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."

Re:40 years?!?

[BoRegardless]

Teachers don't get 4 years for doing it with students.

Re:Legal Defence

[Saanvik]

Um, no, there is no evidence of shady behavior. There's evidence that the computer in question displayed adult images during the time in question, but there are many reasons, such as the pop-up ads blamed by the defense, that such images could have been displayed.

Analysis of her system

[Evets]

Here's a link to some commentary by a guy who actually reviewed a copy of the hard drive from the porn-serving computer: http://www.networkperformancedaily.com/2007/01/the _strange_case_of_ms_julie_a_1.html [networkper...edaily.com]

This woman was a substitute teacher.

We examined all internet related folders and files before October 19, 2004, during October 19, 2004 and after October 19, 2004. Most significantly, we noted freeze.com, screensaver.com, eharmony.com and zedo.com were being accessed regularly.

Sounds like the regular classroom teacher had a lot of time on her hands to go surfing around.

Re:Forty years in jail?

[Anonymous Coward]

She wasn't sentenced; 40 years is the max she hypothetically could have been sentenced to (4 charges with a max of 10 years each, served consecutively for example).

No sane judge would issue such a sentence, though.

Re:Legal Defence

[reddburn]

There's truth here - my wife is a teacher, and her school has terrible IT security. She actually had to tell them (after I found out by opening my laptop while waiting for her in the parking lot) that an open wireless network is a BAD idea. They had left it open because there were no neighbors for a few hundred yards in any direction, and the IT person (ok, the school librarian) was too lazy to configure the school's laptops.

Re:She should lose her teaching license

[harlows_monkeys]

Story based on trial testimony and juror statements here [norwichbulletin.com].

That page contains links to where you can download and read the trial transcript, if you want more than that story summarizes.

Re:lazy

[grasshoppa]

i remember when teachers would have sex with the students

It's the parents now. If the local paper is any indication, it's MILFS doing it to high school basket ball players.

In case you are wondering: She got 300 days with time served and does NOT have to register as a sex offender ( california ).

Re:She should lose her teaching license

[Anonymous Coward]

"In fact the popups were appearing for several hours".

Unfounded, pro-prosecution claims. Belief in authority. Between-the-lines longing for official (i.e. governmental) intervention. You must be a Republican, like all the other hypocrites.

Re:Forty years in jail?

[McDutchie]

If it's good enough for security in software engineering, why isn't it good enough for our legal code?

Because legal code governs people, not computers.

Happened to us - sort of...

[evil_aar0n]

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...

Re:Hang on...

[KarmaMB84]

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!

Re:She should lose her teaching license

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Legal Defence

[sjames]

If she'd been thinking more astutely, she might have simply shut the computer down

She was explicitly instructed never to turn the computer off. You and I know that shutting just the monitor off is perfectly OK, but she might not have. Locking it away is a thought but may not have been possible without unplugging it. Given that, she did the one thing she was allowed to do and requested support, but didn't get any.

Re:Legal Defence

[ryanov]

Since it appears as if you've never had teenagers, you probably don't know what the hell you're talking about.

My parents smacked me once in awhile -- probably not their proudest moment -- but it sure kept me from doing shit. I resented them at the time, but not for that -- for not being allowed to do whatever it is I wanted to do (which was probably some asshole thing I shouldn't have been doing anyway).

Maybe you can do it without corporal punishment, and that's fine... but I know that every time I ride the train and some little shit is running up and down the aisles, it occurs to me that kids don't seem to have to behave the way they used to. SOMETHING is obviously different.

Re:Legal Defence

[drsmithy]

Hah! In 10 years, they'll be 14, 12 and 10, so I wouldn't have thought they'll be in jail just yet.

Well that changes the situation somewhat. Saying your children have never been spanked when the oldest one is 4 is a vastly different situation than if, say, they were all teenagers.

Much like the vast gulf of difference between the odd clip 'round the ear here and their to drive home a point and child abuse. These two things are not - despite the best efforts of some people - even close to being synonymous.

Thousands of generations of human society have been practicing corporal punishment. It would be drawing a very long bow indeed to say current society is any better today than it has been in the past with regards to discipline and respect, especially amongst young people. Many - including myself - would say it is a hell of a lot worse and believe that the decline has a great deal to do with a known-to-be-effective form of discipline being strongly discouraged, if not outright criminalised.

What I would suggest is effective discipline in the first place. My parents never hit me, and I'm not in jail. Plural of anecdote is not data, I realise, but violence of any kind in the home engenders a violent attitude to problems encountered in adult life.

Bollocks. I got my fair share of spankings when I was kid - none of them unjustified, in hindsight - and I've never even been in something as trivial as a schoolyard fight. I know many people with the same story to tell, because they grew up in the same sitaution.

I've yet to see any proper data linking physical disicpline in the way you suggest. Most (deceptively, because they're pushing an agenda) conflate physical discipline and child abuse.

You want a good sign about whether or not someone will grow up to be violent freak ? Have a look at how they treat their pets, not whether or not they've ever been whacked on the arse by their parents.

Some facts of the case

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Reality of criminal justice

[glider0524]

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.

Re:Legal Defence

[Tofystedeth]

When I was a child, other parents were amazed at how well behaved I was in the grocery store, I never threw tantrums. The reason, is that I did throw a tantrum, once. My mom turned me over and spanked me right there in the store. I never did it again. This is one of maybe 3 times I remember being spanked. It hardly ever happened, so when it did, I knew they meant business. Otherwise, they never hit me, or deprived me of supper. I would get stern lectures, and when it was related to me not doing my schoolwork they would ground me from my favorite hobbies, video games and reading.