Last week, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeals overturned the 2024 conviction of a Nova Scotia man on three charges related child sexual abuse material. The man, Brandon Klayme of Halifax, spent 18 months in jail, all the while protesting his innocence. It turns out that he was indeed innocent—and his conviction came down to a single missing underscore.

The case centered around 125 sexually explicit messages exchanged on Snapchat-esque app Kik in late 2018 between a Wisconsin girl referred to as “CH”, who was 12 years old at the time, and a man who went by “Jay.” The messages were discovered by the girl’s mother; alarmed, she alerted local police. They established that Jay’s Kik username was “fus__ro_dah,” and subpoenaed Kik for details of the user who went by that name.

Except they didn’t. Instead, the subpoena they issued was for the username “fus_ro_dah”—one underscore between the first two words, not two. That username was connected to an email address owned by Brandon Klayme, a 28-year-old who lived with his parents in Halifax and was about to have his life turned upside down.

On the strength of the username/email address connection, Canadian police obtained details of the IP address used by Klayme to connect to the internet, and then searched his parents’ house, seizing multiple devices. They found nothing on those devices but charged Klayme anyway—specifically with one count each of child luring, making sexually explicit material available to a child, and possession of child pornography. The case went to trial in late 2023, and on January 5, 2024, Klayme was somehow convicted on all charges and sentenced to 18 months in jail.

This story raises all manner of questions, not least of which is: what in the name of all that is good and holy happened during the trial? We all tend to be cynical about the justice system—be it Canadian, American, or whatever—and on the whole we have good reason to be. But even so, how do you convict a man despite having literally no evidence?

To try to answer that question, we can look at the decision from Klayme’s trial, as well as the decision overturning the conviction. (Content warning: the former, particularly, makes for pretty grim reading, and contains explicit descriptions of child sexual abuse.)

As the original decision notes sagely, “the key issue in the trial was whether the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr Brandon Klayme was, in fact, ‘Jay.’” So how was that issue resolved? Frustratingly, this remains unclear. The written decision states simply, “The Court ultimately concluded on the basis of the totality of direct and circumstantial evidence accepted by the Court that the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr Brandon Klayme was, at all material times, the person who identified himself as ‘Jay’.” (“The Crown” in this context is basically the prosecution.)

There’s no explanation of what that “direct and circumstantial evidence” actually was. It’s interesting to note that there’s no mention of the “fus_ro_dah” username in the decision, nor of any other material presented by prosecutors—and they must have presented something, because the decision refers to “hearing three days of evidence introduced by the Crown.” One thing that the evidence clearly didn’t include was anything found on Klayme’s devices: “No images or chats were found on any of the devices seized from the bedroom in his parent’s [sic] house which the police believed to have been utilized by Brandon Klayme.”

The images and chats—details of which, again, are pretty ghastly—were recovered from the iPhone used by the 12-year-old recipient, and it seems that their mere existence, along with the fact that the “fus_ro_dah” username led back to Klayme’s email address, were considered enough evidence to convict him. (The unfortunate Klayme, the court notes, “presented as being polite, respectful, and cooperative, but took no responsibility and maintained that he was innocent and repeatedly cited that his ‘email account had been hacked’”—a not unreasonable guess as to how he’d somehow ended up in this nightmare, but no doubt also one the court had heard a million time before.)

Klayme was released after serving his sentence and went straight back to trying to clear his name. In the course of doing so, he finally noticed the fatal underscore, explaining in his appeal, “In the latter stages of preparing my appeal arguments, it was discovered that the subpoena contained a subtle mistake that changed the course of my life… This discrepancy went completely unnoticed at the trial. It was never brought to the attention of the trial judge.”

The Nova Scotia Court of Appeals agreed. Its decision, handed down on July 23, overturned Klayme’s convictions and concluded, “Mr Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted.” This is true! Especially since, as the appeal decision notes, “there [was no] evidence found of any Kik account activity by Mr Klayme during the time frame of the offences.” Nor was there any evidence “that Mr Klayme’s Google account was used to communicate with CH.”

It seems inequitable that ultimately, all that will happen here will be Klayme having his convictions struck from the record. This is obviously a good thing—being tarred as a sex offender would have affected his life going forward. But he won’t get the 18 months of his life he spent in prison back. There’s no reason to think there’ll be any accountability for whoever decided to charge him, the police who presented a bunch of nothing as evidence, or the judge who inexplicably convicted him on the basis of that non-evidence.

And most importantly, the actual offender—the person who identified himself as “Jay,” who is in fact “an individual whose first name is ‘Jay’ [and] whose IP address appears to be in California”—has remained free to do god knows what while Klayme was sitting in jail. The entire case is a depressing study in incompetence at every level.