Prosecution bars expert defense testimony in order to convict teacher on dubious porn charges
She refused offers of a plea bargain and now faces an astounding 40 years in prison.
Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, Connecticut, has been convicted of impairing the morals of a child and risking injury to a minor by exposing as many as ten seventh-grade students to porn sites.
It’s a short story: On October, 19, 2004, Amero was a substitute teacher for a seventh-grade language class at Kelly Middle School. A few students were crowded around a PC; some were giggling. She investigated and saw the kids looking at a barrage of graphic, hard-core pornographic pop-ups.
The prosecution contended that she had used the computer to visit porn sites.
The defense said that wasn’t true and argued that the machine was infested with spyware and malware, and that opening the browser caused the computer to go into an endless loop of pop-ups leading to porn sites.
I’ll admit all my don’t haves right away: I don’t have access to court records; I don’t have first-hand evidence of what occurred; and I haven’t examined the computer’s hard drive myself.
What I do have is a working knowledge of spyware and plenty of experience cleaning infected PCs.
I also have a copy of the report written by computer forensic specialist W. Herbert Horner, the expert witness who testified in Amero’s defense. You can read it, too; it’s on the NetQos site .
Horner made an image of the computer’s hard drive. He saw that there was no firewall and that the antivirus program was outdated. He also found 42 active “spyware/adware tracking cookie/programs.” Most important, Horner said that 27 of the spyware apps were accessed before Amero had access to the computer.
The defense wanted Horner to have Internet access at the trial in order to re-create what happened to Amero in the classroom. The prosecution objected, claiming they hadn’t had “full disclosure” of Horner’s examination.
On January 24 the Norwich Bulletin reported that the school district’s technology administrator, Information Services Director Bob Hartz, said, “from August to October 2004, the district’s filtering system didn’t regularly add newly discovered pornographic sites to its restricted Web sites database.” Oddly enough, they upgraded the software just after Amero’s incident.
Go to original by Steve Bass in PC World. Also see an excellent story in the Washington Post by Brian Krebs.
