GAMING NEWS – Canadian officials are investigating how a typo in a Skyrim-inspired username sent an innocent man to prison for 18 months. Reports say there was no other incriminating evidence against Brandon Klayme, yet he was convicted after police omitted a single underscore from a Kik account name.
Nova Scotia Attorney General Scott Armstrong has requested a briefing from the Public Prosecution Service to establish how such a small character error produced such severe consequences. He also pledged that the same kind of failure must not be allowed to happen again.
“I’m very concerned about this. I’m not sure how something like this can happen within the system. I’ve asked the Public Prosecution Service to give me a specific briefing on all the steps in this case. And once I have that, I want to make some decisions of what the next steps will be,” Armstrong said.
The attorney general has not ruled out a public inquiry and is willing to meet Klayme and his representatives. He is examining how police, prosecutors, defence lawyers, and the court all failed to catch the mistake, although possible compensation has not yet been discussed.
One underscore separated the two usernames
Klayme was acquitted last month after spending more than a year – reportedly 18 months – behind bars for an offence he did not commit. His Kik username was “fus_ro_dah,” a reference to Skyrim’s famous dragon shout.
Investigators were actually looking for a California-based user named Jay who operated under “fus__ro_dah.” That person was accused of sending an inappropriate photograph to a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin, but police left out one of the two underscores when they requested information from the messaging service.
The faulty query directed them to Klayme instead. Nothing else implicated him in the case, yet the mistaken username match still led to his arrest, prosecution, and eventual imprisonment.
The seized devices produced no link to the victim
Authorities had several opportunities to discover that they had identified the wrong person. Police used the username to secure a search warrant and seized Klayme’s phones and laptops, but the devices produced no relevant evidence and revealed no connection between him and the girl.
Investigators could not even show that Klayme had accessed Kik during the period when Jay, who was located in California, contacted the child. He was charged anyway, leaving the Skyrim quotation and its incorrectly recorded underscore as the sole apparent link.
The Canadian review must now determine how the false identification travelled through the entire justice system without police, prosecutors, the defence, or the court spotting the second underscore that distinguished the two accounts.
Source: TheGamer
