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Teacher Julie Amero Gets a New Trial
LazloHollyfeld writes "A New London Superior court judge this morning granted a defense request seeking a new trial for Julie Amero, the former Norwich middle school substitute teacher convicted of exposing her middle school students to Internet porn. Acting on a motion by Amero's attorney, William Dow III, Judge Hillary Strackbein placed the case back on a trial list. Amero had faced 40 years on the conviction of four counts of risk of injury to a minor. State prosecutor David Smith confirmed that further forensic examination at the state crime lab of Amero's classroom computer revealed "some erroneous information was presented during the trial. Amero and her defense team claimed she was the victim of pop-up ads — something that was out of her control. Judge Strackbein said because of the possibility of inaccurate facts, Amero was "entitled to a new trial in the interest of justice." After the brief court appearance, a smiling Amero stood next to her attorney. "I feel very comfortable with the decision," Amero said. Dow commended the state for investigating the case further. A new court date has yet to be scheduled. Amero has reentered a not guilty plea."
The Pop-up add made me do it!
s/©//g
*sings* The Internet is for porn...
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
40 years? For this? Good lord. Aren't there any real criminals we could lock up instead? It's insane.
I'd consider even four years to be excessive for such an offense.
i remember when teachers would have sex with the students. now they just show you internet porn. techers at public schools have gotten so lazy. Do it right or dont do it.
Indeed, I'm sure the boys were horrified when they had to tolerate pop-up porn after being able to view the stuff they'd bought with their mom's credit card....
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
wouldn't mozilla firefox have halted unwanted popups?
only if people listened to the nerds who know.
This whole topic makes me so incredibly furious. Forty years in jail, for being the vicitm of spyware? Even if the defendant used a school laptop in at home and visited some questionable sites, that should at most earn her a fine, as a strict warning to other educators that extremely careful to not bring a laptop into the class when it might be compromised. The only real justice here would be if the creator of that pop-up ad/spyware would be tracked down by their 1-900 number and they be convicted to forty years in jail. This is an utter failure of the justice system.
This woman was a substitute teacher.
Sounds like the regular classroom teacher had a lot of time on her hands to go surfing around.
I'm happily posting from an European country. I remember a handful of events like this, usually with those "videotape" thingies you hardly remember anymore...well, back to the story. Occasionally it was the teacher who made a little mistake, more often it was one of the kids who smuggled in some porn when the teacher wasn't watching. The latter happened a few times in my class. I was maybe 13. (Never was the one who smuggled it, though. Honestly!)
Now, what was the reaction, from both the kids and the parents?
Basically, "Hee hee." Maybe some frowning by those few who actually go to church (quite rare around here) but that's all. If you even tried suing over this, you'd more likely get fined for being a crackpot and wasting the court's time.
"Injury to a minor"? 40 years? This would be some great comedy if it wasn't true. Now it's tragicomedy.
Call in an expert witness to testify the computer was infected with malware which automatically displayed porn ads at irregular intervals. Nothing a non-expert like her could do about it. The whole case was an accident in my opinion.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Good news! Next week your school district is going to vote on whether they should hire more IT staff so they can make their own controlled internet. All it will take is a small increase to your property taxes.
Get real. Using the internet is a valuable skill that children in school should learn, but creating a completely controlled environment will be too expensive. The best we can reasonably hope for is a public internet connection and a horribly configured/maintained proxy. We're just going to have to deal with the occasional child being accidentally exposed to material that his/her parents find objectionable. But really, is anyone ever really "injured" by information?
According to http://www.courant.com/news/local/hcu-amerotrial-0 606,0,4739321.story the state is unlikely to prosecute her a second time.
Also, there, it states that her sentencing was postponed 4 times this spring as the state considered new evidence. It's not clear how much - if any - time was spent in jail.
It's disturbing that the teachers unions did not come to her defense, or at least push to have more light shed on the situations that teachers face regularly in the classroom. Yeah, this girl was a substitute, but the case has a large bearing on teachers in general.
