Julie Amero, substitute teacher and convicted porn-pop up purveyor, has finally gotten a tiny break in her favor. Connecticut criminal defense lawyer William Dow has stepped in and offered help to Julie Amero. The Norwich Bulletin -- the same paper that did such a terrible job of covering the case up to this point, convicting Julie Amero in print and circulating its uneducated drivel to a technophobic and Internet illiterate readership -- reports that Dow has offered pro-bono assistance to Mrs. Amero and will likely file a formal request for postponement of her March 3rd sentencing in order to review the facts of the case. Dow is a well respected criminal defense attorney who, according to Amero's lead attorney John Cocheo, has joined the team because, "he sees it as an injustice that this happened. I think it's a moral issue for him."Speaking of moral issues; PC World's Steve Bass made a bit of a miscalculation and outted the partial identity of Fred F. a juror in the Amero trial. The email interview in which the juror's screenname was released was initiated by Fred F. who failed to follow Lincoln's famous rule, "It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool; Rather than open it and remove all doubt." I'll let Fred F.'s own words and lack of punctuation speak the volumes that I dare not say.
"she was pronounced guilty because she made no effort to hide or stop the porno, not just because she loaded the porno onto the machine. Going to the history pages it was obvious that the paged were clicked on they were not the result of pop-ups."
That statement is in direct conflict with the testimony on record. Amero did everything short of turning off the computer, which she was instructed by a superior not to do. The children from her class testified -- right in front of this juror -- that she did make every effort to hide what was being displayed. He also seems to have picked up the same in-depth knowledge of Internet Explorer possessed by the Norwich police computer expert, which could be defined as; little to none.
Fred's obviously not the sharpest tool in the shed but, can you blame him? After all, he's a product of the same Connecticut school system that's teaching kids it's OK to send an innocent woman to jail in order to cover your own incompetence.
USAToday writer Andrew Kantor went one step further, releasing pictures of a portly Fred F. on his personal blog after publishing a scathing piece condemning the school system and the Norwich police department. For certain, this case has gotten ugly. In some instances, it's even become deeply personal. Fred F. has reportedly been berated by an angry public, and been the subject of ridicule for his former 435 pound plus frame, since the public outing.
Amero's husband has set up a blog and is asking for your help covering his wife's legal fees, reportedly in-excess of $20,000 (easily more than a Connecticut substitute teacher makes in a year). He writes, "To think that it is possible for the average layperson to understand all the ins and outs of how a computer works is just not reasonable. What's worse, our employer's don't know any more than we do, and they rely on us to identify problems when they happen. If you are lucky, your employer will know what to do when a crisis happens with your system. If not you'll end up like Julie arrested, ridiculed, demeaned and left with useless teacher's degree in special education."
I don't agree with his statement that it's "not reasonable" to expect the layperson to have some basic understanding of Internet threats and staying safe online however, massaging a lack of knowledge into a felony conviction is more than prosecution; It's persecution.
Amero's husband is also offering up the phone numbers and email addresses for Principal Scott Fain and Superintendent Pam Aubin, who should both be charged with criminal negligence for allowing the Kelly Middle School's lack of Internet-security to ruin the life of an innocent woman. Also on the list is Norwich police "Detective" Mark Lounsbury, the department's not-so-expert computer expert who testified under oath that there was no question Amero had visited the porn pop-up websites on purpose, and offered no information to the jury about malware or spyware being in any way culpable. Unfortunately, it's a bit late to give Lounsbury a lesson in computer security or forensics, at least where Julie Amero is concerned.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
2-23-2007 @ 12:39PM
Mike said...
I'm really surprised that no one has turned to M$ for at least being partly responsible for this by making an OS that is vulnerable to malware like this. Sure, they are not responsible for this specific situation, but without them, she'd never be in this situation.
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2-23-2007 @ 12:45PM
Gardiner Westbound said...
.
The Superintendent. Principal, Detective and Judge should be immediately fired. Not because they don't know anything about computers, but because they aren't bright enough to recognize their own limitations. I wouldn't want the first two teaching my kids, the third carrying a gun, or the last one sitting in judgment of others.
I'm glad Connecticut criminal defense lawyer William Dow has stepped forward to help Ms. Amero with this nightmare.
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2-23-2007 @ 1:30PM
geekbee said...
Mike, you're a total joke. There's a thin line between being stupid and complete idiot.
