1) that a female substitute teacher, in the view of ten 13-year-old students, intentionally choose to visit dozens of porn sites rather than teaching class or reading a book;

or

2) that a 13-year-old disabled some filtering software while the teacher's attention was elsewhere, and, while the incident was being investigated by school officials and police, denied involvement or intentional viewing of the website, instead blaming the appearance of the pornography on the substitute teacher.

i can only assume this woman had the single most inept defense attorney in new england. geez, i'm not even an attorney, and i could have blown the prosecution out of the water.

i hope this gets (quickly) overturned on appeal.

This teacher is being used as scapegoat.

In a presentation to the Board of Education Tuesday night, Robert Hartz, the school district's information systems director, said the company that supplies the school's content-filter software failed to send him the necessary paperwork to activate an updated version of the filter prior to the 2004 school year. Hartz also blamed himself for the computer pornography incident, saying he may have overlooked an invoice for the update.

"That's why we didn't get this thing updated in time for the 2004 school year and that's why this incident happened," Hartz told the board.

back in 2004, i was using windows 2000 pro, and the then current version of IE. talk about two sieves! even with norton systemworks pro, it was all i could do to keep up.

  I have no opinion on the verdict because I have no idea what the evidence was that the prosecution used to persuade the jury that the teacher was responsible and it was not simply something beyond her control.

   I am always amused with insights that amount to  "the jury had to be stupid to convict/acquit" from people who, unlike the jury, actually heard the evidence in the case.

   The jury system is not perfect, but even among lawyers, the knee-jerk conclusion that it was an ignorant jury easily swayed by improper appeals is often wrong.

  Obviously, that won't happen in this case and even if it did it would be unlikely to withstand a proportionality review on appeal.

   I don't know Connecticut law and if she is eligible for probation based on these convictions, or, if as common she is only eligible if she agrees to counseling (which often creates a dilemma because many counseling programs essentially require a person to confess to guilt in oder to "pass"-- but that's another issue for another time)

  In any event she will likely get either a very short term of incarceration or an alternative sentence even if this conviction stands.

  This article is not to good either, but it may shed some light on the crux of the issue.

  It appears possible that the technical issues are being overplayed and the real issue was the credibility of the teacher v. the students.

Somebody did a very poor job of defending this poor woman.  I simply find it unbelievable that she would be looking at porn in those circumstances.  It is far more likely that it was a problem with pop-ups.

any jury, not totally composed of complete imbeciles, living solely in caves, absent running water and electricity, for the past 20 years, had to have been, at minimum, exposed to pc's, and heard/personally experienced horror stories about them.

for one to be that completely clueless, one must be declared medically brain-dead, and not fit to serve on a jury. even my in-their 70's parents, who use a pc minimally, at best, aren't that totally unaware.

sorry, there is no other rational explanation. as well, based on what i have read (which isn't much, since there seems to be a dearth of actual trial data available), both the judge and defense attorney suffer questionable skills.

From alternet:

Detective Mark Lounsbury, a computer crimes officer at the Norwich Police Department testified as an expert witness for the prosecution. He maintained that Amero was intentionally surfing for pornography while her seventh grade class busied itself with language arts.

Lounsbury told the court that Amero musts have "physically clicked" on pornographic links during class time in order to unleash the pornographic pictures. However, he admitted under cross-examination that the prosecution never even checked the computer for malware.

The tool the police used to investigate the PC:

ComputerCOP scans the hard drive and reports on when each file was created or modified. Lounsbury says he is satisfied that Amero intentionally viewed porn in class because the logs show that her computer accessed various inappropriate sites while she was sitting at the computer.

Keep in mind that the police did not check for malware on the computer.

Detective Lounsbury shows just how technologically ignorant he is when he states:

"I take that at face value," Lounsbury told Alternet. "It's evidence. It speaks for itself. The pop-up defense is a Twinkie defense."

Lounsbury said that Amero must have navigated to pornographic sites in order to have infected her computer with obscene popups. "You've got to get that ball rolling," he said.

It is obvious that Detective Lounsbury has no clue how to conduct an investigation in regards to computer crime.

Detective Mark Lounsbury is the crime prevention officer with the Norwich Police Department. He has served with the Norwich PD for 18 years - eight of them as a detective, and for the past seven years he has been the sole proprietor of the Norwich computer crime and cybercrime units, which deals with online sexual crimes against children.

He has received training from the State of Connecticut Municipal Police Training Academy, and from the FBI in basic network intrusion and advanced network intrusion in Unix.

It is obvious based on his comments in the alternet article that the Norwich Police Department needs to get a new detective for their computer crime and cybercrime units.

It is unbelievable that through the entire course of his investigation he did not search for malware and states that the pop-up defense is a Twinkie defense.

1. She was not the only person that had access to the computer.

2. The school admits to not paying their bill for filtering software.  The school admits their software was out of date and did not have the capability to block pop up ads.

3. Everyone knows that pop-up ads can infect any computer, esp. one that has no filtering software because someone did not pay the bill...

You don't have to turn off a computer to turn off the monitor.  But then some people, even teachers (subsitute teachers) are not computer literate.  It used to be (not sure if its still true) that to turn off your Mac and its monitor you pressed one button.  Perhaps this woman thought if she turned off the monitor she was shutting down the PC?  Who knows.  

However, I think we can all agree that she was stupid about not controlling the view to the pop ups once they appeared, but does that mean we must throw this person in jail with the REAL criminals?  I say no.  I just cannot believe that our legal system has become so useless that it cannot distinguish the truly guilty.

Give this woman some training with computers, don't throw her in jail!  Do any of you honestly think this woman is a threat to society because she doesn't A) have much common sense and B) because she can't operate computer hardware and software?