If I was sent to investigate this situation, and ran into a pregnant substitute teacher who was given instructions not to turn off the computer under any circumstances it would be hard not to take a look at the potential pop-up/spyware situation. Is there nobody that works for the police department, prosecutors office, the school, or the school board who has any real IT experience?
Here are some links to stories we did:
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
Whenever I hear about this stuff, or when some hot female teacher has sex with a student, I know that as an adult, and a parent, I'm supposed to be upset and outraged, but... If it was me, and some hot female teacher wanted to do some extracurricular activities at her house or some hot chick from my class wanted to take me on a magic carpet ride...I don't think I'd be that upset.
You assume teachers know how to do this. An English teacher doesn't need to know how to play cat and mouse with Windows security, S/he needs to know how to engage kids, teach kids and the subject in question. IT skills don't come into this what so ever.
The saying goes "Jack of all trades, master of none", it's not just random chance you know.
I like muppets.
Got links to back your assertions? I haven't read anything that suggests that she left those images up on the screen for hours.
I'd have to argue against even losing her teaching credentials. Certainly a reprimand is in order, but the catalyst to the situation was not only beyond her control, it was within the control of the school administration. She was under orders not to turn the computer off under any circumstance. She reported the situation (poorly, but she did report it).
Plenty of young and old teachers alike are not computer savvy.
It's very easy to imagine a person who would not know what to do in this situation. How many times during your scholastic career did a teacher or school administrator make a decision that was contrary to logic, not in the best interest of students, or altogether dumb.
I found naked pictures in National Geographic in third grade. Eventually those issues were removed from the classroom. I can't imagine that my teacher was even reprimanded. The only real difference is that those pictures weren't designed to be tittilating. They still got into the classroom under the guise of an educational tool, and my teacher didn't immediately remove the issues when she discovered what we had been seeing. I'm willing to bet that my third grade class was not the only one in the country to go through this, and I'm also willing to bet that there are National Geographic issues in classrooms today with pictures of naked women inside them.
with pornography is just weird, and even though I am a born and bred Scottish Lutheran - sheesh I did Grow-Up and had an education. Resident as I am on the Continent, (where the Alps are on my doorstep) I am fortunate enough to live where the local population, in general, has a very sensible attitude to sex. It occupies no more of an obsession than clothes, food, beer, balsamico, olive oil and er...George W. Bush (Okay, you can't have everything), so while this is a marginally interesting post it is really a huge load of tosh about an idiosyncrancy that is entirely peculiar to our companions across the big pond, who spent some time chucking English tea into Boston Harbour.
You know sex, drugs,rock n roll - these are just things we do.
Snowboarding is where we are at.
What we want is long powder.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
I remember teachers having problems getting slide projectors to work.. let alone a computer. for all she knows taping paper on the monitor would overheat it and cause it to melt.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Dude what the fuck are you talking about? what the hell is wrong with some of you americans, kids doesn't get harmed by accidentally seeing a porn popup.. Let me repeat: watching a picture of people having sex is not harmful to children ffs. Get it into your skull, no why the hell do you want her fired, its probably some of the pupils who been accessing the porn sites responsible for the popups.. geez..
> She could have simply covered the monitor. An elementary
> school classroom would have plenty of items available to allow
> that (construction paper, tape). She could have sent the kids
> to the playground or cafeteria or assembly room.
You know what's funny? You expect this woman to react appropriately in the heat of the moment. OTOH, you, who is under no pressure and has all the time in the world, failed to come up with the most effective way to prevent the images, i.e. turn off the monitor, and instead would be running around the classroom looking for construction paper and tape.
"Mommy, guess what I learned at school today! I tried it on ALL the boys, and they want me to do it again!"
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I absolutely agree. I have one son who is a Junior and another that will be a Freshman next year... and the school would be better off if they dragged out and burned every computer they own. For every ounce of extra benefit the computers give them, it gives them a pound of distraction and expense. And I'm skeptical about that ounce of benefit.
"Hey Dad, my friend got a quake server running during English class." "Hey Dad, know any techniques for getting around websense? They're blocking Google Images." "Hey Dad, I got an Imageshack account, 'cause all my friends have one." AAAARRRGH
That page contains links to where you can download and read the trial transcript, if you want more than that story summarizes.
