Teacher Julie Amero Gets a New Trial 341
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."
Legal Defence (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Legal Defence (Score:4, Funny)
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No action has been taken against this lying shitbag and given the behavior of the prosecutor, that "i wanna be tough on crime so I get elected mayor" fuckhead will probably call the same asshole again and some fucking tard jurors won't have any more sense than the last bunch.
The legal
Re:Legal Defence (Score:4, Insightful)
We should not be prosecuting this lady. We should be prosecuting the advertisers and adware distributors. Listen if it wasn't for the advertisers we'd have no malware products. We should also be suing Microsoft for their negligence in their failure to protect the children and the school for not ensuring proper protection to begin with.
Schools should be mandated to use Linux with strict account control. Without a doubt the issues are with Windows, the advertisers, with malware creators, and the school IT people. Someone using a computer for whatever reason should not be held liable because they unwittingly find their way to a malicious site. If they installed Linux on those boxes the accounts would be so compartmentalized there's be little to no adware and no infections that were more difficult to clean than backing up the account data and wiping the account.
The whole idea of holding this poor lady responsible for everyone else's fuck ups is just ludicrous. I know they are saying she did this on purpose and that she was hoping she'd create havoc and harm these children's development and hoped to get fired for doing so. If this hadn't been overturned on this appeal it certainly would have been overturned higher up. This poor woman is being abused by the powers that be and is being used as a scapegoat. This is just sad.
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Sure, if they're a good teacher and aren't showing it to students. Does it really matter what a teacher does on their own time as long as it doesn't come out during the time they spend teaching? Suggesting anything else is trying to force your morals and values on others under the guide of "saving the children", even though it
Re:Legal Defence (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Legal Defence (Score:5, Insightful)
The other thing is: ok so a bunch of teens saw some boobs on a computer screen... so what ? They're probably already checking that stuff out at home when mom & dad aren't watching. It won't make them into lesser beings. On the other hand, dragging this bening issue into court and legally abusing a teacher is one hell of a bad example to set for your kids. That's right son, when the going gets tough, shrug responsibility and sue someone!
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Not sure when this became fact, but in my day, a teacher was someone that (a) would teach, and (b) would not do unnecessary harm. I probably missed the memo where indoctrinating them to a particular way of life (the parent's responsibility) were offloaded to the teacher.
Re:Legal Defence (Score:5, Interesting)
No kidding. I'm a teacher and let me tell you, the worst role models are the people intentionally trying to be a role model.
-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
Re:Legal Defence (Score:5, Insightful)
Fortunately, modern high schools provide such examples in vast numbers.
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I have three. And I will never hit them, and never deprive them of their dinner. I guess I must just be a bad parent hey?
Re:Legal Defence (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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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 synonymou
Expert witness (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Legal Defence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Legal Defence (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Legal Defence (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Legal Defence (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
porn (Score:2)
I mean, there's definatly evidence of shady behavior, viewing pron at work, but I do believe that it wasn't intentional to show the students. Trouble is though, do you really want some pron-at-work type person teaching your child? After all, they're supposed to be a trusted role model and good influence for our youth.
Just because porn is found on a computer does not mean anyone was viewing, looking at, porn. Several years ago it happened to me, even though I didn't download or install anything recently,
I feel a song coming on....! (Score:4, Funny)
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40 years?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd consider even four years to be excessive for such an offense.
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Re:40 years?!? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:40 years?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't put any ideas into the heads of legislators. Instead of decreasing the 40 year penalty for this crime, they'll just ramp up other punishments until they're 40 years. Kissing a student: 40 years. Waving hello suggestively to a student: 40 years. Having a student interpret your cough as sexual: 40 years. As far as I can tell, sentences almost never become more lenient, they just get progressively harsher and more draconian.
Reality of criminal justice (Score:3, Informative)
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I should have given some chronologica
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Well, that wasn't the logic I was trying to apply at all. I completely agree that 40 years is ridiculously excessive and comparing today's actions to those 600 years ago as a way of making the present not look so bad is counter productive to making positive changes in the present.
But even in the last 100 years
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Fixed.
Male teachers get sent to prison to die.
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Re:40 years?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
40 years? For this? Good lord. Aren't there any real criminals we could lock up instead? It's insane.
Don't you know politicans want to look like thier tough on crime? The easiest way to do this is to go after people for non violent "crimes". Send someone who uses marijuana recreationally in their home to gaol for 25 years or another person accused of showing children porn for 40. Of cource they'd then have to release murderers and rapists after just 5 years.
FalconRe:40 years?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
The moral of the story: never ever do anything of any kind anywhere near children that are not yours. And, walk on eggshells around your own kids. Never become a teacher for people under 18 because you can end up in jail for doing nothing wrong. Never work at a day care center. Never talk to kids on the street even to ask them the time. You are putting your freedom in another person's hands when doing so.
