sites, too many.
giantg2 2 days ago [-]
"he likely didn't have any experts to refute the prosecution's evidence."
What evidence? They didn't have any other than a user name. An arm chair lawyer who watched too many shows could have created reasonable doubt.
bizzletk 2 days ago [-]
But in a trial room, that evidence was 100% there:
> Prosecution: Mister Klayme, the criminal messages were sent from a Kik username called "fus ro dah". What's your Kik username?
> Klayme: It's "fus ro dah".
> Prosecution: It logically follows that Mister Klayme was the sender, and is therefore guilty of the offense.
giantg2 1 days ago [-]
And the reasonable doubt would come from someone else could have used my account, does the service's account ID match the account ID for my user name, nothing was found on my devices, did the IPs match my known IPs, when did the access take place vs where was I, etc.
voxic11 31 minutes ago [-]
But that is all speculation/opinion, you can't actually say any of those things in court without an expert witness. Only expert witnesses can give opinions, lawyers and lay witnesses cannot.
thephyber 20 hours ago [-]
Your comment was already asked and answered several times in this HN post.
There was evidence of a crime, only the Kik account ownership evidence was thin. Any decent lawyer would have probed into that aspect of the case, but there are lots of comments here about failures of defense / prosecution / experts / legal system.
jibal 2 days ago [-]
They had the exchange with a minor from an account that everyone -- including the defense -- believed to be Klayme's. His only counterargument was that his email had been hacked, which was not true and not the correct explanation.
But what they didn't have is any independent evidence that Klayme had sent the messages or even that he had access to the account that sent them. If they had looked at the IP address from which the messages were sent, they would have seen that it wasn't his and was in a distant geographic location.
ralferoo 1 days ago [-]
Residential proxies exist. Even if they had picked up that the IP was from somewhere else, a decent lawyer could probably have been able to convince a jury that just showed intent because he was trying to conceal his IP.
giantg2 1 days ago [-]
You'd have to show some evidence that he did conceal his IP, otherwise there should still be reasonable doubt. You can make up whatever you want without evidence, proving it is different.
jibal 20 hours ago [-]
You're talking nonsense. Among other things, had either the prosecution or the defense seen that the IP addresses didn't match, they would have pursued it further. "The IP addresses don't match but that just proves that the defendant tried to hide their IP address" is a ridiculous corrupt argument, one that a decent prosecutor would never make ... please do not ever serve on a jury.
ralferoo 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure they would have pursued it much TBH. It seems an incorrect username match was already a slam-dunk for the jury. Even if the defence had seen that the IP address was in the wrong location, the prosecution would argue they'd use a residential proxy. It'd be hard to prove or disprove, so it'd probably impact the jury about the same as the IP address being totally in the wrong region - i.e. it'd not be the magic bullet to show his innocence.
throw101010 2 days ago [-]
> I would guess his lawyer didn’t really believe him
Then you'd ask to change lawyer. If they can apply a standard practice of care and do basic checks like matching a username and time of use because they don't "believe" you when you say these are not you messages, they are not doing their job as a lawyer.
I'd go as far as saying such basic checks not being done amount to negligence/malpractice, they might have a civil case against that lawyer.
bizzletk 2 days ago [-]
But the lawyer would say "okay, help me prove you didn't send these messages"
We know he's innocent, and he knows he's innocent, but how does he prove it?
jibal 2 days ago [-]
He doesn't have to prove that he didn't send them ... that's the prosecution's burden. (In the U.S. ... I know nothing about Canadian law.) But a competent lawyer could figure out how to prove it: get ahold of the IP address from which the messages were sent. Oh look, it was in California! (The IP address they had was from the email address with which Klayme had registered his Kik account with the mistranscribed name.)
Also a competent lawyer would have done a scrupulous audit of the chain of reasoning that led to his client, which would have revealed the username mixup.
account42 11 hours ago [-]
Why do you assume that the IP that sent the messages was recorded. They the police went after the email at least suggests that it wasn't in the data that Kik provided during the police investigation.
fortran77 24 hours ago [-]
This is Canada. That may not be possible.
saidnooneever 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
codetiger 2 days ago [-]
This case can be the best example of human hallucinations. They made a mistake in username, and assumed everything after that was facts. All that had to be proved was the person is the owner of the mistaken username.
Dilettante_ 2 days ago [-]
There should be/does anyone know if there is a name for this? When you truth-check exactly once and then just blindly runaway after that?
Edit: Apparently in medicine there exists the concept of "premature closure", where the carer settles on a diagnosis early and stops considering other possibilities. Seems like a decent match?
codetiger 1 days ago [-]
In LLM (AI) terms, we call the same effect as "models are hallucinating".
Dilettante_ 1 days ago [-]
I did understand that analogy from your first comment, because I have neither been living under a rock for the past few years nor suffered a heavy concussion minutes before making my reply.
That may seem needlessly harshly worded, but I wanted to very bluntly tell you to not expect/treat your fellow commenters like they are pants-on-head stupid.
My intention with GP was finding a good term for this failure to question oneself. That's not even strictly what hallucinations in the context of LLM mean in common discourse, which would be more along the lines of meaning both the (mechanism of) production of the wrong info in the first place, as well as (more implicitly and softly) that propensity to fail to question themselves. You would have understood that, if your model of my ability to understand had been more generous.
codetiger 1 days ago [-]
Sorry if I sounded to you like assuming fellow commenters like that, but that was not my intention. As you were bringing up medical terms, I was trying to set the context clearly for my previous comment.
odo1242 1 days ago [-]
Tunnel vision, probably
codetiger 1 days ago [-]
"Tunnel vision" sounds too positive for this context.
Hackbraten 1 days ago [-]
Sounds like confirmation bias to me.
jasonfarnon 2 days ago [-]
"the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username."
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."
jojobas 2 days ago [-]
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.
anigbrowl 2 days ago [-]
Judges generally do not evaluate the quality of evidence. Unless the defense challenges, it's assumed that the prosecutions claims are founded in fact. It doesn't matter if the prosecution alleges you did six impossible things before breakfast unless the defense disputes these allegations.
jojobas 2 days ago [-]
A judge that has no reasonable doubt with this sort of evidence has no business being a judge.
We don't know what defense did in this trial but not picking up on the username mismatch and the assumed non-challenge of the evidence is telling as well.
anigbrowl 2 days ago [-]
In an adversarial system (which the US and Canada and UK are), the judge is not supposed to challenge evidence unless it's glaringly, obviously adrift from reality. That's the job of the defense lawyer. In civil law systems the roles of the judge and prosecutor are combined and responsility for bad decisions is distributed differently.
DoctorOetker 21 hours ago [-]
a simple law could mandate that attribution chains presented as evidence (by either party) MUST recursively include a header reminding everyone about this law (so that ALL defendant, plaintif, their lawyers and the judge & jury if applicable), the law being for example:
1) the username must be introduced as " the <N>-character user name <username> at the <M>-character online platform <platform> ..." along with a cryptographic hash of the concatenation, of user name, service name, ... so that any alteration is easily noticed.
2) a histogram of usernames binned by Damerau-Levenstein edit distance, along with a tabular cumulative count so that everyone can comfortably read off how many other but similar user names this platform has less than 1 edit away, less than 2 edits away, less than 3 edits away etc...
3) the law should introduce a bet between law enforcement and corporations:
upon being requested for the other half of a forensic link (say an IP address, or an email address, ...), it must demand the exact number of characters, it must provide a list or at least a cumulative count of user names less than N edits away. if they are ever caught violating user privacy they owe money to the state, the individual, ... even if law enforcement demanded out of band cooperation. The corporation should financially feel the risk of prosecution / police making invalid requests, so they have an incentive to technologically think ahead of the police and their sloppy work.
> In an adversarial system (which the US and Canada and UK are), the judge is not supposed to challenge evidence unless it's glaringly, obviously adrift from reality.
So regardless of common law vs civil law systems, one could devise laws such that this type of errors could be made glaringly clear to anyone involved, by law.
It's not like the first time humanity is confronted with misattribution. If a phenomenon has a word, its typically been happening for a long time. If the laws haven't been adjusted to learn from mistakes, it's not because they don't want to learn, but because they want to not learn.
jojobas 2 days ago [-]
The prosecution must still present evidence that proves guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
"Something something IP address" sort of evidence that the article describes doesn't seem to cut it.
anigbrowl 2 days ago [-]
Indeed, but it's up to the defense to articulate what the basis of that doubt is. If you read jury instructions, they typically tell the jurors to only base their decision on the information presented in the courtroom and to set aside their own intuitions, prior life experience etc.
Now this isn't universal; I've seen judges that encourage the jury to ask questions in open court (by submitting as notes to the judge who reads them out), for example. But that's very unusual. Judges who make a habit of questioning submitted evidence are likely to have their rulings challenged far more often and be accused of bias, even if they are superb jurists. And high status in the legal world goes to appellate judges whose rulings set legal precedent. Trial judges do get cool points for calling out bad lawyering and writing spicy opinions but this can also be a career anchor.
We are encouraged by civics classes and media to believe in courts as truth-finding institutions, but the reality is that most of the time they are engaged in argument-scoring. Even to the extent that they do pursue truth via the appellate process, it doesn't happen in a timely fashion. There's saying that the wheels of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine, which goes back to the Roman empire: so you're looking at an institution that is historically so confident in its process that it has become divorced from any sense of urgency in its application.
jojobas 2 days ago [-]
It's not even about asking questions, the judge is allowed just listen to the prosecution case and acquit without requesting any elaboration, or even challenge by the defense, isn't he? The prosecution didn't meet "no reasonable doubt" even before the defense started.
anigbrowl 23 hours ago [-]
It's not my fault that the legal system does not work the way you wish it did. Maybe stop arguing with me and write earnest letters to the Supreme Court instead.
voakbasda 1 days ago [-]
Is that the standard for evidence in Canada?
irishcoffee 2 days ago [-]
I am curious if you’ve ever met a judge. Every single one I’ve known was a giant, arrogant, jackass. They aren’t actually (generally) interested in being good at their job, they just like the idea.
victorbjorklund 1 days ago [-]
Happens all the time. You have to then say ”the ip address does not prove it because X”. If prosecutor have a photo of you committing the murder it is enough evidence. But then maybe you will say ”that isn’t me. That’s photoshopped” and then court needs to evaluate if that can be the case or not. But if you don’t give any plausible explanation to the photo it will be used against you.
vintermann 1 days ago [-]
> happens to have Kik on his device
That would have been (highly likely) true by construction, after all the single underscore username did exist. The only case it wouldn't have been true is if they deleted the app but not their account I guess.
jasonfarnon 20 hours ago [-]
"That would have been (highly likely) true by construction"
You're assuming people knew what evidence to question. That is having the kik app on his device isn't evidence against the claim that "kik didn't return the wrong guys username". Of course it's evidence in support of what he was accused of.
nimonian 1 days ago [-]
_Exactly_.
