The Brandon Klayme conviction overturned by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal began with one character in a Kik username. The court acquitted Klayme on Thursday after finding that police sought records for the wrong account in a child-luring investigation that started in Wisconsin and later moved to Halifax.
The court said Klayme was “factually innocent of the offences” and “should never have been charged, let alone convicted.” His 18-month prison sentence and remaining probation were set aside.
The case started in 2018 after the mother of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin found an inappropriate image of an adult male on the girl’s phone and contacted police. According to the court decision, the Dane County Sheriff’s Department examined the phone and found 125 Kik messages between the child and a user named “fus__ro_dah,” with two underscores after “fus.” The name appears to reference the “fus ro dah” shout from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a detail that did not make the evidence handling any less brittle.
Why did one underscore matter in Brandon Klayme's case?
Usernames are exact identifiers. In this case, “fus__ro_dah” and “fus_ro_dah” were two different Kik accounts, so a subpoena for the one-underscore version pointed investigators at the wrong person.
The court said police contacted Kik to identify the account holder, but the subpoena requested records for “fus_ro_dah,” with one underscore after “fus.” Kik responded with an email address belonging to Klayme. Google records connected that email address to Google access from an IP address in Canada, and Dane County investigators sent the matter to Halifax Regional Police.
Halifax police then asked Bell Aliant about the IP address. Bell tied it to Klayme’s physical address, according to the court. Police got a search warrant, searched his bedroom, and seized phones and laptops.
Those devices did not produce evidence tying Klayme to the Wisconsin child. The court record says investigators found no relevant intimate images, no connection between Klayme and the girl, and no proof that Klayme had accessed Kik during the relevant period.
Klayme was nevertheless arrested in 2020 and charged with luring a person under 14 by telecommunication, providing sexually explicit material to a child, and possession of child pornography. He was convicted after trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison, which he served.
How was the mistake found?
Klayme kept pursuing an appeal after his release. During late-stage appeal preparation, his side found that the subpoena had asked Kik about the one-underscore username instead of the two-underscore username seen in the forensic report from the girl’s phone.
Prosecutors reviewed the issue and agreed the appeal should be allowed. The Court of Appeal said a proper investigation would have led to “an individual whose first name is Jay whose IP address appears to be in California.”
The court said the username information was available at trial, but the record does not show how the discrepancy escaped notice. That is the bleak technical lesson here: an identifier mismatch is not a clerical footnote when it becomes the spine of a prosecution.
This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.