This sort of prosecution is the exact opposite of helping children. By making teaching a risky job, you're going to drive even more people away from the profession. No sane person would ever become a teacher to kids. The money is low. The aggravation is high. The legal risk is high. You have to really love being around kids to work under those conditions. Heck, one day maybe the only people who would willingly be teachers are pedophiles who can't help themselves. It's the catholic priest principle. (priests aren't allowed to have sex, so only sexually repressed people become priests, and sexually repressed people will sometimes lose control in the worst possible way)
The more we try to protect the children, the worse we make the world for those children.
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My guess is that "contributing to the delinquency of" or "abuse of" a child carries a pretty hard penalty. You have to cover everything from letting kids see you smoke or swear all the way up to showing kids how to properly cut up and dispose of a human corpse. Hence, 40-years maximum for violation of that law.
The chances of someone being sentenced to the max are
Re:40 years?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Seriously now, regarding the mind numbing pointlessness of a show like American Idol, making someone see that should incur the death penalty. I kid.
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We have a 12 year old daughter. She has full access to the internet and still has. But we check out the sites she goes to and check her email twice a day as well as her myspace account every day. We have her password. That was a requirement for her to become a member. The other day my wife discovered that her myspace page AND email address
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lazy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:lazy (Score:5, Funny)
Hadn't you heard? Those who can, do. Those who can't teach.
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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 ).
Injury.... (Score:5, Funny)
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....
should have used firefox (Score:3, Funny)
only if people listened to the nerds who know.
Forty years in jail? (Score:5, Insightful)
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No sane judge would issue such a sentence, though.
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True enough, I suppose, but the problem with the modern American Justice system is that it is a crapshoot. You never know what you're facing when you enter the courtroom. Worse, in a situation such as this one, you can't depend upon anyone else in the room having a grasp of the technological underpinnings of your case, even if you do.
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Because legal code governs people, not computers.
Analysis of her system (Score:3, Informative)
This woman was a substitute teacher.
Sounds like the regular classroom teacher had a lot of time on her hands to go surfing around.
Re:Analysis of her system (Score:4, Funny)
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"Most people prefer higher quality porn!"
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However - he did find non-school related surfing, spyware, and adware. Whether this spyware was actually the cause of this or whether it happened to just be a component of a visited website isn't really clear either.
Re:Analysis of her system (Score:5, Interesting)
You guys are great! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Porn inflicts injuries now? (Score:5, Funny)
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I hope she gets off... (Score:2)
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Add'l Info (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Add'l Info (Score:4, Interesting)
As a long-time union member, I can assure you that the image of the union (or gains made via concessions by management) almost always trumps the protectionism provided its members. I have personally been "sold down the river" when it became clear that the union stood more to gain from honoring management's wishes that I would just go away rather than defending me (ironic, since I was a union rep with the singular goal of defending my bargaining unit members). I have seen many others treated similarly over the years.
BTW, this really isn't a dig for or against unions; it's just something you accept when you get involved with a union.
We covered the original conviction... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here are some links to stories we did:
Double Standard (Score:4, Insightful)
The middle-American obsession... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The middle-American obsession... (Score:5, Insightful)
"inaccurate facts"? (Score:2)
Happened to us - sort of... (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Most completely missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Prosecutors gone wild (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly one option for "justice served" (Score:5, Interesting)
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. [wikipedia.org]
-S
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That would be great - unless the judge bars your experts from testifying, like this judge did with this case. She had an expert, who was much better qualified than the prosecutors 'witness' to provide testimony, who was prohibited from testifying. Essentially the judge & pros
Some facts of the case (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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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
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Oh, the entire contents of Wikipedia for starters. My son used that a lot for high school research papers.
Re:Here's a crazy idea... (Score:5, Funny)
"Mommy, guess what I learned at school today! I tried it on ALL the boys, and they want me to do it again!"
Re:Here's a crazy idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
The saying goes "Jack of all trades, master of none", it's not just random chance you know.
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Fixed that for you.
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Re:She should lose her teaching license (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:She should lose her teaching license (Score:4, Informative)
That page contains links to where you can download and read the trial transcript, if you want more than that story summarizes.
Re:She should lose her teaching license (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 man
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"She could have effectively sought help. "
"That in all that time she could not come up with a single effective way to deal with the situation shows that she is totally unable to deal with being in charge of children."
how could she? porn destroys your mind, doesn't it? Isn't that the "injury" she risked inflicting on the children?
Obviou
Are you batshit insane? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:She should lose her teaching license (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
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Just so long as he wasn't running with scissors - you could poke someone's eye out with those things.
Re:Hang on... (Score:4, Informative)
Think of the children!
Re:Hang on... (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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