Both the article and the parent comment treat "happens to have Kik account" as an independent discovery that affects our Bayesian inference.
No. The innocent was identified exactly _because_ they have a Kik account, so the conditional probability they have a Kik account is 1.
jasonfarnon 20 hours ago [-]
No. If the target of your "Bayesian inference" is whether the chain kik->gmail->ISP is reliable, then it isn't independent evidence. But that isn't the same as the target of inference in court, which is guilt or innocence, and obviously having kik is additional evidence for that. As I mentioned, the chain kik->gmail->ISP would not even be disputed in a run-of-the-mill accusation in the US, any more than DNA evidence gets scrutinized for lab mix-ups. You would need expensive attorneys and experts for that.
benj111 1 days ago [-]
If it wouldn't happen today, it's only because the US has a long history of doing this, mainly to black people.
Youre more confident that it doesn't still happen than I am though.
phyzix5761 1 days ago [-]
As a software engineer the legal system scares me. How can we put someone in jail (for the rest of their lives in some cases) based on nebulous rules and personal interpretation/application of the law?
benj111 1 days ago [-]
As a person it should scare you.
Unfortunately this isn't unusual, well except it actually being accepted that he was innocent after the fact.
cucumber3732842 1 days ago [-]
You think criminal law is bad just wait until you hear about civil/administrative enforcement.
We steal people's life work, destroy livelihoods, etc, etc, on far, far far flimsier grounds.
tekla 1 days ago [-]
It's scary that people think being a software engineer makes them an expert in law
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Worse, several people will have an aortic dissection tomorrow. Their main arteries will split apart and they will just die from internal bleeding. And the next day, and the next day, and the next day. But only until next week because that's when false vacuum decay will get us.
sirsinsalot 1 days ago [-]
Other than misplaced nihilism what's your point?
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
The justice system isn't the only thing that randomly kills you.
sirsinsalot 1 days ago [-]
Right, and...?
Just because many things can do something doesn't negate a discussion about one of the things. Your point (which it barely is one) isn't really interesting or useful.
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
It effectively does for the average person person. You think you have a tiny ability to change or influence it, when in fact you do not, at least not while exercising the range of options and risk you find acceptable*. It is not of much different design today than during the Salem Witch Trials, 300 years ago, and sits in the one branch of government with next to zero democratic levers of control. The justice system is effectively a natural disaster or act of god to the typical person.
Most people harm themselves more by considering it anything more than a fixed system to be calculated against, bashing their head into a wall for no gain.
* To the typical HN user
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
To extend the metaphor, HN people don't build a house because 'what if there's a flood tomorrow' and end up sleeping in the dirt.
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
Anyone with means will generally try to put their business, their wealth, and their residence all in separate countries/jurisdictions to ensure their exposure to any particular flood is minimized. Ironically actual career criminals are often the most hedged because they always have dirt on someone higher up so they can horse-trade away charges right at the source before they interact with judge and prosecutor. This is why low level drug users or ignorant drug mules often get hemmed up far worse than their suppliers when caught.
DoctorOetker 20 hours ago [-]
> You think you have a tiny ability to change or influence it, when in fact you do not, at least not while exercising the range of options and risk you find acceptable.
Perhaps I am atypical for HN, but I see a clear distinction between corrupted legal systems or layers in society (most lawyers in general), and
force majeure* from natural disasters: the average person isn't paying taxes to make sure natural disaster continues happening, and history has shown that system collapse is often preceded by intolerable taxation used in offensive ways. Average persons holding pitchforks...
Keep in mind that Klayme wasn't the only victim of this shoddy prosecutor: while he had to navigate the prison bitch brothels, the real perpetrator might continue the abuse with same and possibly many other victims!
Can we please discuss how misattributions like this can be prevented, and think of ways to align the interests of all parties?
SZJX 1 days ago [-]
The crusade and strong Western societal taboo/moral panic on this topic clearly massively cloud people’s judgments (e.g. Chat Control in the EU), unfortunately.
DoctorOetker 20 hours ago [-]
I believe its orthogonal to what you refer to as moral panic:
Every day the legal process dragged on, every day this defendant sat in prison, was a day the real perpetrator wasn't recognized, wasn't prevented from harming more victims. Now what you refer to as a moral panic turns out to have interests aligned with the falsely convicted defendant.
Any further harm suffered by victims of the perpetrator should be entitled to sue the police / prosecution, suppose such further harm happened:
as I understood, for a person / entity to be co-liable theoretically requires:
* the person / entity having faulted
* a causal connection between the fault and resulting damages
Please don't push on the basis of what position you consider yourself more or less likely to find yourself in, but push on the basis of what you believe may help prevent false positives and false negatives.
deltoidmaximus 1 days ago [-]
I've seen people argue for lowering burdens of proof for particularly heinous crimes and seemingly unaware they're arguing from a position of rage and need for revenge.
gregdaniels421 2 days ago [-]
It is Canada so a decent amount of the process is different and more English than American.
Tangurena2 1 days ago [-]
This is one of those crimes where the accusation is the conviction.
anigbrowl 2 days ago [-]
An unfortunate fact about the legal system is that it's much easier for lawyers to sway a jury based on emotions than facts. simply labeling someone as a child abuser and then recounting a sordid tale is enough to get most people to switch off their rational faculties completely. Another unfortunate fact is many defense attorneys start work from the premise that the client is both guilty and an idiot, accepting the facts as alleged and trying to develop a counter-narrative that legally excuses or at least mitigates them. Protestations about the validity of the factual allegations are evaluated as legal arguments, with the implicit assumption that the police work will stand up to examination and that challenging it will alienate the jury even more than the initial allegations.
To my mind this is a by-product of legal education, where lawyers are tasked with identifying precedential or logical flaws in an opponent's argument rather than considering the entire set of circumstances. Answering 'First, I would examine all the evidence to make sure it was correct that the police did not make mistakes...' will not earn you any points on a typical law school exam; it's regarded as similar to disputing the givens on a logic or philosophy problem. I don't know about Canadian law specifically, but in US law appeals revolve solely around legal issues and the facts adduced at trial are assumed to be correct by default; you can't appeal on the basis that the facts were wrong or that the evidence was lacking, but must go on the basis that the wrong legal conclusion was drawn from the evidence in question or that your attorney failed to represent you properly (which requires you to explain why you didn't fire them at an earlier stage).
If I ever found myself wrongly accused I would never, ever go for a jury trial but ask for a bench trial instead, where the judge is the sole decider. Unlike a jury, a judge has to write out the reasoning for the decision. (It's sad that even here, the judge failed to notice the discrepancy in the evidence.) And if a defense attorney proposed to go on some other basis than the correctness of the facts I would seek to replace them immediately, even if this meant a longer period of pretrial detention. Most people go along with bad defense strategies because the carceral process is so demoralizing that they want to escape it as quickly as possible, even at the price of pleading guilty or letting the defense counsel field the wrong sort of argument. Even when someone is certain of their innocence like this defendant, starting a fight with one's own lawyer (who might be their only friend in the world if the accusation is lurid or grave enough) is often too scary for a defendant to imagine.
I'm curious (but not optimistic) as to whether anyone in the police, prosecution, or judiciary will face any consequences for their carelessness in this case beyond slower promotion. It's also unclear how the state intends to make the unfortunate defendant whole beyond declaring him the the victim of a procedural error. Compensation in such cases is usually calculated around loss of expected earnings; since it's hard to put a price on the loss of liberty, dignity, safety, or sanity those deficits are usually accorded some fixed nominal value, which tends to be on the low side. For example, the Federal government in the US pays $50,000 per year of imprisonment and $100,000 per year on death row; states have their own formulas and I assume things are approximately similar in Canada. Personally, I don't think $75,000 is adequate compensation for 1.5 years in prison on a child sex crime charge, which notoriously puts a convict at a much higher risk of violence from other prisoners than crimes involving property or ordinary violence.
gblargg 2 days ago [-]
Why would people get jury trials if bench ones were better? Is it only when the person is innocent?
bryanrasmussen 1 days ago [-]
do people ever do anything that is less beneficial than an alternative?
If the system is railroading you, the judge looks like another member of the system.
If you did it but believe that a jury will decide the law is unjust then you may go for jury nullification. A judge is not going to give you that.
In the U.S you might want to push as far as you can before accepting a plea, based on the idea that the prosecutor will offer better terms the closer it comes to trial. Under these conditions jury trials are more expensive, take longer, and may offer more uncertainty. Therefore ask for jury trial if your strategy is to get improved terms for plea.
In other words, there are reasons why jury trials would be better. There are reasons why people might think that jury trials would be better. However if your thing is about realizing the evidence is a bunch of crap and the charge is something that might emotionally cause people to want to see someone suffer you might want to take a bench trial, because hopefully judges should be able to see through crap evidence.
tancop 1 days ago [-]
because they think jury trials work the way they are supposed to work.
the system is broken because juries are not required (or even allowed) to explain their decision, and the selection process is not that good at removing bias. thats how you get cases where the jury is racist or not following the law.
but the idea of using a group decision instead of individual is great, and the jurors not being judges/lawyers avoids professional deformation. if selection was completely fair the system would work as intended but thats not really possible with the way it is now.
GJim 1 days ago [-]
> selection process is not that good at removing bias
I'd say it introduces bias.
Here in Blighty, jury selection is *entirely* random. A juror is only going to be 'deselected' in extremis; for example, it turns out they are related to the prosecution or defendant.
> The police also retrieved one voicemail message from CH’s iPhone that was sent to her by “Jay,” with a timestamp of December 13, 2018, at 7:40:54 PM (UTC-6), which was played in court.
So it sounds like they played audio of the actual perpetrator's voice in court, and no one realized it was a completely different person.
> In the final analysis, the key issue in the trial was whether the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Brandon Klayme was, in fact, “Jay” and that he was the person who had sent her the sexually explicit text messages and had demanded and received sexually explicit photos and videos of CH, who was at the time that those images were exchanged, only 12 years old.
Funny (sad?) that the judge literally says he established this "beyond a reasonable doubt".
