MSNBC
Updated: 7:47 p.m. ET June 6, 2007
NEW LONDON, Conn. - A substitute teacher was granted a new trial Wednesday after her conviction for failing to prevent students from viewing pornography on her computer raised thorny questions about who is ultimately responsible for screening unsavory online material.

The woman, Julie Amero, 40, of Windham, Conn., adamantly denied clicking on pornographic Web sites that appeared on her classroom

Oh thank GOD!!

I really believe she is innocent.

MadCarlotta - 07 June 2007 01:54 PM

Oh thank GOD!!

I really believe she is innocent.

Yeah.  I don’t get how she got “convicted” in the first place.  How is a full time teacher, let alone a sub, supposed to know about spyware and popups and viruses?  If the school has computers when they should have IT guys/gals who install the software filters that keep out the unwanted sites, and they should be the ones making the rounds to see that all is working well.  That shouldn’t be the teachers responsibility.  Now, if a teacher found the kids looking at porn and failed to take appropriate action, that’s another story.

Ridiculous decision. Glad they’re giving heranother go at it with some real evidence.

It’s interesting that my corporate PC has anti-virus, but no anti-spyware (and we are forbidden from running any for ourselves). And what pop-up blocking IE6 offers is disabled by electronic policy and can’t be used.

At the same time, the security group that instituted these policies is telling me that all error messages on my latest project (a tool for internal use only) must read “There has been an error, please try again.” so as to avoid giving ‘potentially useful information’ to any would-be hackers amongst my colleagues.

So basically, they don’t trust us, are probably monitoring us (hence the anti-spyware ban), and consider us a bigger threat than web-based malware.

Oh, and the last time a support guy did something on my machine he looked something up on ‘dogpile’ (“I always use it, t’s better than Google!” he enthused). So after he’d gone I had to manually remove the ‘helpful toolbar’, i.e. spyware, that it had installed.

Bebelicious - 07 June 2007 02:39 PM

Yeah.  I don’t get how she got “convicted” in the first place.

Apparently because a non-expert “expert” gave wrong evidence, and then an actual expert wasn’t allowed to give all of his own evidence.

I wonder what the prosecution claimed that the teacher’s motivation for the whole thing was?  “Oh yeah, she obviously decided to trash her repuation, throw away her job and risk jail and fines so that she could show random dirty web-pages to her students.”

Accipiter - 07 June 2007 09:03 PM

Bebelicious - 07 June 2007 02:39 PM

Yeah.  I don’t get how she got “convicted” in the first place.

Apparently because a non-expert “expert” gave wrong evidence, and then an actual expert wasn’t allowed to give all of his own evidence.

I wonder what the prosecution claimed that the teacher’s motivation for the whole thing was?  “Oh yeah, she obviously decided to trash her repuation, throw away her job and risk jail and fines so that she could show random dirty web-pages to her students.”

Some people get their jollies from the strangest things.

We got a case last year in Criminal Law of a guy who sat in a playpark and, without a word of a lie, scattered pictures of people so the kids would see them. I wish I could remember what the pictures were of but it was something really weird. Like clowns. Clowns with massive breasts or something (it was really bizarre). Not exactly paedophilia but it was obvious he got his kicks from it, and if you get off on doing ANYTHING in a playground you get the Bar-L and a red hot boaby for heat in your cell.

i remember one time i was at a friends house and her brother was on the internet looking something up and a ton of porn pop up adds came up one after the other and they would not stop. he had to restart the computer to get them to stop, and he was not looking up anything risque. i think we were having an argument about where the real world had filmed or something mundane like that.

i can see how something like a porn ad coming up on the computer during class when the teacher had a powerpoint slide show to start and some kid going home and telling the story during dinner as a funny anecdote about his day and the parents totally over reacting and calling the school to complain when the student was not upset about the incident and the parents totally overreacted.