Posted on 03/01/2007 7:54:37 PM PST by jmc1969
A substitute teacher faces up to 40 years in jail after pornographic website images were displayed to her seventh-grade students.
But the conviction of 40-year-old Julie Amero - for four counts of risking injury to a child - has sparked mass outrage on the blogosphere.
Amero, who worked at Kelly Middle School in the US town of Norwich, Connecticut, argued that she was the victim of adware and spyware - malicious computer code that causes pop-up advertisements to appear spontaneously.
The prosecution, on the other hand, said Amero loaded the porn deliberately, and faulted her for not shutting the computer off fast enough once the children had witnessed it.
Since the conviction a legion of security experts have sided with Amero. They say the jury's lack of understanding of computer security technology blinded them to the presence of adware, which Amero - a computer novice - could not control.
Eckelberry, along with other security experts, dismissed the police and prosecutor's claims that a forensic investigation of the computer showed the teacher was actively browsing porn websites the entire day on October 19, 2004, the same day she was accused of displaying porn to her students.
(Excerpt) Read more at smh.com.au ...
Obviously a dangerous woman who should be locked away for decades...
Must not have been dyke stuff.
But those who taught fisting in Massachusetts were celebrated.
Why was she going to porn sites on a school computer in the first place?
Yikes, I cant believe this thing went to trial and won.
I've been doing this for years and getting cases dismissed. This person probably is a shiznitbag. It's tough to police these thing.
Eckelberry, along with other security experts, dismissed the police and prosecutor's claims that a forensic investigation of the computer showed the teacher was actively browsing porn websites the entire day on October 19, 2004, the same day she was accused of displaying porn to her students.
Even if she did it on purpose... 40 years in jail?
it was malware, I believe the school even admitted their anti spyware software license had been allowed to expire.
I'm inclined to believe the defense here, just because I can't imagine why a teacher would deliberately cause porn to "pop up" and even if she had for whatever reason been looking at porn earlier, it wouldn't mean she wanted malicious software to take over the computer and use it to display porn at random times when students were around. If anything, the blame lies with the school for not properly setting up their computers to prevent such problems.
But beyond that, what's up with 40 years in prison for "risking injury to a child"? Were the porn actors jumping out of the screen and molesting the kids? It makes no sense to imprison this woman for decades because 12 and 13-year olds (not little kids) saw naked people, especially when real child molesters sometimes get sentences of just a few months.
Stupid prosecutors are a threat to liberty I just never considered until recently.
Have you seen this?
Women who sleep with their 14 year old students get probation.
She wasn't. Bad stuff got put on her computer that caused the pop ups. You don't have to go to a porn site to get a rootkit stuck on your machine.
If all of this is what I think it is, I hope this lady gets her name cleared and sues the hell out of the government for defamation of character in this case.
It sounds like there was plenty of reasonable doubt about her guilt. I doubt she would have received a sentence of 40 years even for killing one of those kids. This is insane.
Perhaps I am overly cynical, but I have come to believe that some prosecutors want to convict innocent people, so then they can argue that sentencing laws are too harsh. I'd expect the same prosecutors who push to lock up people for decades for minor offenses would be more than happy to offer probation to real dangerous criminals.
So I dismiss their dismissal. :)
A guy out West was convicted for over 100 years this week for having some child porn images on his computer. Child porn is bad, but 100 years?
This woman was convicted to 40 years for having porn pop up on a computer in class. Kids seeing porn is bad, but 40 years?
The American justice system is the worst in the Western world. It is an utter casino, a random game. OJ "If I Did It" Simpson knifed two people and is walking free, and his pension can't even be touched by the legal judgment against him.
Whoooooooa...slow down a bit here. Let's not rush to judgement.
The first computer I had in 1999 I was searching for Ford Tractor Parts distributors in my area. I clicked on an interesting site, but instead of tractor parts I was inundated with HOMO PORN when the site loaded. I clicked off immediately and went back to search, but the damned porn kept popping up time and again. I repeatedly kept clicking out, but finally had to shutdown the computer to escape the constant barrage of disgusting pop ups.
To make a long story short it was my first 'puter, I'm still not an expert on these things, but I ended up buying another 'puter and getting rid of the old one that kept popping up porn I most certainly did not want. (Old Toshiba with Win 95)
I'm now on my third 'puter NEVER having the problem since that first one. I was really afraid to search there for awhile, but got over it. I just don't go looking for tractor parts LOL.
My point is that if she genuinely is a novice as myself, then I can relate. It happened to me innocently looking for parts for my old Ford tractor eight years ago.
Why are there government owned school house computers running without protection? No, seriously!
Ad blockers, spyware blockers, keystroke spies, anti-virus, etc.
Teacher shouldn't have been cruising porn linked or porn sites, but blockers are essentials.
