Kelly Middle SchoolThis is an incredible miscarriage of justice. Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in a middle school is told to let the students use the computer and NOT to turn it off. Suddenly she sees all sorts of pornographic images popping up on the screen. She tries to get the students away from the screen (remember, she was told not to turn it off) and runs to get help from the assistant principal. Another teacher goes to get him but he never shows up. Another teacher tells her not to worry about it, that pop-ups happen all the time. So she goes back to the room and keeps the monitor covered for the rest of the day.

Next thing she knows, she is under arrest for showing porn to children! Her defense attorney doesn’t have a good handle on computer issues but he finally figures out what happened and gets an expert but the judge says, sorry, too late. So she goes to trial and gets convicted and could be sentenced up to 40 years!!!

Apparently what happened was that one of the students went to a website that installed adware on the computer and that is what started popping up the porn. The PC was using Windows 98 running Internet Explorer 5 with only middling antivirus protection, no firewall, no antispyware program, no popup blocking and no up-to-date Internet filtering in place (in violation of federal law that requires all school to have up-to-date filtering software on all PC’s connected to the Internet). The police used a non-expert police officer to determine what happened to the PC and he used off-the-shelf software that had never been accepted in a court of law before. He testified that she must have willingly gone to the porn sites and the jury accepted this in spite of all the testimony supporting her including the testimony of the teachers who said she came into the teacher’s lounge panicking because of the pop-ups.

This was not the first time that a computer was infested with porn at the Kelly Middle School. In June and July of 2004, before Ms. Amero worked there, the school had an infestation of pornography that caused local authorities to seize a computer and hard drives. A student printed a nude image to take home in their backpack! No one was prosecuted in that case.

The incompetence of the Connecticut District Attorney is mind-boggling.

 

 

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