"he likely didn't have any experts to refute the prosecution's evidence."
What evidence? They didn't have any other than a user name. An arm chair lawyer who watched too many shows could have created reasonable doubt.
What evidence? They didn't have any other than a user name. An arm chair lawyer who watched too many shows could have created reasonable doubt.
> Prosecution: Mister Klayme, the criminal messages were sent from a Kik username called "fus ro dah". What's your Kik username?
> Klayme: It's "fus ro dah".
> Prosecution: It logically follows that Mister Klayme was the sender, and is therefore guilty of the offense.
Also don't think you can simply get the opposing expert witness to give this kind of testimony on cross examination. During cross examination you can only ask them about things they testified to during direct (and a few other things such as their qualifications). So if they never testified anything about your IP during direct then you can't ask them about whether or not your IP matched during cross.
If you don't have the money to pay for an expert witness then you better just hope that the jury already knows about IP addresses and actually realizes that IP addresses matching was never brought up during the trial (they won't btw, the general public knows nothing about these things).
Think about it this way, all this techno mumbo-jumbo about account IDs and IP addresses may as well be black magic as far as the jury and court is concerned. So only a verified expert witness can testify about them. If we allowed otherwise then every trial would be nothing but testimony about how various magical or religious principles mean that you can't possibly be guilty (or vice versa).
But what they didn't have is any independent evidence that Klayme had sent the messages or even that he had access to the account that sent them. If they had looked at the IP address from which the messages were sent, they would have seen that it wasn't his and was in a distant geographic location.
There was evidence of a crime, only the Kik account ownership evidence was thin. Any decent lawyer would have probed into that aspect of the case, but there are lots of comments here about failures of defense / prosecution / experts / legal system.