> The Court ultimately concluded on the basis of the totality of direct and circumstantial evidence accepted by the Court that the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Brandon Klayme was, at all material times, the person who identified himself as “Jay” and furthermore that, he was the person with whom CH had been communicating over several weeks in sexually explicit messaging and that he had demanded that CH send sexually explicit photos and videos of her, being a 12-year-old girl, to him. The Crown’s direct and circumstantial evidence included numerous references to the IP addresses and other information for accounts such as Google+, Google, Kik which referred to different usernames, like ““Jay” with their subscriber contact being listed as Mr. Brandon Klayme.
I barely know anything about law, but all of this sounds like "circumstantial" evidence, not direct?
> The Court received a Pre-Sentence Report (PSR) prepared by the Probation Officer on July 21, 2023, which indicated that Mr. Klayme, is now 28 years old, single and continues to live at home at his parent’s house. The PSR notes that Mr. Brandon Klayme has a very close relationship with his parents and siblings, is not currently involved in a relationship and also reported that he has never been in one.
> The PSR notes that Mr. Klayme completed grade 12 in 2013, but he advised the Probation Officer that he did not care about school and often was in trouble for not paying attention in class. He has not continued his education, but in terms of future education goals, Mr. Klayme indicated that, in the future, he would like to take a program in sound engineering. Mr. Klayme is presently unemployed, and his employment experience was with the family business and working with his father after graduating from grade 12. He has been unemployed since the family business was sold over one year ago. As a result, he is financially dependent on his parents.
> Mr. Klayme reported that he has good health and that he had been diagnosed with ADHD as a child but took prescription medication to address those issues. He does not use any intoxicating substances but may have a drink on a few special occasions each year. He described himself as being a “very calm person” and has never attended any form of counselling.
> The Probation Officer noted that, during her interview with Mr. Klayme, he presented as being polite, respectful, and cooperative, but took no responsibility and maintained that he was innocent and repeatedly cited that his “email account had been hacked.”
> With respect to those comments in the PSR, at the conclusion of the sentencing submissions, the Court offered Mr. Klayme the opportunity to make any comments directly to the Court or for that matter, any comments directed towards CH or LS, who had remained on the videoconference throughout the hearing on December 18, 2023. Mr. Klayme stated that he was sorry to hear what had happened to CH and her family, but maintained, as he had stated to the Probation Officer, that they were occasioned by another person and not by him.
So it would seem the defense's claim was "He must have been hacked, since he didnt do any of these things". Which, while wrong (He wasn't hacked, they just mixed up two different accounts), I don't see how they could argue that he wasn't hacked?
Like, if we assume in a different case that a person was indeed hacked, and a third party got access to their "kik" account. Would it not be a very similar situation?
buckle8017 2 days ago [-]
Canadian prosecutors tend to bring charges with no basis in law or reality fairly frequently.
The conviction rate Canada wide is only like 50% because so many absurd cases are brought to trial.
1 days ago [-]
quantified 2 days ago [-]
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.
As the defendant, I'd have been terrified that all this seems to be me yet isn't.
RichEO 2 days ago [-]
The double underscore error was made on the subpoena/request to Kik, and may not have appeared in the evidence at all.
If the request was made before the defendant was charged, it’s entirely possible that the defendant’s lawyer was not given that document until it was expressly requested.
ahoka 1 days ago [-]
How could they prove the possession?
crazygringo 2 days ago [-]
Yes, this is an atrocious article.
It makes no sense as presented.
The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages.
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?
Everything important about this story is missing from the article.
A single judge just decided 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.
nl 2 days ago [-]
> The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages.
I think the point is that the message history would show incriminating messages.
He'd have been saying "this isn't me", but somehow no one noticed it was the wrong username.
crazygringo 22 hours ago [-]
No, the message history wouldn't.
Because the message history was for his actual account, not the criminal's account.
The whole point is that they looked up the wrong username. And when they looked it up, they found an innocent man's identity, but didn't bother to look at the message history, which would not have had any of the messages.
Which is super-weird, because if he'd been messaging this one child, you'd think they'd be looking at all of his messages to find potential messages with other children. And then immediately noticing the lack of the messages that started the investigation in the first place.
account42 10 hours ago [-]
I think part of the confusion is also that the defense didn't disclaim the account was his but claimed that the account was hacked, which implies agreement that the account is his.
Still pretty flimsy evidence when they had voice recordings and pictures sent by the real culprit that surely didn't match the accused.
thephyber 2 days ago [-]
You are right, but your parent is right too.
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.
dzhiurgis 1 days ago [-]
IDK if you know much about kik but the only way this makes any sense is - I suspect he might have had other incriminating messages on his actual account he chose not to reveal.
thephyber 19 hours ago [-]
That is a hazard of the way evidence is collected for cases. If the state has a warrant and they find evidence of another crime while executing the warrant, that might be used to bring more charges. I don't know enough about law to know under what conditions it may be used or must be ignored.
But also, I read the article where it said that no corroborating evidence of any crime was found when searching his house or devices, so I suspect his Kik account is not likely to be full of illegal content if his other possessions weren't.
jibal 2 days ago [-]
The message history of what? Not his account name, the one they had throughout the investigation and trial.
AnodicElegy 2 days ago [-]
For all but minor offences in Canada, you have the right to a jury trial. Here, the accused elected to be tried by a judge. Most people do.
gruez 2 days ago [-]
>Most people do.
Why?
AnodicElegy 6 hours ago [-]
I imagine that the perception might be that a judge will approach the case more rationally and technically, whereas the jury might be swayed by sympathy for the victim, biases, etc. To what extent that's true I do not know, but conviction rates are significantly lower in Canada than in the U.S.
subarctic 2 days ago [-]
Maybe he or his lawyers thought he would fare better with a judge? Hard to say. I've heard that there are a lot fewer jury trial in Canada vs US but I'm not sure why.
thephyber 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
protocolture 2 days ago [-]
>How can someone be convicted of these charges without any evidence?
The evidence would have been the sworn testimony of the cyber cop who screwed it up.
gamblor956 2 days ago [-]
Unless the article left something out, the only possible evidence they had was
the wrong username.
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.
They couldn't even find evidence that this person used Kik at the time of the crime.
The lack of digital evidence is not proof of innocence. It's not proof of anything either way.
the wrong username
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.
oersted 2 days ago [-]
It’s not an unusual username, it is actually quite unoriginal, there are probably thousands of users with variations of the same name.
It is the name of the headline magic ability in Skyrim, which is probably among the top ten most popular videogames of the last 25 years.
ButlerianJihad 1 days ago [-]
Since the introduction of the Skyrim game in 2011, UrbanDictionary has also indicated that the specific phrase is a term for fellatio. Just sayin'
account42 10 hours ago [-]
UrbanDictionary has a lot of terms that are maybe used by one friend group who thought it would be funny to add it to the site.
dzhiurgis 2 days ago [-]
Wonder if there are expert witnesses in videogame niche. I have no idea what you are talking about.
oersted 1 days ago [-]
I understand that certain segments of the population have remained completely disassociated from videogames, and that's fine, but that doesn't make it a niche or an expert topic.
Games make significantly more money than movies and TV now. More than 65M people bought Skyrim, and many more millions would recognise Fus-Ro-Dah just from spending time on the Internet anywhere near to gaming circles.
The defendant could have told their lawyer and it would have been trivial to research and demonstrate. Not sure what went wrong there.
dzhiurgis 1 days ago [-]
> Games make significantly more money than movies and TV now
Don't wanna accuse you of anything, but why would you assume thats an important metric for HN populace. I assume most people here don't own a TV to begin with (personal projection obvs).
dafelst 1 days ago [-]
It's a proxy for reach, which is what GP is talking about.
account42 10 hours ago [-]
In $current_year you can watch movies and TV shows without owning a TV.
bryanrasmussen 1 days ago [-]
I have not idea either, other than I understand it is a common text from a really popular video game. Why wouldn't variations of that be a really common username?
DoctorOetker 20 hours ago [-]
oh no please no, not videogame experts in court...
just be sane and force any Cyber attribution link in testimony to present in standardized form (with reference to find explanation) Damerau-Lehvenstein edit distance histogram, cumulative distribution, etc.
So that all parties (defendant & lawyers, plaintif & lawyers, judge or if applicable also jury) can trivially read and interpret the data:
On this platform we also have 4 users exactly 1 edit away, 15 users exactly 2 edits away,...
On this platform we thus also have 4 other users 1 or fewer edits away, 19 users 2 or fewer edits away, ...
And I assure you Klayme or whomever would have read this part of the testimony over and over, and pushing his lawyers towards the right questions, that is if they allow themselves to work in the interest of their client, which usually they refuse to do, and just submit straw-man arguments intentionally because everybody wants to go home or have shorter workdays so prosecution and defense lawyers just pre-judge how the cookie should be crumbled, and then nobody has to read anything...
imtringued 2 days ago [-]
If you knew anything about the Skyrim community you would know that it is one of the most generic names possible on the level of John_Smith, possibly even more generic.
It is kind of like naming yourself after a meme or "lol".
xigoi 1 days ago [-]
> The lack of digital evidence is not proof of innocence.
A claim made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
jibal 2 days ago [-]
> It was fairly unique.
Wrong.
And in any case, if they had looked at the message history of the account name that they used to track him down and that was entered into evidence at the trial, they would not have found any criminal messages.
> The lack of digital evidence is not proof of innocence.
Misplaced burden of proof.
> Lawyers aren't generally known for their grasp of computer technology.
Good lawyers are known for mastering the relevant details of a wide range of subjects.
stefantalpalaru 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
dzhiurgis 2 days ago [-]
> Unless the article left something out
I'd be sus of anyone who has a kik account to begin with...
40four 2 days ago [-]
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.
Macha 2 days ago [-]
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.
femto 2 days ago [-]
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.
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
PxldLtd 1 days ago [-]
We used to charge innocent men for room and board in prison after being released here in the UK not long ago. They only changed this in 2023 after uproar in a recent case of an innocent man being freed.
> the wrongful conviction will probably to taken to be without malice and reasonable given the information the US provided, so tough luck
Now imagine if this same standard was applied to individuals doing reckless but not inherently malicious things.
thephyber 2 days ago [-]
Legal processes take time. The news doesn't wait until the entire process plays out before they start reporting on the news.
Apparently the appeal leading to the acquittal just happened last week.
thephyber 2 days ago [-]
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.
> 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.
esafak 2 days ago [-]
Is it surprising? Every time you log in your IP is recorded, and the ISP can handle the rest.
kalleboo 2 days ago [-]
And this is why IP addresses are often considered personally identifiable information under the GDPR, as impractical as that makes things like anti-spam/anti-bot.
account42 10 hours ago [-]
GDPR requires a lawful basis for collecting and processing PII and one of possible lawful interest is "legitimate interests" that reasonable anti-spam/bot systems would fall under, i.e. ones that don't needlessly store the IP forever and don't use it for other purposes than security.
stkdump 2 days ago [-]
One of the rare cases where a vpn actually does help. Though of course only if they don't also turn over records.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
I thought everyone knew that hiding your IP address from the government was a big reason to use trustworthy VPNs.
ttctciyf 2 days ago [-]
We're really getting into Computers Don't Argue[0] territory here, eh?
