Remember the teacher facing felony charges for porno popups?

[Lonestar]

Well, she be let off.

The substitute teacher who was convicted on four felony counts of risking injury to minors after she failed to prevent porn ads from popping up on a classroom computer has been granted a motion for a new trial, reports Wired News.

Julie Amero, of Norwich, Conn., who was to be sentenced this week, was facing 40 years of jail time for not being able to control the images that popped up on the monitor.

Despite the fact that Amero testified that the monitor did not face the children, and that the schools IT administrator allowed the school’s filtering software to expire, she was found guilty.

The judge has granted her a new trial but it is likely that the case won’t go to trial again. Judge Hillary B. Strackbein granted the motion after a state laboratory’s examination contradicted evidence presented in court.


“The jury may have relied, at least in part, on that faulty information,” said Judge Hillary B. Strackbein, according to the Associated Press.

The computer’s hard drive was closely examined by Eric Sites, the CTO of the security software company Sunbelt, who found misinterpretation in the testimony of the expert witness.

“For a real computer expert, it was easy to see there were inaccuracies in the testimony given by the prosecution’s expert witness, and I think the prosecution was truly led astray by the assertiveness of their witness,” Sites said.

“There was definitely adware called new.net,” Sites said. “It was downloaded by a screensaver installed for Halloween by the teacher Amero was subbing for.”

If exonerated, Amero could have the basis for suing the city if they knowingly misrepresented evidence or presented testimony from a clearly incompetent expert. She could also have a malpractice claim against her first lawyer, who failed to provide the prosecution with evidence that the computer was infected. As a result, the evidence was excluded from trial, so the jury never learned about it.

[Duckie]

That's good, although the idea that 40 years of prison on endangerment of children for seeing some tits and vagoo is hardly reasonable. I mean, half of them should already know basically what they look like by sheer gender probabilities.

Even if the regular teacher hadn't installed adware by accident like so many stupid laymen (and careless non-laymen, too!), it's still a bullshit charge and the idea that she's guilty and not the porn advertisers of showing pornography to children (ignoring the fact that it's not that big of a deal) is retarded.

Of course, then we also have to consider why it even matters if the monitor wasn't facing them and there was no overhead projector or anything.

[Bounty]

She's not let off; the deluge of computer and security experts saying the technical side of the trial is a shambles has convinced the court she deserves a retrial. So while her chances have gotten a lot better, she's still not off the hook.

Not that there should have been much of a case to begin with. The computer she used did not have a firewall, no malware protection and it's nanny-filter had expired due to lack of payment; she immediately turned the screen away from the students, most of whom saw nothing and the few that did bareky saw anything; she followed school orders not to turn off computers and tried to get the matter resolved during a break, but was brushed off; she reported the incident herself, something the principal tried to hide; computer logs were misrepresented to make it seem like she surfed to porn sites while in reality, the entries were triggered by a pop-up loop; et cetera, et cetera.

The whole case was a disgrace.

[brianeyci]

In high school some motherfucker with too much time on their hands did something to their computer to bring up a whole bunch of Britney Spears fake porn up. Either that or they were cut and pasting the porn from sites into Microsoft Word and Word "recovered" the document. Then the computer froze.

Instead of following the rules to keep the computer on, I slammed the power. I didn't need to be accused of surfing for porn and getting suspended by technical fools and have half the class giggling at me in my final year. My "excuses" wouldn't have been believable either, given I was supposed to be a computer nerd and a know-it-all in computers.

Fucked up world that someone who follows the rules get shat on. As an aside, I've thought for a long time that people who obey regulations and rules and the law should be paid. More people would play by the book if they were paid to do it.