When I served on our local school board, one of our teachers had pop-ups take over his screen when a student used the PC while the teacher was logged in. He quickly responded to the situation to minimize the exposure, but some students still saw things they shouldn't, according to the district, and it was reported up the chain. When I heard about it, I was more unhappy with the IT folks who can manage to block all sorts of sites, and lock down this, and make impenetrable that, according to their boasts, but couldn't block a pop-up. I argued that if anyone should be punished, it should be the head IT guy, but, as only one voice among seven on the board, I was overruled and the principal wrote up the teacher for some infraction or another - I don't recall exactly what they settled on. I don't believe it was turned over to the police or DA, though.
Good luck with the re-trial, but if their district is anything like ours, a "not guilty" verdict still won't help her get her job back. Not that she'd want to work for them, anyway...
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
The biggest problems in schools in the US today are the parents and administration. The teacher is caught in the middle.
Absolutely, any teacher that allowed something to be viewed that parents object to will be villified, investigated and possibly fired by the administration. It doesn't matter if it is pornography, white supremacy, or evolution. If the parents do not agree with the material, the teacher is in trouble for bringing it out in the classroom. And in most cases, the teacher is getting zero support from the administration.
This teacher that was told not to turn off the computer and couldn't seem to control it obviously had no business in a classroom with a computer in it. Any barrage of porn popups is going to be distracting, titilating and going to cause problems when the students talk about what they have seen. Sure, you can say "Titties for everyone" but the parents don't seem to agree. They want to control their children's access to explicit sexual materials and the school is telling them that they can. So when a teacher proves this control isn't present, the parents blame the school and the teacher.
Sex education in US schools has been watered down over the last 20-30 years so completely that it is almost pointless. The parents of even a minority of children can block this from being any meaningful exchange of information. The result is what the parents say they want - they control access to sexual information. So girls end up having sex at 12 without ever understanding this is where babies come from and yes, you can get pregnant if you do it standing up. But parents are demanding this kind of control so the school gives in.
It was brought up and the police admitted they did ZERO forensics on the computer in question. She was still convicted.
Think of the children!
The fact that this case is being prosecuted just sickens me. This prosecutor needs to stand behind the Duke lacrosse prosecutor in the line to get his license revoked.
Who's to say she didn't 'get off'.
Some days I just get bored and Troll post all the memes I can think of...
I don't mean to offend you, but I frankly doubt that you actually read the transcripts that you link to.
You claim that this happened in an elementary school, but it was in a middle school. By that you imply that the the kids were much younger than they really were. At the time of the hearings, all the students that testified were fifteen, and they said that they were thirteen years old when the incident took place. (One student said (s)he wasn't sure if (s)he was twelve).
You also claim that the kids were exposed to the porn for several hours, but in the transcripts the kids explicitly say that the students could not see the porn from their seats, as the monitor was on the teacher's desk and facing away from them. They say they caught glimpses of the "popups" when they went to the front of the room (to ask about the assignment they were working on, to throw some trash away, etc.). The real scandal began when those students talked about what they saw with other students outside of the classroom, but based on the testimonies most of those students never really saw the images.
So, people who read your comment will get their emotions manipulated, as they will think that these were dozens of pre-teens who were exposed to hard core porn being continuously presented to them for several hours in a large monitor that was facing them (a setup very common in elementary schools, where a handful of computers are placed against the walls, facing towards the center of the room). And that my friend, is a very different picture from what the testimonies say.
There is exactly one option that will, at this point, make me say "justice served." That is complete and immediate dismissal of all charges and disbarment of the prosecutor who pursued this in the first place.
If this does go to trial, my defense strategy would be this: Bring one expert witness after another to the stand to testify that this could happen on a poorly patched and insecure system regardless of what this woman may have done. Eventually the prosecution will have to stipulate that fact to which one must then say "So, why are we here?"
This just makes me amazingly angry.
