Bad Bad Teacher

Julie Amero, 40, of Windham, Connecticut and a former substitute seventh grade teacher at Kelly Middle School, in Norwich is set for sentencing on June 6th. Amero faces up to forty years in prison for her convictions on four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child.

Amero was convicted in January of this year on allegations several of her 12-year-old students saw images of naked men and women engaging in sex on her classroom computer on October 19, 2004. Amero has maintained all along that the pornography was the result of pop-up advertisements that hijacked her computer and left her helpless. She said she even tried to block the computer’s monitor screen from the children’s view.

Previously Amero had been offered a plea deal that would have left her record clean and not involved any risk of prison time.

Amero has maintained her innocence and claim of being the victim of pop-up ads and lost her case at trial when the court denied the defense the option of demonstrating how Amero was ‘victimized’ by a severely outdated and unmaintained computer which had no firewall or anti-spyware software and which was infected with spyware.

The prosecution admitted that it’s “so called expert” who has little if any formal information technology training and who simply used an “after the fact audit program” to find the pornography on the computer did not examine the computer for spyware. This past March, a $2,400 advertisement appeared in the Hartford Courant signed by 28 computer science professors who said that they think that Amero could not have controlled the pornographic pop-ups.

Since Amero’s conviction, the case has come under scrutiny from a group of computer experts determined to prove the pop-ups were out of Amero’s control. Represented by attorney John Cocheo, Amero has also enlisted the help of an additional attorney, William Dow III, who is expected to file an appeal in the case. She also is accepting donations in a defense fund through an Internet site apparently run by her husband.

Reference:

Amero facing 40-year sentence Wednesday

Background:

Wikipedia article on Julie Amero (extensive list of reference links, background info and additional info).

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 7:27 am and is filed under Connecticut, FE-CP, Middle Schools, Substitute Teachers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.