I'd trust a computer to catch a missing underscore way more than humans.
binaryturtle 2 days ago [-]
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"?
kmoser 2 days ago [-]
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.
mvdtnz 2 days ago [-]
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.
a34729t 2 days ago [-]
They should all be required to serve the sentence themselves.
account42 10 hours ago [-]
More importantly all the other cases they have been involved in need to be re-examined to find out what else they fucked up.
entropy47 1 days ago [-]
I don't think it would matter - the crime is sending images, not necessarily sending images of you. Entirely plausible a perp might use a random image they found online rather than a genuine personal photo for a multitude of reasons.
Terrible luck and a terrible legal defence. The stuff of nightmares!
account42 10 hours ago [-]
Of course it would matter as it casts doubt on the evidence.
codazoda 2 days ago [-]
> The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty.
There’s a lot missing in this sentence. What evidence ended up convicting him?
ericcumbee 2 days ago [-]
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”
angry_octet 1 days ago [-]
The police testified that they had collected evidence from Kik that his username send the messages. Only he had access to that Kik account, ergo it is him. If that evidence is accepted as factually correct you are cooked. Case closed.
Courts are inherently bad at understanding that technology has bugs. Injustice is the norm.
account42 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, the root cause is that computer systems are seen as reliable witnesses even when they involve fallible human beings, e.g. the person making the request in this case.
pseudo0 2 days ago [-]
They had the victim's device and logs from the messaging service. The issue was that the logs were attributed to the wrong user.
bhk 2 days ago [-]
There's a lot missing in this article. Obvious follow-up questions unanswered.
firasd 2 days ago [-]
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)
thephyber 2 days ago [-]
You can assume "the system is lazy".
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.
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.
SZJX 1 days ago [-]
Exactly. The strong Western societal taboo and moral panic on this topic have led to a frenzied crusade that easily bypasses reason (e.g. Chat Control), unfortunately. This is just one of the tragic consequences.
account42 9 hours ago [-]
Describing the crime here (which was committed, just not by the accused) as a "Western societal taboo and moral panic" is ... something.
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).
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Theres a site called AbuseIPDB where you can report that someone is portscanning you. Some server hosts watch this database and will suspend any server that's accused by it.
shen 2 days ago [-]
The premise of Brazil (1985)
etothet 2 days ago [-]
Thank you, Mr. Tuttle!
jeff_carr 2 days ago [-]
I'd rather have Brazil be accurate for the future than Idiocracy. Both suck, but Robert Di Nero as the hero HVAC guy is excellent.
dtagames 2 days ago [-]
Came here to say this! You beat me to it.
rpaddock 1 days ago [-]
"A well placed underscore can make the difference between a S_EXCHANGE and a SEX_CHANGE." - Intel 8048 manual ~1977.
The Intel manuals of today lack such humor.
account42 9 hours ago [-]
If only the founders of expertsexchange.com had read that.
m463 19 hours ago [-]
more on-target would be an extra underscore in findtherapistonline
lefra 2 days ago [-]
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].
A bit off topic but is there a reason why the Cyrillic letter in the example image is slightly different than the regular “a”? Did someone redraw it from scratch and it looks kind of different or did someone actually take the “a” glyph and slightly modify it to make it Cyrillic? Because the small difference is so small that it can’t really be on purpose to make them look different, right?
d1sxeyes 1 days ago [-]
It's not required, you can re-use the exact same glyph. The letters are effectively the same (both descendants of the Greek 'alpha').
Generally when this happens, it's because they copied the Latin glyph and then made some tweaks to the whole Cyrillic alphabet to make it look more even, etc., and the changes to the 'a' may not even be intentional, but the 'a' got caught up in a batch change or something.
account42 9 hours ago [-]
Could also be that both were traced/vectorized independently from the same source. Still, you'd think that a competent digital front creator would recognize that the glyphs should be the same and store them only once for both characters.
srdjanr 2 days ago [-]
Only if non-ASCII characters are allowed in usernames, and generally I don't think they often are
dredmorbius 21 hours ago [-]
I don't know what's most common these days, but quite to the contrary there's often a great deal of agitation for full i18n of name fields, such that people can specify their preferred name / spelling, in their native language. This is often pitched as a rights/respect issue.
I feel otherwise: usernames and other identifiers (URLs particularly, and a number of other widely used identifiers), should be drawn from well-known, common, and small charactersets. The original 7-bit ASCII characterset (128 distinct characters), or some subset of that (e.g., Roman alphabet, Arabic numerals) may not be the native representation of all cultures, but it is all but certainly a familiar representation, and avoids numerous homoglyphic attacks.
This greatly exceeds the typical vocabulary (distinct known words) of most native-language speakers, estimated at between 20k -- 35k words for a typical adult English speaker.
Yes and pretty much all languages already have widely used and well known ASCII embeddings aka romanization schemes because early computing did have many places where more wasn't possible or at least not for more than one language at the same time.
account42 9 hours ago [-]
Depending on the font there are homoglyphs even with ASCII. 0 and O as well as I and l are the obvious ones.
a34729t 2 days ago [-]
Ultimately the prosecutor should then go to jail for say 10x the time. Maybe that would make prosecutors less zealous?
qingcharles 2 days ago [-]
AFAIK, only one prosecutor in the history of the USA has been jailed for malicious prosecution or intentional fabrication of evidence. And in this case there was no intent (that we know) to convict an innocent person, just wild incompetence, so likely just a stern talking-to from the head prosecutor is all they get.
illliillll 1 days ago [-]
Obsessing about intent here is so gross.
A careless psychopath firing a gun into a crowd doesn’t necessarily care if he hits anyone. Despite the lack of intent, most would consider that careless psychopath worse than an individual that commits premeditated homicide for a reason other than “fun”.
Intent is irrelevant. The person firing a gun into a crowd knows the consequences of their actions just as well as a lazy judge or prosecutor does.
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
The job of the prosecutor is to convict, I don't think it matters whether the person is innocent or not. They have no moral responsibility, if it is most efficient to their career to damn an innocent person the system is designed for the purpose of doing so.
gus_massa 1 days ago [-]
> They have no moral responsibility
They may have no legal responsibility, but they have a moral responsibility. Getting paid to make a bad things is not a excuse.
account42 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, this thread is about how it shouldn't be that way.
Way back lots of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore couln't bring cases against all because the expert witnesses (US law enforcement website trap-setters) wouldn't go to the UK to testify. How come Canada was able to press ahead without the expert winesses being cross examinable?
frozenseven 2 days ago [-]
"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.
luciana1u 2 days ago [-]
you need more verification to reset a password than to put someone in prison for 18 months
silisili 2 days ago [-]
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?
tossitawayplz 2 days ago [-]
This is absolutely insane, if the article is truly accurate they literally had NO evidence besides the user name (which was wrong.)
thephyber 2 days ago [-]
There was lots of evidence of a crime, just not evidence of the defendant doing it.
This is most likely super common for criminal trials outside of highly professionalized police and prosecutors.
xnx 2 days ago [-]
I hope this guy gets better lawyers when he sues everyone involved.
greenavocado 2 days ago [-]
It'll be thrown out by the JustUs system when a judge will declare the lawsuit has "no standing."
protocolture 2 days ago [-]
I am betting the judge accepted all the messages as evidence, and that was enough to convict.
Theres no one technical in a court room.
thephyber 2 days ago [-]
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.
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.
protocolture 2 days ago [-]
>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.
Yep,
So they have a cop stand up in court.
"We read X messages" (Here they are look how exceptionally heinous they are)
"We then asked the service for the IP."
"We then asked the ISP to deanonymise it. "
"Heres the guy we found at that IP"
He signs a stat dec that using his brilliant super techno crime brain he has correctly attributed the messages to this human.
It sounds like the defense from there was: But your honor, there's no history of these messages etc etc.
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.
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.
The end unless you can find some way to challenge the technical evidence. Which he did after some time.
sterlind 2 days ago [-]
does Canada not have public defenders? I know they're overworked but, c'mon, surely they can do better than they did?
I want to see the transcripts.
nianderwallace 2 days ago [-]
the defendant hired a private lawyer, Peter Planetta, who resigned from the Nova Scotia Barrister's Society a few months after the defendant was sentenced.
In the US public defenders don't have time to try cases. They are basically plea bargain assistants.
sterlind 2 days ago [-]
what happens if the defendant pleads not guilty? does the public defender not bother to show up to trial? do they not represent the defendant? what is this charade?
Wait so they were also videochatting and the girl saw the actual perpetrator's face at least briefly and this ALSO didn't result in anyone questioning that they got the correct guy?
qingcharles 2 days ago [-]
Public defenders will try your case if you demand trial; in fact, a lot of public defenders probably try more cases than paid attorneys.
The problem is that public defenders generally are starter defense attorneys, they're in the job to get experience so they can eventually quit and take a cushy private role. And secondly, they have very little time to allocate to each case; if the defendant is stuck in jail, then they have even less time to visit the defendant and prepare any kind of useful defense or trial strategy.
A public defender's primary strategy for their client is to, sadly, negotiate the best possible plea deal in the shortest amount of time to get the case off the docket.
(This might actually be in the best interests of the defendant; most defendants are guilty of something in the charging document, even if not everything they've been likely over-charged with; the justice system isn't quite so broken that it scoops up a huge number of factually innocent persons)
thephyber 2 days ago [-]
Public defenders are required to build the best case they can, but the nature of a defense requires hiring experts to contradict the prosecution evidence. Without hiring experts, the public defender is just pounding the table or arguing the technicals of law.
gremlinunderway 2 days ago [-]
thats not the verdict. Thats the sentencing decision, which just goes into a separate Judge's sentencing hearing and decisions on that.
throwaway17_17 2 days ago [-]
That depends mostly on the jurisdiction, the structure of public defense in said jurisdiction, and the quality, resourcing, and culture of the individual Public Denfender’s Office. I do understand the view from strictly statistical analysis, but there are subtleties (particularly, misdemeanors vs felonies) in how plea vs trial plays out in various parts of the US not captured by large granularity stats.
