Wrong username Sent man to jail for 18 months, court heard

A Canadian man served 18 months in prison after he was wrongfully convicted in 2023 of child sex abuse offenses when investigators mistook his username on an instant messaging app, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal has found.

It was a man, Brandon Klayme, 30, of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia acquitted of all charges on July 23 by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, which also overturned his sentence.

The court found that law enforcement officials mistook Mr. Klayme’s username on the instant messaging app Kik for another account that sent sexually explicit material to a 12-year-old girl in Madison, Wis., in 2018. The difference was slight: The offending account’s username had an extra underscore.

Mr Klayme’s username was fus_ro_dah, while the messages came from an account with the username fus__ro_dah, which had two underscores between fus and ro, according to the ruling.

Both names come from the dragon language in the console game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and roughly translate to strength, balance, and pressure.

But when the Dane County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin began investigating the messages that were sent to the victim, it missed the small deviation, the court heard. Nor did the Halifax, Nova Scotia, regional police, who took over the case.

In February 2020, while Mr. Klayme was living with his parents and working for the family’s pizzeria, Halifax Regional Police executed a search warrant at his home and seized all of his electronic devices, including phones and laptops, according to his affidavit.

Mr. Klayme, who was serving 18 months of probation following his time in prison at the time of his acquittal, raised the discrepancy in a May affidavit that was part of his appeal. In his affidavit, Mr. Klayme said he had not used his Kik account since late 2012, about six years before the victim received the sexually explicit messages.

“In the final stages of preparing my arguments for appeal., it was found that the subpoena contained a subtle error that changed the course of my life,” Mr. Klayme wrote. failed to notice that the perpetrator’s Kik username “fus__ro_dah” contains a double underscore. This discrepancy went completely unnoticed by the court. The judge never pointed it out.”

In an email Wednesday, Zeb Brown, Mr. Klayme’s appeals lawyer, said he noticed the error.

“We couldn’t figure out how Mr. Klayme’s account came to be,” Mr. Brown said. “So we took a closer look at the evidence from the trial and the discrepancies were clearly visible in the printouts of the social media reports.”

Following a trial in April 2023, Mr. Klayme was convicted by a court of making sexually explicit material available to a child, soliciting children and possessing child sexual abuse material. In January 2024, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison, which he served before the court granted his appeal. His lawyer said he is “currently exploring his options and receiving advice regarding damages in the civil lawsuit.”

In the decision acquitting Mr. Klayme, the judges said that investigators had provided Kik with an incorrect username that was used to obtain Mr. Klayme’s email address. The account that sent the girl messages belonged to another person in California, according to the ruling.

“He should never have been charged, let alone convicted,” the judges said.

It was not immediately clear whether authorities were pursuing the person who sent the messages to the girl.

Melissa Noonan, a spokeswoman for the Nova Scotia prosecutor’s office, acknowledged in a statement Wednesday that Mr. Klayme’s conviction was flawed.

“We recognize the seriousness of the outcome for Mr Klayme,” Ms Noonan said.

“Once it became clear that the conviction was based on faulty evidence,” she said, prosecutors “provided the resulting information to the court, supported its admission as new evidence, recognized that the appeal should be allowed, and asked the court to enter a judgment of acquittal.”

In a statement Wednesday, Halifax Regional Police said it was not the agency that opened the investigation.

“This was a complex investigation as it began with a Wisconsin law enforcement agency before Halifax Regional Police was asked to assist,” the statement said. “In light of the court’s recent decision, we are committed to reviewing this file and our role in the outcome.”

Kik did not respond to a report about its role in the investigation.

A spokeswoman for the Dane County Sheriff’s Office said in an email Wednesday that the agency has no record of the case.