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

"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."

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.

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?

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.

It is Canada so a decent amount of the process is different and more English than American.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

I wouldn’t think to much more on it if I were you. It’s not just this article. I’ve been getting the same feeling with other Arstechnica articles that recently trended on HN, so I think I’ll just pass when I see them for a while.

Yes, this is an atrocious article.

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.

> Unless the article left something out

I'd be sus of anyone who has a kik account to begin with...

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

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.

Is it surprising? Every time you log in your IP is recorded, and the ISP can handle the rest.

I'd trust a computer to catch a missing underscore way more than humans.

The prosecution certainly could have done a comparison, but it seems they just went with the matching username and figured it was a slam-dunk (which it turned out to be). It's very possible the defense was never even made aware of those photos, and thus had no recourse for challenging them.

Any number of things could have acquitted this man, including that. His lawyer, the judge, the prosecutors, the police and anyone else involved at any stage of this case need to be looked at very carefully and hard decisions should be made about whether it's appropriate for them to be licensed to perform whatever duties they were performing in the course of it.

It’s not inconceivable that it was on those chat logs alone. In the us the jury instructions read something to the effect of “this is what beyond a reasonable doubt means. It is up to you to determine if the prosecution has met that burden and you choose to apply as much or little weight to any piece of evidence or testimony as you see fit”

They had the victim's device and logs from the messaging service. The issue was that the logs were attributed to the wrong user.

There's a lot missing in this article. Obvious follow-up questions unanswered.

Only if non-ASCII characters are allowed in usernames, and generally I don't think they often are

Thank you, Mr. Tuttle!

Came here to say this! You beat me to it.

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.

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.

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"

This is absolutely insane, if the article is truly accurate they literally had NO evidence besides the user name (which was wrong.)

I hope this guy gets better lawyers when he sues everyone involved.

I am betting the judge accepted all the messages as evidence, and that was enough to convict.

Theres no one technical in a court room.

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).

No reason to believe this wasn't a one-off, either. I say dig up every case the judge has touched for thorough scrutiny.

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.

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!)

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.

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.

Insane. An LLM is just as likely to hallucinate a missing/extra underscore and ping the wrong person. A machine cannot be held accountable.

It was a popular platform briefly for college students etc. I remember college kids posting drama on Kik etc

> 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).

> 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..."

There was evidence. Just not pointing to him.

He was just acquitted last week.

Let the process play out. "News" is called that because it is new and things are still happening.

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.)