OutOfHere 2 days ago [-]
No, they aren't. If your account gets stolen, you'll be found guilty, but in reality you didn't do the crime. No IP address tied you to the crime, and no real evidence tying you to the crime existed.
fsckboy 2 days ago [-]
>Theres no one technical in a court room.
oh c'mon, if a technical person receives a piece of paper with a printed out user__name on it with the wrong number of underscores they'd just as likely make the same mistake. Rather than ban the use of paper, how about technical people ban fonts (designed by clueless font designers) that blend multiple underscores together?
protocolture 2 days ago [-]
>oh c'mon, if a technical person receives a piece of paper with a printed out user__name on it with the wrong number of underscores they'd just as likely make the same mistake.
A technical person did make the mistake, likely a police cyber forensics type.
But there's no one technical in the court room capable of reviewing their work and identifying the fault.
fsckboy 2 days ago [-]
technical people developed the systems that print out confusing glyphs. it's certainly nobody else's fault.
protocolture 2 days ago [-]
>technical people developed the systems that print out confusing glyphs.
And they aren't in the court room to assist with technical analysis. Why we need to keep revisiting this confuses me.
>it's certainly nobody else's fault.
Not sure I would agree, but even if I did how is this a relevant reply? What's important to the defense is identifying the point at which the technical evidence is faulty. Blame and penalty for the screw up is irrelevant to the goal of getting the innocent party out of prison.
angrypie 22 hours ago [-]
So someone at Kik can fabricate a report, and another person is going to be sentenced for life with no evidence?
account42 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, it's scary that what a company says in these kinds of cases gets treated as 100% reliable when at the end its still just fallible humans.
notorandit 1 days ago [-]
This is not the first time I see people copy-typing text by hand instead of copy-pasting it.
I am not sure why they do that, but when I see a DevOps engineer doing it I have a chilling feel.
dredmorbius 21 hours ago [-]
Depends on the context.
If running code samples from a remote (untrusted) site, re-typing may spare you some grief.
I've addressed the homoglyph issue in my immediate prior comment. Other transcription errors are also of course possible with identifiers.
account42 9 hours ago [-]
How is it weird? It's often much faster to re-type a short identifier than to select, copy and paste it.
canthonytucci 3 hours ago [-]
They’re talking about likelihood of a typo, not speed.
laszlojamf 1 days ago [-]
The scary thing is that it's unclear to me what would have happened if the guy hadn't had a Kik account, and the real perp had used just one underscore. Can you just pick somebody's username from another service to frame them for grooming? Couldn't you do this to anyone in that case, if that's all that it takes? I sure hope this article is leaving something out, otherwise this is some kangaroo court shit...
echoangle 1 days ago [-]
I don’t get the hypothetical, the perpetrator and the guy arrested were both using Kik and the account names were confused. There was no other service in this case.
reenorap 2 days ago [-]
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!
thephyber 2 days ago [-]
I'm guessing there are LOTS of poor/rural parts of Canada (and the US) where convictions happen on less than convincing evidence.
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.
2 days ago [-]
joeframbach 2 days ago [-]
How does one vacate a sentence that was already served?
sterlind 2 days ago [-]
there's no time machine, but at least the charges are removed from the poor man's record.
he should probably try to seek damages from the state for his wrongful conviction (and get his lawyer disbarred for grossly incompetent counsel!)
[edit] Since his old lawyer wasn't practicing anymore, Klayme got a new lawyer who discovered the missing underscore.
qingcharles 2 days ago [-]
He's lucky. In the USA a lot of appellate options are not available if you are no longer incarcerated. You are basically out of luck, the conviction is a lock-in.
ibudiallo 2 days ago [-]
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?"
kmoser 2 days ago [-]
> When the article says "he was found guilty" what does that even mean? "found" implies there was evidence.
IANAL but to be "found guilty" means you are determined to be, in the eyes of the law, guilty. Actual guilt is irrelevant. As for evidence, there's the "matching" username (which, we all now know, didn't really match).
whiterock 2 days ago [-]
Perhaps there should be input fields that are paste-only, no typing allowed (or only with extra modal warnings).
thephyber 2 days ago [-]
Who is "they"?
Police generally have to send faxes to companies for subpoenas, except for the few mega techs who have digital portals built specifically for police subpoenas. Source: I worked for a company who received subpoenas via fax.
qingcharles 2 days ago [-]
You're right. AFAIK it's still mostly done via fax. All the subpoenas I see are fax copies.
mvdtnz 2 days ago [-]
He didn't say "they" anywhere in his message?
jokoon 2 days ago [-]
How could they manage to forget that underscore if that's their only evidence?
2 days ago [-]
mlmonkey 2 days ago [-]
How tf could he be convicted without any evidence??!?
RagnarD 2 days ago [-]
They arrested Mr. Buttle rather than Tuttle.
fortran77 1 days ago [-]
People and judges will trip over each other to show how repulsed they are over child sexual abuse. Nobody will stuck his neck out for the accused.
Peacefulz 2 days ago [-]
Hmm. No mention of a need for subpoena on the google end... Wonder why that is? Is that rubber stamp just public knowledge at this point? Google and Apple both are appendages of the State.
pelasaco 1 days ago [-]
18 months in a male prison as pedophile but innocent.. no money can fix it. If he had died in the prison - common for such perpetrators - nobody would never review his process and note "ops, we missed an underscore"
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.
account42 9 hours ago [-]
How is E2EE relevant here. And permitting sign ups with only email or less used to be the standard everywhere. Also according the sentencing [0] the perp and victim initially met on Google+.
It was a popular platform briefly for college students etc. I remember college kids posting drama on Kik etc
aussieguy1234 2 days ago [-]
This guy should sue
rootusrootus 2 days ago [-]
The underscore is the least interesting part of this. That is a garden variety fuckup. Everything that came after that is the scandal.
mvkel 2 days ago [-]
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.
phendrenad2 1 days ago [-]
There's probably a lot of alpha in getting (legal) access to a bunch of court records and finding discrepancies, and then using that to convince municipalities into buying a subscription to your discrepancy-finding AI SaaS. Give it a cool YC name like "Convictly.ai"
mvkel 1 days ago [-]
I don't get it. We're snobs about facts being more accurate?
In a system that is innocent before guilty, more accuracy favors the person.
superkuh 1 days ago [-]
These Wisconsin cops, the judge, and everyone involved in this should face serious consequences. Their actions need to have consequences.
hunter2_ 2 days ago [-]
At least nobody has figured out my password yet.
nkrisc 2 days ago [-]
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?
quantified 2 days ago [-]
There was evidence. Just not pointing to him.
degamad 2 days ago [-]
> A: "Hey, we have a bunch of evidence that someone called Jonathan BaskinsRobbins did a bunch of crimes with an axe - can we figure out where he lives?"
> B: "Yep, the phone book says Johnathan BaskinRobbins lives at 123 Main Street, Shelbyville."
> A: "Hey Shelbyville Police, we have a bunch of evidence that someone called Jonathan BaskinsRobbins at 123 Main Street did a bunch of crimes with an axe - can you please check it out?"
> C: "Yep, we found that axe at the house of Johnathan BaskinRobbins at 123 Main Street."
> D: "Here's the evidence from A that Jonathan BaskinsRobbins did a bunch of crimes with an axe. And here's the evidence from C that Johnathan BaskinRobbins at 123 Main Street had the same kind of axe. Please convict him."
> E: "That's a whole lot of evidence. Johnathan BaskinRobbins is probably guilty."
.... 18 months later ....
> J: "Hey guys, my name is spelled Johnathan BaskinRobbins, not Jonathan BaskinsRobbins..."
A, B, C, D, and E: "Oops, sorry..."
OutOfHere 2 days ago [-]
In other words, if you want to frame anyone with an underscore or dash in their username, just add a matching underscore or dash!
The article didn't mention any follow up. He actually served his full sentence.
Did he sue after? Was there any accountability?.
thephyber 2 days ago [-]
He was just acquitted last week.
Let the process play out. "News" is called that because it is new and things are still happening.
FrustratedMonky 1 days ago [-]
wow.
Well, actually, my dear fellow, "NEWS" is short for N.E.W.S., which is North, East, West, and South. Indubitably. How smart, very intelligent.
sltr 2 days ago [-]
can we go after the real perp now?
qingcharles 2 days ago [-]
Only person asking this, but it's possible they ran out a statute of limitations by going down the wrong path. (SoL normally begins when the prosecution becomes aware that the crime has happened. In the USA SoL for most felonies is often 3 years.)
sltr 1 days ago [-]
that's the real tragedy here
2 days ago [-]
gqgs 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Ozzie-D 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
illliillll 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
srdjanr 2 days ago [-]
Sure, we should kill everyone who makes an honest, human mistake. Especially if it's so hard to catch that at least 3 people missed it (someone from the police, prosecutor, and defense lawyer).
illliillll 1 days ago [-]
That’s absurd.
The standard in Canada is “beyond a reasonable doubt”, a standard which does not leave much room for “honest, human mistakes” if you actually take it seriously.
If the judge bothered to review the evidence, he’d presumably have been baffled by the fact that nothing has been recovered from the defendant connecting him to the crime. This judge chose to not do that and chose not to be baffled, that wasn’t an honest mistake.
tomhow 20 hours ago [-]
Could you please stop posting ragey comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
It's not okay to assert that anyone “deserves a bullet in the head” here, for any reason. In the case in question, clearly the system, and multiple people within it, failed to notice the issue. On HN we expect people to be thoughtful and curious, and ”bullet in the head” is a barbaric, medieval reaction to a modern scenario.
Tom, you live in a democratic country where the death penalty is codified in law as a legitimate punishment for certain crimes.
What is it in the guidelines that should keep me from arguing in favour of expanding the scope of such penalties to also cover other, perhaps more harmful behaviour?
> is a barbaric, medieval reaction to a modern scenario.
You are inherently calling US voters at large barbarians and medieval here.
You may not share my views on how misconduct by judicial officials should be treated, but you can hardly condemn my opinion as illegitimate given the country you choose to live and pay taxes in. Taxes which fund executions carried out by your government.
tomhow 1 hours ago [-]
Please don’t make assumptions about where I’m a citizen, voter or resident. You’re mostly wrong, and even if you were right it’s irrelevant.
The guidelines require us to converse curiously, to be kind, and to avoid ideological battle and flamebait. To write “A judge making a “mistake” like this deserves a bullet in the head, nothing less” is obviously in breach of all those expectations.
If you want to mount a case for ways judges and other actors in the legal system should be held accountable for errors that lead to illegitimate convictions, sure, you can do so thoughtfully. This isn’t diffuicult.
phendrenad2 1 days ago [-]
No reason to believe this wasn't a one-off, either. I say dig up every case the judge has touched for thorough scrutiny.
illliillll 1 days ago [-]
Of course it wasn’t, this could never happen to a judge who is really serious about having things proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
The evidence presented in this case wouldn’t have satisfied that standard even if all the underscores lined up.
arjie 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
BugsJustFindMe 2 days ago [-]
"Haha" isn't appropriate here.
