A single typo by cops led to an innocent Canadian man spending 18 months in jail.
The man, Brandon Klayme of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, was eventually acquitted of all charges on July 23 by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeals. But it was a small recompense for a catastrophic chain of incompetence that led him to being wrongly smeared as a child sex offender, completely upending his life.
In 2018, police in Wisconsin launched an investigation into a man on the Kik messaging app who had sent 125 sexually explicit messages to a 12-year-old girl. His username was fus__ro_dah, a reference to the 2011 video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
But when the police sent a subpoena to Kik to unearth the user’s identity, they made a critical error: they asked for fus_ro_dah, missing a single underscore.