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2-23-2007 @ 4:30PM
asdf said...
This is why schools should use Macs.
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2-23-2007 @ 4:55PM
David Chen said...
Great write-up on this terrible, terrible situation.
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2-23-2007 @ 5:18PM
you moo said...
The juror stated that history pages do not include pop-ups. This is NOT correct. A pop-up is a web page and as such would show up in the web browser history.
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2-23-2007 @ 5:26PM
Jon Robinson said...
Amero has been thrown under the bus by the principle and IT director. You can access more expert analysis by the technology lawyer Nancy Willard at:
http://www.jonsnetwork.com/2007/02/expert_analysis.html
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2-23-2007 @ 5:41PM
Mike said...
Well, geekbee, I see you've crossed that line.
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2-23-2007 @ 5:59PM
Jeff Daigle said...
It gets better--Julie Amero miscarried due to the stress of the case. She and her husband had been trying with a great deal of difficulty to get pregnant: http://www.myleftnutmeg.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5793
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2-23-2007 @ 6:10PM
Oz Fox said...
What in God's Holy Hell is going on? I'm not for porn at all. But this is not her fault. If she spends one day in prison, I think Alec Baldwin should go to Canada. OH MY, A NAKED PERSON HAVING SEX!! No one should ever, ever see that or experience being apart of that filth. Well, at least we can still see dismembering in Braveheart in school, because that is natural. All I can really say is this, "It is time that we all be fully ashamed of our bodies, stop procreation now!"
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2-23-2007 @ 6:11PM
Chris said...
It's not "Lincoln's Famous Rule" at all. In fact, it can't be THAT famous, because it's a Samuel Clemens quote - otherwise known as Mark Twain to most.
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2-23-2007 @ 6:19PM
Bryan Walston said...
I believe the quote "Tis better to remain silent and be thought the fool than to speak and remove all doubt" is attributed to Samuel Johnson rather than Lincoln.
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2-23-2007 @ 7:40PM
T. Allan Christopher said...
If this school stuck with Macintosh computers like most of the elementary educaational system in this country this would not have been an issue! Yet another part of the school ADMINISTRATIONS failing to protect it's systems and students.
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2-23-2007 @ 7:47PM
Mantari Damacy said...
"Guilty until proven innocent" doesn't work when you have morons proving your guilt to other morons.
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2-23-2007 @ 8:21PM
Devlin said...
What we have here is really sophisticated electronics connected to the entire world, which is then installed and operated and protected by Moron's that wouldn't know the simplest of computer functions outside of clicking on that big E thing on the screen to get onto the internet.
This is a complete travesty of the US court system
when will all the people stand up and be counted, I say everyone call the Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman or at least send an email or letter demanding he get off of his backside and get involved in this case also the mayors office and anyone else who should be involved
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2-23-2007 @ 10:54PM
steve said...
windows 98 support is done
it has been for a while
its the schools job to keep the computers secure by upgrading to xp
and to maintain the computers with proper security updates
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2-23-2007 @ 11:26PM
Federale500 said...
As a law enforcement officer, I can attest to the general ignorance of a jury. The matter is only exacerbated when dealing with technical matters. Usually, however, this works in favor of the defendant. Here it clearly did not. The blame squarely fits on the defense attorney during the trial. Ignorant jurors are also to blame, but if the defense attorney did a good job, the juorors, maybe only one of them, will hold out on a conviction. I have cleaned up other people's computers that have been infected with pop-up style porn and I can absolutely attest to the inability to stop it the cascading porn pop-ups and the inability to eliminate the rogue files. The infected files are reinstalled by a file that runs only on boot up. That boot up only file has one job- make sure that the infection files are still there, and if they are not, they access the internet and download the scripts from a website and reinstall the infection. The one in particular that I worked on was not affected by the antivirus software on the machine. It disabled it. Ditto for the crappy firewall on the machine.
Good luck to this teacher. The 14 yr old kid that the above listed scenario happened to was tricked into clicking on an IM message from someone else who was infected.
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2-24-2007 @ 12:39AM
Mantari Damacy said...
"Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't work when you have morons proving your guilt to other morons.
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2-24-2007 @ 1:18AM
Anonomous said...
This is the worst. 40 years for an innocent person. A porn pop-up lol
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2-24-2007 @ 1:30AM
joelpurvis said...
This case isn't about Mac vs. PC, for gad's sake give it a rest already.
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