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A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

arstechnica.com

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Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#161

Post by phyzix5761 »

Aurornis wrote: post #15

> Nothing linked Klayme to the girl. No intimate images were found. Klayme did have a Kik account, but cops couldn’t even show that he had accessed the service during the period in question. > Still, Klayme was arrested and hit with three charges: > Luring a person under 14 years of age by means of telecommunication > Providing sexually explicit material to a child > Possession of child pornography > The case went to…

As a software engineer the legal system scares me. How can we put someone in jail (for the rest of their lives in some cases) based on nebulous rules and personal interpretation/application of the law?

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#162

Post by leni536 »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #129
qingcharles wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the Canadian justice system, but it's very hard in the USA for defendants to get expert witnesses. The state is supposed to pay, but it's almost never done, and when it is they pay bottom rate for the defendant while having unlimited funds for their own experts.

Oh something I can comment on! A friend of mine was facing a mountain of criminal charges. Photo evidence proved the cops lied. We needed an expert testimony explaining the camera angle and why the photo explained how the cops lied. I think we called every service qualified for providing such a testimony in Ontario, and a good portion of them across all of Canada. Some were even happy to work with us, until they foun…

This is insane. I guess this is because of economic incentives, and expert witnesses risk losing work coming from prosecutors if they ever testify against them?

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#163

Post by benj111 »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #161
Aurornis wrote: post #15

> Nothing linked Klayme to the girl. No intimate images were found. Klayme did have a Kik account, but cops couldn’t even show that he had accessed the service during the period in question. > Still, Klayme was arrested and hit with three charges: > Luring a person under 14 years of age by means of telecommunication > Providing sexually explicit material to a child > Possession of child pornography > The case went to…

As a software engineer the legal system scares me. How can we put someone in jail (for the rest of their lives in some cases) based on nebulous rules and personal interpretation/application of the law?

As a person it should scare you.

Unfortunately this isn't unusual, well except it actually being accepted that he was innocent after the fact.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#164

Post by benj111 »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #58
Aurornis wrote: post #15

> Nothing linked Klayme to the girl. No intimate images were found. Klayme did have a Kik account, but cops couldn’t even show that he had accessed the service during the period in question. > Still, Klayme was arrested and hit with three charges: > Luring a person under 14 years of age by means of telecommunication > Providing sexually explicit material to a child > Possession of child pornography > The case went to…

"the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username." Out of curiosity and definitely not defending this prosecution, but if the chain "unique Kik username -> unique gmail address -> unique ISP user -> guy living alone, happens to have Kik on his device" weren't screwed up by the investigators submitting the wrong username, would you say that's enough for a jury to convict ? I don't know about Canada but in t…

If it wouldn't happen today, it's only because the US has a long history of doing this, mainly to black people.

Youre more confident that it doesn't still happen than I am though.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#165

Post by oersted »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #149
oersted wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not an unusual username, it is actually quite unoriginal, there are probably thousands of users with variations of the same name. It is the name of the headline magic ability in Skyrim, which is probably among the top ten most popular videogames of the last 25 years.

Wonder if there are expert witnesses in videogame niche. I have no idea what you are talking about.

I understand that certain segments of the population have remained completely disassociated from videogames, and that's fine, but that doesn't make it a niche or an expert topic.

Games make significantly more money than movies and TV now. More than 65M people bought Skyrim, and many more millions would recognise Fus-Ro-Dah just from spending time on the Internet anywhere near to gaming circles.

The defendant could have told their lawyer and it would have been trivial to research and demonstrate. Not sure what went wrong there.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#166

Post by tancop »

gblargg wrote: post #131
anigbrowl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An unfortunate fact about the legal system is that it's much easier for lawyers to sway a jury based on emotions than facts. simply labeling someone as a child abuser and then recounting a sordid tale is enough to get most people to switch off their rational faculties completely. Another unfortunate fact is many defense attorneys start work from the premise that the client is both guilty and an idiot, accepting the f…

Why would people get jury trials if bench ones were better? Is it only when the person is innocent?

because they think jury trials work the way they are supposed to work.

the system is broken because juries are not required (or even allowed) to explain their decision, and the selection process is not that good at removing bias. thats how you get cases where the jury is racist or not following the law.

but the idea of using a group decision instead of individual is great, and the jurors not being judges/lawyers avoids professional deformation. if selection was completely fair the system would work as intended but thats not really possible with the way it is now.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#167

Post by phendrenad2 »

mvkel wrote: post #92

Now imagine dumping the corpus of this case into an LLM and asking it to find discrepancies. I'll bet your bollocks to a barn dance that it'd point out the extra underscore. This is yet another example of human confirmation bias leading to terrible outcomes for other humans. Our judgment is not so virtuous. Now the question is whether being fallible is a feature. It seems like society is interested in keeping humans…

There's probably a lot of alpha in getting (legal) access to a bunch of court records and finding discrepancies, and then using that to convince municipalities into buying a subscription to your discrepancy-finding AI SaaS. Give it a cool YC name like "Convictly.ai"

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#169

Post by phendrenad2 »

denkmoon wrote: post #113
koolba wrote: post #80

All of this boils down to an extra underscore in his username. It’s the type of thing I’d hope our LLM-powered future solves for the common man. Catching typos like that would be load bearing for someone armed only with a public defender.

Insane. An LLM is just as likely to hallucinate a missing/extra underscore and ping the wrong person. A machine cannot be held accountable.

What's insane is that people say things like this in 2026. I suspect it stems from being retired and not really using LLMs for work, and instead using them for leisure, and therefore not knowing that they're extremely capable for logical operations, much more than they are for entertainment. Your second point about "machine cannot be held accountable" is a non sequitur, so I'll leave it.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#170

Post by phendrenad2 »

denkmoon wrote: post #140
Noumenon72 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My LLMs frequently find subtle typos and never make subtle typos. I don't think that's equally likely at all.

Just today I had an incident review meeting resulting from a prod incident where the root cause was an LLM refactor stripping ! from the front of a boolean statement "for no reason". Not to mention how often I've seen garbled output from the LLM. Lots of things failed for that to reach prod, but the assertion that LLMs do not make subtle typos... is not congruent with my experience.

Which LLM? When was this code written? When was the last time you saw "garbled output" and what was the context?

I'm really trying to get to the bottom of these claims, because I see them a lot and it's so wildly different from most people's experiences.

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