As described in today’s Morning File:
‘Factually Innocent’: How police in Wisconsin and Halifax, a determined prosecutor in Nova Scotia, and a credulous provincial judge worked in concert to wrongly convict Brandon Klayme of vile sexual crimes against a child
This is a followup on the case of the Nova Scotia man who was convicted based on a misread username. There was a lot more wrong with the case.
The article came out from behind the Halifax Examiner’s paywall today.
You must log in or register to comment.
IMO we need a Department of Digital Fluency, Competence, and Oversight.
Basically a department tasked on making sure government policies don’t lead to fuck ups on dumb shit like miscounting underscores and going on a wild goose chase. (I might be confusing this instance with a different but similar one)
Besides providing oversight on legislation, internal policies, and judicial investigations; they could also provide mandatory training to any legislators or officials.
We simply can’t be trusting these dusty ass judges, life appointed senators, or anyone with tenured employment to maintain the digital fluency todays world necessitates.
This is the case with the underscores, yes. The username was “fus__ro_dah”; anyone paying attention should be able to tell that the first underscore is longer than the last one. Not looking at why that could be seems like a lack of effort/curiosity on the part of the people with access to the message logs.
Similarly, there’s a recording of the actual perpetrator’s voice in evidence, but “over seven years after it was obtained by police, no attempt has been made to analyze it or to compare it to any person’s voice.”
This isn’t about technical literacy so much as just laziness.
Yea I came across this story a few weeks ago after seeing the body cam footage of that woman arrested at her house with the cop insisting they had her on video but the footage he was referencing clearly showed a different person.
ACAB.