Case Against Julie Amero

Andrew Kantor has been following the Julie Amero case and has written on it often, both on his USA Today column and his personal blog (several more postings at both sites). The case seems pretty simple. Amero was a substitute teacher in Connecticut. In her classroom she found an old PC whose anti-virus protection was long out of date and which had no pop up, spyware, or adware protection at all. While the kids were using it, they visited a site supposedly about hairstyles and got hit with endless pop ups, including porn sites.

Here's the kicker. She's been convicted of endangering the morals of children because of the porn sites and faces 40 years in jail because of the pop ups. The computer illiterate prosecutor and his computer illiterate computer experts (experts because they worked with mainframes back in the 60's, and who admit to occasionally using PCs) argue that she must have intentionally visited the sites herself while the kids were in the room. They know she did because the links in the pages show up now in an different color, which means she intentionally clicked the link.

Then, there's the side of the story where the local paper came out against Amero and is now doing its best imitation of George Bush by exaggerating or mis-stating facts, or simply coming up with new arguments when the old ones are shot down.

Pretty scary story, particularly when taken together with the so-called Duke rape case, both stories of over-zealous and not so bright prosecutors doggedly pursuing a case even when it's become painfully obvious to just about everyone that the case is junk.

Amero will be sentenced for her crime of living in a town with a moron for a prosecutor on March 29.

Now, in all fairness, while it's easy to point out the flaws (let's be generous) of the prosecution's case, I have to question the defense team as well. Did they bring any of the obvious points up during the trial? When the mainframe expert was testifying about how Internet Explorer works, why didn't the defense team bring in a PC decked out exactly like the one in the classroom and have the mainframe guy visit the site that caused all the problems to begin with? It seems like this case would be pretty easy to shoot down that I have to question the defense.