> 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.
"the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username."
Out of curiosity and not defending these investigators, 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/gmail/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."
It all comes down to the jury, none of those things matter. The bigger issue here: he knew those messages weren’t him, so the lawyer should’ve gone full force to figure out how this happened. I would guess his lawyer didn’t really believe him
It 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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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).
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"?
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.
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.
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)
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.
In 2016, CBS News called it "a predator's paradise", and Wikipedia notes that it lacks E2EE while permitting sign-ups without providing any valid contact information.
This 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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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?
> 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.
"the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username."
Out of curiosity and not defending these investigators, 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/gmail/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."
It is Canada so a decent amount of the process is different and more English than American.
It all comes down to the jury, none of those things matter. The bigger issue here: he knew those messages weren’t him, so the lawyer should’ve gone full force to figure out how this happened. I would guess his lawyer didn’t really believe him
It 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Jury trial is a right for crimes over a specific threshold:
> The 5-Year Rule: You get the benefit of a jury trial if the maximum sentence is five years or heavier.
> Minor Offenses: Less serious crimes (summary conviction offenses) are tried by a judge alone without a jury.
(Source: Google AI results)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty.
There’s a lot missing in this sentence. What evidence ended up convicting him?
It’s not inconceivable that it was on those chat logs alone. In the us the jury instructions read something to the effect of “this is what beyond a reasonable doubt means. It is up to you to determine if the prosecution has met that burden and you choose to apply as much or little weight to any piece of evidence or testimony as you see fit”
There's a lot missing in this article. Obvious follow-up questions unanswered.
They had the victim's device and logs from the messaging service. The issue was that the logs were attributed to the wrong user.
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).
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"?
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.
They should all be required to serve the sentence themselves.
If you read it carefully, the victim was in the US and the defendant was in Canada (I suspect a rural part).
I think everyone is rightly questioning why the defendant's lawyers failed to tear apart the prosecution's case. This generally requires that the defendant have money, the defendant hire a competent criminal defense attorney, and the attorney hires a team of experts to rigorously challenge all of the evidence.
Here is some additional Canadian news coverage: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...
Ultimately the prosecutor should then go to jail for say 10x the time. Maybe that would make prosecutors less zealous?
The premise of Brazil (1985)
Thank you, Mr. Tuttle!
Came here to say this! You beat me to it.
We're really getting into Computers Don't Argue[0] territory here, eh?
0: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
(available in Best of Creative Computing Vol. 2 at https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ah... , p.133)
Source article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...
Connecting 'this account belongs to you' to 'this account did these activities' seems to rely on a chain of high-integrity (in the sense of both ethics and precision) investigative work that clearly doesn't happen because of the system's lazy recourse to subpoenaing internet companies (here with a typing error)
You can assume "the system is lazy".
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.
I had never heard of "Kik" so I looked it up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_(app)
In 2016, CBS News called it "a predator's paradise", and Wikipedia notes that it lacks E2EE while permitting sign-ups without providing any valid contact information.
This is completely dystopian. Did he have the worst legal defense possible, or are Canadian laws such that an IP address is sufficient for any claimed charges to just stick?
This is absolutely insane, if the article is truly accurate they literally had NO evidence besides the user name (which was wrong.)
I hope this guy gets better lawyers when he sues everyone involved.
It'll be thrown out by the JustUs system when a judge will declare the lawsuit has "no standing."
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.
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.
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.
If you find them, let us know.
In the US public defenders don't have time to try cases. They are basically plea bargain assistants.
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?
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.
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.
How does one vacate a sentence that was already served?
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!)
Perhaps there should be input fields that are paste-only, no typing allowed (or only with extra modal warnings).
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.
He didn't say "they" anywhere in his message?
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!
This guy should sue
Remember when Saudi Arabia indicted Canada on its human rights and everyone laughed?
Got to separate the message from the messenger
The underscore is the least interesting part of this. That is a garden variety fuckup. Everything that came after that is the scandal.
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?
There was evidence. Just not pointing to him.
The article didn't mention any follow up. He actually served his full sentence.
Did he sue after? Was there any accountability?.
At least nobody has figured out my password yet.