One more note... don't try to wiggle out of jury duty, folks. That may be your chance to be the voice or reason and to see justice done. It may also be an opportunity to exercise your right of Jury Nullification.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I'm still not sure why the teacher is being blamed. I would assume that most K-12 schools would be using some kind of proxy server to limit access to 'questionable' content. From talking to some network admins in the past who work for a local school district, they treat the students as hostile users and try to limit the access as much as possible.
Classroom puter, I would assume wasn't something the teacher lugged back and forth from home....did the substitute teacher circumvent the network? how was she able to surf pr0n in the first place?
Just so long as he wasn't running with scissors - you could poke someone's eye out with those things.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
I agree that educators should not be punnished for teaching young people (including, in an appropriate context, images) about the "very process that brought them into existence," but if you've ever had pop-up pictures grace your monitor, you know that most of them have nothing to do with educating people about procreation and have everything to do with simple gratification. Make a scientific argument that random pr0n images are beneficial. Many studies have concluded they are harmful (and sex education would not be included in that definition of pr0n).
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
She did fight it. She did let them know that the pop-up pictures just kept coming. She did indicate she tried to shield the children once she saw what was happening. Evidence was suppressed that would have disclosed the amount and nature of malware on her system. That's why this was tossed back by the higher court.
Unfortunately, if you're technically literate, you might find it difficult to find a judge who understands the technology, even moreso a full jury of your peers. If you've ever worked a help desk, just imagine a random sampling of 10 of your users sitting on a jury. Do you think they'll be able to make head or tails of the technical arguments, even with lots of pictures and mono-syllabic definitions?
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
The school in this case was a middle school (jr. high).
The teacher was not surfing the web for pr0n as some have suggested. The images were pop-ups ads that appeared on her computer.
Only some students saw the images in questions as her monitor did not face the class.
She informed the school of the problem but was told not to turn off the computer.
The teacher was not computer literate enough to know to turn off the monitor.
The school did not have firewalls, spyware removal tools, etc.
The state placed all the responsibility on her and did not believe that she could have received pornographic pop-ups without visiting pornographic sites.
As someone who has had to clean up many pop-up infections of other people, all it takes is one click to a shady site to get infected. One of my friends was horrified when these ads starting appearing on her computer as she was the kind of person that didn't even curse. I checked out her history and found the offending site. It was a lyrics site that she had visited to look up lyrics of a song. The ads she got were not always pornographic in nature. Some of them were general ads but the nature of these shady sites means that they attract businesses that are less than reputable. So I installed firefox and Google toolbar. I recommended she use firefox but in case she didn't like it, the Google toolbar should block most of them.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
This is part of the philosophy of the modern criminal justice system. Heavy maximum sentences are simply a bargaining chip granted to prosecutors to efficiently dispose of cases that probably don't merit a trial. Prosecutors in the real world are the de facto judge and jury 90% of the time, due to the fact that they have the discretion to pick and chose cases to prosecute with draconian penalties. The best you can hope for is to pick responsible, reasonable people for that position. Prosecutors examine the evidence, make personal judgments on their facts and the applicable law, and file a laundry list of charges totaling 40 years if they so choose. At that point defense attorneys are often forced to tell a defendant not to risk it and plead guilty to a negotiated subset of the charges. The overwhelming volume of 'justice' is handled in backrooms this way. The rules of criminal procedure actively encourage it.
That's the struggle between the principles of civil liberties and the pragmatism of limiting crime in society. On the one hand, we demand a certain amount of accuracy for the sake of human dignity (not convicting the innocent), but on the other we demand that the streets be made safe and lawlessness be tamed. The only way to have it both ways it to place regular human beings (prosecutors and defense attorneys) in a position to arbitrarily dish out justice on an informal level. All of the myriad of technical rules and protections used in trials are a great amount of overhead. Trials are only necessary in close-call cases, for most defendants it's an unnecessary waste of resources.
So, we end up with a game where ridiculously oppressively harsh sentences are always threatened but rarely handed out. That was it creates the psychological impression that a defendant (and his lawyer) should sit down, shut up, and be 'thankful' to only get a 4-year sentence. If it weren't this way, every blatantly guilty and heinous criminals would always demand their day in court. I personally object to the forced informality of it all, but it's just the reality of a real-world system.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, however, there is. -Berra