Dilettante_ 1 days ago [-]
True, this is more of a "honk honk"(like a clown nose) type situation.
BugsJustFindMe 1 days ago [-]
No.
yieldcrv 2 days ago [-]
Remember when Saudi Arabia indicted Canada on its human rights and everyone laughed?
Got to separate the message from the messenger
ktallett 1 days ago [-]
Huh? I am not sure Saudi Arabia can hold the moral high ground and this is definitely not the way to do it.
account42 8 hours ago [-]
That's what "Got to separate the message from the messenger" refers to. Saudi Arabia's faults do not in any way make the situation in Canada any better.
yieldcrv 1 days ago [-]
It was their turn on the UN seat and they were correct
Was it an incorrect message if a different country’s delegate said it?
ktallett 18 hours ago [-]
No, but they need to perhaps be more open on their human rights and 9/11 first as well. They can accuse another country who at least will admit they got it wrong. I don't see Saudi doing the same.
yieldcrv 15 hours ago [-]
Like I wrote, separate the message from the messenger otherwise you would have no idea that Canada is railroading people because you’re waiting for the infallible messenger
ktallett 8 hours ago [-]
You can only seperate the message from the messenger when you don't try to hold the higher ground or compare. Saudi Arabia doesn't need to be mentioned in the original message.
You can simply say, Canada has an issue with this. France has an issue with this.
It is the same when you often see on forums, "It is better in Japan". It isn't a relevant comment and therefore invokes comparison.
yieldcrv 5 hours ago [-]
That’s what happened, the UN gave the admonishment, and the media pointed out who in the UN said it to discredit it
I’m guessing you aren’t familiar with that news cycle
koolba 2 days ago [-]
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.
denkmoon 2 days ago [-]
Insane. An LLM is just as likely to hallucinate a missing/extra underscore and ping the wrong person. A machine cannot be held accountable.
Noumenon72 2 days ago [-]
My LLMs frequently find subtle typos and never make subtle typos. I don't think that's equally likely at all.
denkmoon 2 days ago [-]
Just today I had an incident review meeting resulting from a prod incident where the root cause was an LLM refactor stripping ! from the front of a boolean statement "for no reason". Not to mention how often I've seen garbled output from the LLM.
Lots of things failed for that to reach prod, but the assertion that LLMs do not make subtle typos... is not congruent with my experience.
phendrenad2 1 days ago [-]
Which LLM? When was this code written? When was the last time you saw "garbled output" and what was the context?
I'm really trying to get to the bottom of these claims, because I see them a lot and it's so wildly different from most people's experiences.
Silamoth 1 days ago [-]
If a lot of people make the same claim, then from their perspective, you’re the one with a “wildly different” experience. What makes you so certain your experience generalizes to “most people’s experiences”?
Ukv 1 days ago [-]
> Insane. An LLM is just as likely to hallucinate a missing/extra underscore and ping the wrong person
If it's just for "Catching typos", a hallucinated missing/extra underscore would just be a false positive to dismiss.
> A machine cannot be held accountable.
Seems unlikely that his lawyer, the law firm, the judge, whoever made the typo, or the police department will be held accountable either.
Nor can any of the tools they used, since that's not really the level at which it makes sense to hold accountability, but that's no reason not to use a tool that could find errors and reduce the chance for an innocent person to spend time in prison.
Dilettante_ 1 days ago [-]
Using LLMs to find errors and using LLMs to produce error-free artifacts are two extremely different levels of challenge.
phendrenad2 1 days ago [-]
What's insane is that people say things like this in 2026. I suspect it stems from being retired and not really using LLMs for work, and instead using them for leisure, and therefore not knowing that they're extremely capable for logical operations, much more than they are for entertainment. Your second point about "machine cannot be held accountable" is a non sequitur, so I'll leave it.
> 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.
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.
A friend of mine was facing a mountain of criminal charges. Photo evidence proved the cops lied. We needed an expert testimony explaining the camera angle and why the photo explained how the cops lied.
I think we called every service qualified for providing such a testimony in Ontario, and a good portion of them across all of Canada. Some were even happy to work with us, until they found out we were testifying against the police. We ended up going international but without luck, and ended up with no expert testimony
This is absolutely horrible to hear!! I know you probably don't want homework, but would you ever consider taking this story to news outlets? I suspect there'd be no compensation, but the uproar might (eventually) result in change.
I was actually dismissed from a jury panel partially because I said I don't know if I could trust the experts because my perception is that individual experts either repeatedly testify for only the prosecution or only the defense.
1) Pile of evidence that someone is guilty.
2) Federal "expert witness" allowed and funded to testify it points to X person
3) Defense is broke
4) If defense not broke, judge finds reason why defense expert witness can't present their full argument
5) Prosecution offers plea deal or a gazillion years in jail
6) Person folds when they realize none of their defense is allowed or will be funded, or goes to trial and gets a gazillion years for daring to go to trial.
If you already have a pile of evidence for a crime and an expert witnesses you can keep piling on it's not much of a stretch to dump it on some random person, as we saw here, quite easy actually.
Even your paid defense attorney might never look at the case files at all. Jared from Subway's lawyer got into hot water because he got Jared to take a plea and it turned out he was factually innocent of one of the many offenses he was charged with, and that fact would have been uncovered quickly had the defense attorney ever looked at the evidence, which he said he had not.
Most plea bargains are done simply based on the charging instruments.
This is effectively a truth, but prosecutors are generally held to high ethical standards, where they are expected to drop cases / not bring cases if the evidence doesn't point specifically to the defendant.
That said, there are occasionally times when prosecutors have been caught hiding / burying / not sharing exculpatory evidence (something the police / prosecution found which would help the defense's case against the prosecution). The only reason to do so would be to sandbag the case against the defendant even when there is a shadow of a doubt in the prosecution's case.
And overturning convictions gets you straight into the history books. It gets so ridiculous that people make their life work out of redoing cases from the 90s.
The problem is that these intersecting conditions make the number of relevant cases small, while having experts testify for defendants for cheap during mundane cases has MUCH higher demand.
Some corners must be cut, to reach quotas!
But I also suspect your statistic is not accurate and designed to make your point, not represent reality.
What evidence? They didn't have any other than a user name. An arm chair lawyer who watched too many shows could have created reasonable doubt.
> Prosecution: Mister Klayme, the criminal messages were sent from a Kik username called "fus ro dah". What's your Kik username?
> Klayme: It's "fus ro dah".
> Prosecution: It logically follows that Mister Klayme was the sender, and is therefore guilty of the offense.
There was evidence of a crime, only the Kik account ownership evidence was thin. Any decent lawyer would have probed into that aspect of the case, but there are lots of comments here about failures of defense / prosecution / experts / legal system.
But what they didn't have is any independent evidence that Klayme had sent the messages or even that he had access to the account that sent them. If they had looked at the IP address from which the messages were sent, they would have seen that it wasn't his and was in a distant geographic location.
Then you'd ask to change lawyer. If they can apply a standard practice of care and do basic checks like matching a username and time of use because they don't "believe" you when you say these are not you messages, they are not doing their job as a lawyer.
I'd go as far as saying such basic checks not being done amount to negligence/malpractice, they might have a civil case against that lawyer.
We know he's innocent, and he knows he's innocent, but how does he prove it?
Also a competent lawyer would have done a scrupulous audit of the chain of reasoning that led to his client, which would have revealed the username mixup.
Edit: Apparently in medicine there exists the concept of "premature closure", where the carer settles on a diagnosis early and stops considering other possibilities. Seems like a decent match?
That may seem needlessly harshly worded, but I wanted to very bluntly tell you to not expect/treat your fellow commenters like they are pants-on-head stupid.
My intention with GP was finding a good term for this failure to question oneself. That's not even strictly what hallucinations in the context of LLM mean in common discourse, which would be more along the lines of meaning both the (mechanism of) production of the wrong info in the first place, as well as (more implicitly and softly) that propensity to fail to question themselves. You would have understood that, if your model of my ability to understand had been more generous.
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."
We don't know what defense did in this trial but not picking up on the username mismatch and the assumed non-challenge of the evidence is telling as well.
1) the username must be introduced as " the <N>-character user name <username> at the <M>-character online platform <platform> ..." along with a cryptographic hash of the concatenation, of user name, service name, ... so that any alteration is easily noticed.
2) a histogram of usernames binned by Damerau-Levenstein edit distance, along with a tabular cumulative count so that everyone can comfortably read off how many other but similar user names this platform has less than 1 edit away, less than 2 edits away, less than 3 edits away etc...
3) the law should introduce a bet between law enforcement and corporations: upon being requested for the other half of a forensic link (say an IP address, or an email address, ...), it must demand the exact number of characters, it must provide a list or at least a cumulative count of user names less than N edits away. if they are ever caught violating user privacy they owe money to the state, the individual, ... even if law enforcement demanded out of band cooperation. The corporation should financially feel the risk of prosecution / police making invalid requests, so they have an incentive to technologically think ahead of the police and their sloppy work.
> In an adversarial system (which the US and Canada and UK are), the judge is not supposed to challenge evidence unless it's glaringly, obviously adrift from reality.
So regardless of common law vs civil law systems, one could devise laws such that this type of errors could be made glaringly clear to anyone involved, by law.
It's not like the first time humanity is confronted with misattribution. If a phenomenon has a word, its typically been happening for a long time. If the laws haven't been adjusted to learn from mistakes, it's not because they don't want to learn, but because they want to not learn.
"Something something IP address" sort of evidence that the article describes doesn't seem to cut it.
Now this isn't universal; I've seen judges that encourage the jury to ask questions in open court (by submitting as notes to the judge who reads them out), for example. But that's very unusual. Judges who make a habit of questioning submitted evidence are likely to have their rulings challenged far more often and be accused of bias, even if they are superb jurists. And high status in the legal world goes to appellate judges whose rulings set legal precedent. Trial judges do get cool points for calling out bad lawyering and writing spicy opinions but this can also be a career anchor.
We are encouraged by civics classes and media to believe in courts as truth-finding institutions, but the reality is that most of the time they are engaged in argument-scoring. Even to the extent that they do pursue truth via the appellate process, it doesn't happen in a timely fashion. There's saying that the wheels of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine, which goes back to the Roman empire: so you're looking at an institution that is historically so confident in its process that it has become divorced from any sense of urgency in its application.