Not very familiar with the old "burden of proof is on the prosecution" loophole, huh.
My thoughts exactly...in our school all those sites are automatically blocked. If she were a novice at the computer..I wonder how she got past all the safe guards put on the computer.....I don't browse porn sites..but every now and again I get pop ups that are truly disgusting. Took alot of work to get them to stop...at least for me it did...I am a novice as well.
Actually no.
Sentencing has not happened yet.
In the French court of law the burden of proof is on the accused to prove they are innocent.
I was just thinking the same sad thing...
And, the usual FR quick-draw jury pronounces instant damnation.
I taught a computer class in the late nineties. One studient typed a URL wrong by one letter. His screen was overtaken by porn popups that I, the teacher, had to struggle to kill off fast enough.
Life isn't *always* so simple, and the accused aren't always guilty.
Seems to me everyone here thinks the charge is ridiculous. What thread are you reading?
May be of interest.
The Norton Antivirus I had on one of my kids' laptops expired last week without my realizing it, and the damned thing picked up a trojan via email and started installing spyware.
I put on a corporate version of Norton to prevent worse problems, and I have Spysweeper as well, from an earlier episode where my free spyware programs were able to detect an infection and not remove it.
I struggled with it for three days. I THINK I have finally gotten it all off, but I'm not sure. The damned stuff is poisonous once it gets into your files and registry.
This wasn't pornographic, but it easily could have been. I can easily see a computer novice not knowing what was going on. It can pop up ads from the net, take you places you don't want to go, add to your HOSTS file, and numerous other things.
Geeks to Go can sometimes help, but you have to know a fair amount about computers to communicate with them.
If this teacher had a spyware program that popped up a bunch of porn sites, that could easily pile up a long series of sites in the browser History without her even being in the office while it was at work.
Yes. And apparently they did prove that to the satisfaction of the jury.
Eckelberry apparently did not. If he was even involved in the first place. I can not find any record that he is anything but another member of the peanut gallery just as you and I are in this.
That was crazy! In that state you better keep people who may want to see you rot in prison away from your PC. Some pics, a USB drive, about 20 seconds, and a call to the police could send you to prison for the rest of your life!
My daughter came home from school one day and told me that if I ever wanted to look up the white house I'd better not use whitehouse.com...it is a bad site!!...but isn't that typical of pornographers to use an address close to something they know kids may someday have to look up for a school project? I have typed in wrong URL's and come up with things I have had to shield my kid from if she is in the room.
I have also been the victim of rootkits...nasty things to get rid of...finally had to have my son reformat the whole thing. What a pain.
Just as with the absurd 200-year sentence for child sex photo possession in Arizona, this case is yet another example of stupid prosecutors gone wild.
The Nifong of the tech world strikes.
This could happen through a spam from a friend's 0wned computer, so it looks like it came from the friend. The spam offers a link to an innocent looking page with an innocent sounding subject, and the innocent looking page exploits a security hole to install malware to bombard the victim with porn pop ups.
Now if this lady just stood there looking while kids gawked at the porn, not even trying to chase the kids away or cover up the screen, she does have a much more difficult case showing it wasn't deliberate or wanted.
It's amazing to me that a teacher can get 40 years for accidentally showing students porn images. But the same teacher is permitted to teach a curriculum that very deliberately teaches those same kids about same-sex perversions.
People on power trips gravitate to government.
Read the whole article. The judge also censored some of the defense.
Well I guess that would possibly be relevant if the poster, the defendant, or the trial were in France.
The point is some people seem to like the French system of justice.
This is CAUSING injury to a child:
First graders in Massachusetts are read the book "King and King" in which a prince refuses his mother's urgings to marry a beautiful princess and instead "marries" another prince. The last page of the book shows the two kings kissing. And the teacher who reads this book is carrying out the curriculum!
Quite likely not. Unfortunately the legal (as opposed to the justice) system doesn't allow for retrials just because the prosecution was completely trounced in the public eye after the fact. A pardon may be the only thing possible.
Sounds like the border agents case. The EFF.org people should give her money for an appeal of this ASAP.
This was way before all kinds of utilities became available stop such stuff.
In some cases it's a power-trip issue, but I think in some other cases it's something else. Perhaps I'm projecting unduly using some of my memories of my former liberalogic, and it's rather hard to put into words since it's so obviously nonsensical, but it's something like this:
Someone who commits a crime does so because he had a bad childhood and so he doesn't deserve do suffer. Some other guy who didn't commit a crime must have had a better childhood, which isn't fair; the latter guy should be punished to make up for his having had the unfair advantage in life.Pretty bizarre, but I think that's how I remember the liberalogic working. Actually, reading some of what people have written about the accused Duke students, it's pretty clear some people actually think like that.
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