A Canadian man was wrongly convicted of child pornography and served 18 months in prison after investigators mixed up his instant messaging username with another account. Brandon Klayme, 30, was convicted of sending sexually explicit material to a 12-year-old girl on the platform Kik. But an appeals court acquitted Klayme after it turned out the offending username had two underscores in between its first two words (fus__ro_dah), whereas Klayme’s username had just one (fus_ro_dah). Both names were inspired by the dragon language in the role-playing console game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The Dane County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin, which first investigated the messages sent to the victim, and the Halifax Regional Police in Nova Scotia, which took over the case, both missed the username discrepancy, which went “completely unnoticed” at trial, according to Klayme’s appeal. He hadn’t used his Kik account in years when the explicit messages were sent, he added. The other account belongs to a different person in California. It wasn’t immediately clear if that person was being investigated.
Read it at The New York Times