That would have been (highly likely) true by construction, after all the single underscore username did exist. The only case it wouldn't have been true is if they deleted the app but not their account I guess.
You're assuming people knew what evidence to question. That is having the kik app on his device isn't evidence against the claim that "kik didn't return the wrong guys username". Of course it's evidence in support of what he was accused of.
Both the article and the parent comment treat "happens to have Kik account" as an independent discovery that affects our Bayesian inference.
No. The innocent was identified exactly _because_ they have a Kik account, so the conditional probability they have a Kik account is 1.
Youre more confident that it doesn't still happen than I am though.
Unfortunately this isn't unusual, well except it actually being accepted that he was innocent after the fact.
We steal people's life work, destroy livelihoods, etc, etc, on far, far far flimsier grounds.
Just because many things can do something doesn't negate a discussion about one of the things. Your point (which it barely is one) isn't really interesting or useful.
Most people harm themselves more by considering it anything more than a fixed system to be calculated against, bashing their head into a wall for no gain.
* To the typical HN user
Perhaps I am atypical for HN, but I see a clear distinction between corrupted legal systems or layers in society (most lawyers in general), and
force majeure* from natural disasters: the average person isn't paying taxes to make sure natural disaster continues happening, and history has shown that system collapse is often preceded by intolerable taxation used in offensive ways. Average persons holding pitchforks...Keep in mind that Klayme wasn't the only victim of this shoddy prosecutor: while he had to navigate the prison bitch brothels, the real perpetrator might continue the abuse with same and possibly many other victims!
Can we please discuss how misattributions like this can be prevented, and think of ways to align the interests of all parties?
Every day the legal process dragged on, every day this defendant sat in prison, was a day the real perpetrator wasn't recognized, wasn't prevented from harming more victims. Now what you refer to as a moral panic turns out to have interests aligned with the falsely convicted defendant.
Any further harm suffered by victims of the perpetrator should be entitled to sue the police / prosecution, suppose such further harm happened:
as I understood, for a person / entity to be co-liable theoretically requires:
* the person / entity having faulted
* a causal connection between the fault and resulting damages
Please don't push on the basis of what position you consider yourself more or less likely to find yourself in, but push on the basis of what you believe may help prevent false positives and false negatives.
To my mind this is a by-product of legal education, where lawyers are tasked with identifying precedential or logical flaws in an opponent's argument rather than considering the entire set of circumstances. Answering 'First, I would examine all the evidence to make sure it was correct that the police did not make mistakes...' will not earn you any points on a typical law school exam; it's regarded as similar to disputing the givens on a logic or philosophy problem. I don't know about Canadian law specifically, but in US law appeals revolve solely around legal issues and the facts adduced at trial are assumed to be correct by default; you can't appeal on the basis that the facts were wrong or that the evidence was lacking, but must go on the basis that the wrong legal conclusion was drawn from the evidence in question or that your attorney failed to represent you properly (which requires you to explain why you didn't fire them at an earlier stage).
If I ever found myself wrongly accused I would never, ever go for a jury trial but ask for a bench trial instead, where the judge is the sole decider. Unlike a jury, a judge has to write out the reasoning for the decision. (It's sad that even here, the judge failed to notice the discrepancy in the evidence.) And if a defense attorney proposed to go on some other basis than the correctness of the facts I would seek to replace them immediately, even if this meant a longer period of pretrial detention. Most people go along with bad defense strategies because the carceral process is so demoralizing that they want to escape it as quickly as possible, even at the price of pleading guilty or letting the defense counsel field the wrong sort of argument. Even when someone is certain of their innocence like this defendant, starting a fight with one's own lawyer (who might be their only friend in the world if the accusation is lurid or grave enough) is often too scary for a defendant to imagine.
I'm curious (but not optimistic) as to whether anyone in the police, prosecution, or judiciary will face any consequences for their carelessness in this case beyond slower promotion. It's also unclear how the state intends to make the unfortunate defendant whole beyond declaring him the the victim of a procedural error. Compensation in such cases is usually calculated around loss of expected earnings; since it's hard to put a price on the loss of liberty, dignity, safety, or sanity those deficits are usually accorded some fixed nominal value, which tends to be on the low side. For example, the Federal government in the US pays $50,000 per year of imprisonment and $100,000 per year on death row; states have their own formulas and I assume things are approximately similar in Canada. Personally, I don't think $75,000 is adequate compensation for 1.5 years in prison on a child sex crime charge, which notoriously puts a convict at a much higher risk of violence from other prisoners than crimes involving property or ordinary violence.
If the system is railroading you, the judge looks like another member of the system.
If you did it but believe that a jury will decide the law is unjust then you may go for jury nullification. A judge is not going to give you that.
In the U.S you might want to push as far as you can before accepting a plea, based on the idea that the prosecutor will offer better terms the closer it comes to trial. Under these conditions jury trials are more expensive, take longer, and may offer more uncertainty. Therefore ask for jury trial if your strategy is to get improved terms for plea.
In other words, there are reasons why jury trials would be better. There are reasons why people might think that jury trials would be better. However if your thing is about realizing the evidence is a bunch of crap and the charge is something that might emotionally cause people to want to see someone suffer you might want to take a bench trial, because hopefully judges should be able to see through crap evidence.
the system is broken because juries are not required (or even allowed) to explain their decision, and the selection process is not that good at removing bias. thats how you get cases where the jury is racist or not following the law.
but the idea of using a group decision instead of individual is great, and the jurors not being judges/lawyers avoids professional deformation. if selection was completely fair the system would work as intended but thats not really possible with the way it is now.
I'd say it introduces bias.
Here in Blighty, jury selection is *entirely* random. A juror is only going to be 'deselected' in extremis; for example, it turns out they are related to the prosecution or defendant.
Some interesting bits I found in it:
> The police also retrieved one voicemail message from CH’s iPhone that was sent to her by “Jay,” with a timestamp of December 13, 2018, at 7:40:54 PM (UTC-6), which was played in court.
So it sounds like they played audio of the actual perpetrator's voice in court, and no one realized it was a completely different person.
> In the final analysis, the key issue in the trial was whether the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Brandon Klayme was, in fact, “Jay” and that he was the person who had sent her the sexually explicit text messages and had demanded and received sexually explicit photos and videos of CH, who was at the time that those images were exchanged, only 12 years old.
Funny (sad?) that the judge literally says he established this "beyond a reasonable doubt".
> The Court ultimately concluded on the basis of the totality of direct and circumstantial evidence accepted by the Court that the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Brandon Klayme was, at all material times, the person who identified himself as “Jay” and furthermore that, he was the person with whom CH had been communicating over several weeks in sexually explicit messaging and that he had demanded that CH send sexually explicit photos and videos of her, being a 12-year-old girl, to him. The Crown’s direct and circumstantial evidence included numerous references to the IP addresses and other information for accounts such as Google+, Google, Kik which referred to different usernames, like ““Jay” with their subscriber contact being listed as Mr. Brandon Klayme.
I barely know anything about law, but all of this sounds like "circumstantial" evidence, not direct?
> The Court received a Pre-Sentence Report (PSR) prepared by the Probation Officer on July 21, 2023, which indicated that Mr. Klayme, is now 28 years old, single and continues to live at home at his parent’s house. The PSR notes that Mr. Brandon Klayme has a very close relationship with his parents and siblings, is not currently involved in a relationship and also reported that he has never been in one.
> The PSR notes that Mr. Klayme completed grade 12 in 2013, but he advised the Probation Officer that he did not care about school and often was in trouble for not paying attention in class. He has not continued his education, but in terms of future education goals, Mr. Klayme indicated that, in the future, he would like to take a program in sound engineering. Mr. Klayme is presently unemployed, and his employment experience was with the family business and working with his father after graduating from grade 12. He has been unemployed since the family business was sold over one year ago. As a result, he is financially dependent on his parents.
> Mr. Klayme reported that he has good health and that he had been diagnosed with ADHD as a child but took prescription medication to address those issues. He does not use any intoxicating substances but may have a drink on a few special occasions each year. He described himself as being a “very calm person” and has never attended any form of counselling.
> The Probation Officer noted that, during her interview with Mr. Klayme, he presented as being polite, respectful, and cooperative, but took no responsibility and maintained that he was innocent and repeatedly cited that his “email account had been hacked.”
> With respect to those comments in the PSR, at the conclusion of the sentencing submissions, the Court offered Mr. Klayme the opportunity to make any comments directly to the Court or for that matter, any comments directed towards CH or LS, who had remained on the videoconference throughout the hearing on December 18, 2023. Mr. Klayme stated that he was sorry to hear what had happened to CH and her family, but maintained, as he had stated to the Probation Officer, that they were occasioned by another person and not by him.
So it would seem the defense's claim was "He must have been hacked, since he didnt do any of these things". Which, while wrong (He wasn't hacked, they just mixed up two different accounts), I don't see how they could argue that he wasn't hacked?
Like, if we assume in a different case that a person was indeed hacked, and a third party got access to their "kik" account. Would it not be a very similar situation?
The conviction rate Canada wide is only like 50% because so many absurd cases are brought to trial.
As the defendant, I'd have been terrified that all this seems to be me yet isn't.
If the request was made before the defendant was charged, it’s entirely possible that the defendant’s lawyer was not given that document until it was expressly requested.
It makes no sense as presented.
The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages.
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?
Everything important about this story is missing from the article.
Edit: from another article, it seems like the conviction was made by a trial judge, and didn't even involve a jury: https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-qu...
A single judge just decided 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.
I think the point is that the message history would show incriminating messages.
He'd have been saying "this isn't me", but somehow no one noticed it was the wrong username.
Because the message history was for his actual account, not the criminal's account.
The whole point is that they looked up the wrong username. And when they looked it up, they found an innocent man's identity, but didn't bother to look at the message history, which would not have had any of the messages.
Which is super-weird, because if he'd been messaging this one child, you'd think they'd be looking at all of his messages to find potential messages with other children. And then immediately noticing the lack of the messages that started the investigation in the first place.
Still pretty flimsy evidence when they had voice recordings and pictures sent by the real culprit that surely didn't match the accused.
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.
But also, I read the article where it said that no corroborating evidence of any crime was found when searching his house or devices, so I suspect his Kik account is not likely to be full of illegal content if his other possessions weren't.
Why?
The evidence would have been the sworn testimony of the cyber cop who screwed it up.
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.
They couldn't even find evidence that this person used Kik at the time of the crime.
The lack of digital evidence is not proof of innocence. It's not proof of anything either way.
the wrong username
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 is the name of the headline magic ability in Skyrim, which is probably among the top ten most popular videogames of the last 25 years.
