, 2007-02-12
Substitute teacher Julie Amero faces up to 40 years in prison for exposing kids to porn using a classroom computer, but the facts strongly suggest that she was wrongfully convicted. Many issues remain, from the need for an independent computer forensics investigation and the presence of spyware and adware on the machine, to bad or incomplete legal work on both sides of this criminal case.
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Mouse-Trapped
2007-02-13
Anonymous (6 replies)
Anonymous (6 replies)
Mouse-Trapped
2007-02-21
FreewheelinFrank (2 replies)
FreewheelinFrank (2 replies)
You make the same mistake that the jury did in this case. You're making assumptions about what should & should not be known by the general population. Just because an individual is an intelligent person does not mean they know how the Internet or computers work. This very fact is relied upon by the people that produce the malware that cause these problems.
You're also assuming that the state's attorney in this case believed she did it. Sometimes in criminal legal cases guilty or innocent gets a little blurry. Was pornography seen by the students? Yes, no question about that. Was it intentional? Not sure about that one. Does state law say that it needs to be intentional? My reading of the statute in question says no.
A real good question here is how do you know that this morally damaged the children involved? That seems to be what the state law is based on, - "risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child (Conn. Gen. Stat. § 53-21)". Does injury imply physical injury? If not, how do you determine that a child was morally impaired? How do you determine that that impairment took place at the moment he/she saw that particular image? I'm pretty sure you would have a time getting two experts to agree on those issues.
Sometimes prosecution is about taking an aggressive stance towards the perceived injustice. Angry parents are hard to say "No" to, especially when you work for a civil agency. People end up being made examples of. High profile wins look good on your resume. That's what really worries me about cases like these. That good people end up in serious legal trouble because some ambitious twerp is looking to make a name for themselves.
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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/434/34398#34398