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.

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.

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

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

If you dont mind, which country is that?

You can’t leave is hanging like that! What happened?

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.

I have heard prosecutors say that innocent or guilty doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether they can convict.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I can't imagine a basic analysis of the Kik account would require a terribly expensive expert, in theory.

Could the solution be to turn lots of local IT / programmers into potential experts to bend down the cost curve?

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!

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.

Uh, how many rapists do you guys have trolling about to even manage to produce a percentage like that?

Judging by how many children bodies they find under old orphanage sites, too many.

"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.

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.

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.

But that is all speculation/opinion/non-first hand knowledge, you can't actually say any of those things in court without an expert witness. Only expert witnesses can testify to things that they didn't witness themselves, lawyers and lay witnesses cannot.

Also don't think you can simply get the opposing expert witness to give this kind of testimony on cross examination. During cross examination you can only ask them about things they testified to during direct (and a few other things such as their qualifications). So if they never testified anything about your IP during direct then you can't ask them about whether or not your IP matched during cross.

If you don't have the money to pay for an expert witness then you better just hope that the jury already knows about IP addresses and actually realizes that IP addresses matching was never brought up during the trial (they won't btw, the general public knows nothing about these things).

Think about it this way, all this techno mumbo-jumbo about account IDs and IP addresses may as well be black magic as far as the jury and court is concerned. So only a verified expert witness can testify about them. If we allowed otherwise then every trial would be nothing but testimony about how various magical or religious principles mean that you can't possibly be guilty (or vice versa).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

> Why do you assume that the IP that sent the messages was recorded.

Seriously? It's not an assumption.

This is Canada. That may not be possible.