Games make significantly more money than movies and TV now. More than 65M people bought Skyrim, and many more millions would recognise Fus-Ro-Dah just from spending time on the Internet anywhere near to gaming circles.
The defendant could have told their lawyer and it would have been trivial to research and demonstrate. Not sure what went wrong there.
Don't wanna accuse you of anything, but why would you assume thats an important metric for HN populace. I assume most people here don't own a TV to begin with (personal projection obvs).
just be sane and force any Cyber attribution link in testimony to present in standardized form (with reference to find explanation) Damerau-Lehvenstein edit distance histogram, cumulative distribution, etc.
So that all parties (defendant & lawyers, plaintif & lawyers, judge or if applicable also jury) can trivially read and interpret the data:
On this platform we also have 4 users exactly 1 edit away, 15 users exactly 2 edits away,... On this platform we thus also have 4 other users 1 or fewer edits away, 19 users 2 or fewer edits away, ...
And I assure you Klayme or whomever would have read this part of the testimony over and over, and pushing his lawyers towards the right questions, that is if they allow themselves to work in the interest of their client, which usually they refuse to do, and just submit straw-man arguments intentionally because everybody wants to go home or have shorter workdays so prosecution and defense lawyers just pre-judge how the cookie should be crumbled, and then nobody has to read anything...
It is kind of like naming yourself after a meme or "lol".
A claim made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Wrong.
And in any case, if they had looked at the message history of the account name that they used to track him down and that was entered into evidence at the trial, they would not have found any criminal messages.
> The lack of digital evidence is not proof of innocence.
Misplaced burden of proof.
> Lawyers aren't generally known for their grasp of computer technology.
Good lawyers are known for mastering the relevant details of a wide range of subjects.
I'd be sus of anyone who has a kik account to begin with...
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
Although asterisk: those costs were being deducted from the final compensation. Still disgraceful that even happened.
Now imagine if this same standard was applied to individuals doing reckless but not inherently malicious things.
Apparently the appeal leading to the acquittal just happened last week.
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...
> 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.
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)
Terrible luck and a terrible legal defence. The stuff of nightmares!
There’s a lot missing in this sentence. What evidence ended up convicting him?
Courts are inherently bad at understanding that technology has bugs. Injustice is the norm.
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.
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.
The Intel manuals of today lack such humor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph
Generally when this happens, it's because they copied the Latin glyph and then made some tweaks to the whole Cyrillic alphabet to make it look more even, etc., and the changes to the 'a' may not even be intentional, but the 'a' got caught up in a batch change or something.
I feel otherwise: usernames and other identifiers (URLs particularly, and a number of other widely used identifiers), should be drawn from well-known, common, and small charactersets. The original 7-bit ASCII characterset (128 distinct characters), or some subset of that (e.g., Roman alphabet, Arabic numerals) may not be the native representation of all cultures, but it is all but certainly a familiar representation, and avoids numerous homoglyphic attacks.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack>
By contrast, Unicode has something on the order of 160,000 distinct characters.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode>
This greatly exceeds the typical vocabulary (distinct known words) of most native-language speakers, estimated at between 20k -- 35k words for a typical adult English speaker.
<https://wordcounter.io/blog/how-many-words-does-the-average-...>
A careless psychopath firing a gun into a crowd doesn’t necessarily care if he hits anyone. Despite the lack of intent, most would consider that careless psychopath worse than an individual that commits premeditated homicide for a reason other than “fun”.
Intent is irrelevant. The person firing a gun into a crowd knows the consequences of their actions just as well as a lazy judge or prosecutor does.
They may have no legal responsibility, but they have a moral responsibility. Getting paid to make a bad things is not a excuse.
Honestly, this should be a gigantic scandal. The moment where you'd reevaluate how your entire justice system operates.
This is most likely super common for criminal trials outside of highly professionalized police and prosecutors.
Theres no one technical in a court room.
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.
Yep,
So they have a cop stand up in court.
"We read X messages" (Here they are look how exceptionally heinous they are)
"We then asked the service for the IP."
"We then asked the ISP to deanonymise it. "
"Heres the guy we found at that IP"
He signs a stat dec that using his brilliant super techno crime brain he has correctly attributed the messages to this human.
It sounds like the defense from there was: But your honor, there's no history of these messages etc etc.
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.
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.
The end unless you can find some way to challenge the technical evidence. Which he did after some time.
I want to see the transcripts.
sources: https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-qu... and https://nsbs.org/general-notices/council-approves-resignatio...
In the US public defenders don't have time to try cases. They are basically plea bargain assistants.
I found the verdict here: https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nsp... but no transcript is given. it has to be requested, it seems.
The problem is that public defenders generally are starter defense attorneys, they're in the job to get experience so they can eventually quit and take a cushy private role. And secondly, they have very little time to allocate to each case; if the defendant is stuck in jail, then they have even less time to visit the defendant and prepare any kind of useful defense or trial strategy.
A public defender's primary strategy for their client is to, sadly, negotiate the best possible plea deal in the shortest amount of time to get the case off the docket.
(This might actually be in the best interests of the defendant; most defendants are guilty of something in the charging document, even if not everything they've been likely over-charged with; the justice system isn't quite so broken that it scoops up a huge number of factually innocent persons)
oh c'mon, if a technical person receives a piece of paper with a printed out user__name on it with the wrong number of underscores they'd just as likely make the same mistake. Rather than ban the use of paper, how about technical people ban fonts (designed by clueless font designers) that blend multiple underscores together?
A technical person did make the mistake, likely a police cyber forensics type.
But there's no one technical in the court room capable of reviewing their work and identifying the fault.
And they aren't in the court room to assist with technical analysis. Why we need to keep revisiting this confuses me.
>it's certainly nobody else's fault.
Not sure I would agree, but even if I did how is this a relevant reply? What's important to the defense is identifying the point at which the technical evidence is faulty. Blame and penalty for the screw up is irrelevant to the goal of getting the innocent party out of prison.
I am not sure why they do that, but when I see a DevOps engineer doing it I have a chilling feel.
If running code samples from a remote (untrusted) site, re-typing may spare you some grief.
I've addressed the homoglyph issue in my immediate prior comment. Other transcription errors are also of course possible with identifiers.
Everyone needs to be investigated for this, this is absolutely unbelievable and sickening!
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.
he should probably try to seek damages from the state for his wrongful conviction (and get his lawyer disbarred for grossly incompetent counsel!)
see https://nsbs.org/general-notices/council-approves-resignatio...
[edit] Since his old lawyer wasn't practicing anymore, Klayme got a new lawyer who discovered the missing underscore.
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?"
IANAL but to be "found guilty" means you are determined to be, in the eyes of the law, guilty. Actual guilt is irrelevant. As for evidence, there's the "matching" username (which, we all now know, didn't really match).
Police generally have to send faxes to companies for subpoenas, except for the few mega techs who have digital portals built specifically for police subpoenas. Source: I worked for a company who received subpoenas via fax.
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.
[0] https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nsp...
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.
In a system that is innocent before guilty, more accuracy favors the person.
> B: "Yep, the phone book says Johnathan BaskinRobbins lives at 123 Main Street, Shelbyville."
> A: "Hey Shelbyville Police, we have a bunch of evidence that someone called Jonathan BaskinsRobbins at 123 Main Street did a bunch of crimes with an axe - can you please check it out?"
> C: "Yep, we found that axe at the house of Johnathan BaskinRobbins at 123 Main Street."
> D: "Here's the evidence from A that Jonathan BaskinsRobbins did a bunch of crimes with an axe. And here's the evidence from C that Johnathan BaskinRobbins at 123 Main Street had the same kind of axe. Please convict him."
> E: "That's a whole lot of evidence. Johnathan BaskinRobbins is probably guilty."
.... 18 months later ....
> J: "Hey guys, my name is spelled Johnathan BaskinRobbins, not Jonathan BaskinsRobbins..."
A, B, C, D, and E: "Oops, sorry..."
Did he sue after? Was there any accountability?.
Let the process play out. "News" is called that because it is new and things are still happening.
Well, actually, my dear fellow, "NEWS" is short for N.E.W.S., which is North, East, West, and South. Indubitably. How smart, very intelligent.
The standard in Canada is “beyond a reasonable doubt”, a standard which does not leave much room for “honest, human mistakes” if you actually take it seriously.
If the judge bothered to review the evidence, he’d presumably have been baffled by the fact that nothing has been recovered from the defendant connecting him to the crime. This judge chose to not do that and chose not to be baffled, that wasn’t an honest mistake.
It's not okay to assert that anyone “deserves a bullet in the head” here, for any reason. In the case in question, clearly the system, and multiple people within it, failed to notice the issue. On HN we expect people to be thoughtful and curious, and ”bullet in the head” is a barbaric, medieval reaction to a modern scenario.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
What is it in the guidelines that should keep me from arguing in favour of expanding the scope of such penalties to also cover other, perhaps more harmful behaviour?
> is a barbaric, medieval reaction to a modern scenario.
You are inherently calling US voters at large barbarians and medieval here.
You may not share my views on how misconduct by judicial officials should be treated, but you can hardly condemn my opinion as illegitimate given the country you choose to live and pay taxes in. Taxes which fund executions carried out by your government.
The guidelines require us to converse curiously, to be kind, and to avoid ideological battle and flamebait. To write “A judge making a “mistake” like this deserves a bullet in the head, nothing less” is obviously in breach of all those expectations.
If you want to mount a case for ways judges and other actors in the legal system should be held accountable for errors that lead to illegitimate convictions, sure, you can do so thoughtfully. This isn’t diffuicult.
The evidence presented in this case wouldn’t have satisfied that standard even if all the underscores lined up.
Got to separate the message from the messenger
Was it an incorrect message if a different country’s delegate said it?
You can simply say, Canada has an issue with this. France has an issue with this.
It is the same when you often see on forums, "It is better in Japan". It isn't a relevant comment and therefore invokes comparison.
I’m guessing you aren’t familiar with that news cycle
Catching typos like that would be load bearing for someone armed only with a public defender.
Lots of things failed for that to reach prod, but the assertion that LLMs do not make subtle typos... is not congruent with my experience.
I'm really trying to get to the bottom of these claims, because I see them a lot and it's so wildly different from most people's experiences.
If it's just for "Catching typos", a hallucinated missing/extra underscore would just be a false positive to dismiss.
> A machine cannot be held accountable.
Seems unlikely that his lawyer, the law firm, the judge, whoever made the typo, or the police department will be held accountable either.
Nor can any of the tools they used, since that's not really the level at which it makes sense to hold accountability, but that's no reason not to use a tool that could find errors and reduce the chance for an innocent person to spend time in prison.