4-Year Saga Ends With Fine, Dropped Charges After Techies Rise to Teacher's Aid
A Connecticut substitute teacher’s years-long saga, in which she faced 40 years of prison time for a felony pornography conviction that was overturned, ended rather quietly last week.
Prosecutors in Norwich dropped the felony counts against teacher Julie Amero in exchange for her guilty plea to a single charge of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, the Hartford Courant’s CT Confidential blog reports.
Amero, who has reportedly been hospitalized for stress-related ailments, also agreed to surrender her teaching license.
So what happened to the sensational pornography charges that resulted in her conviction? Connecticut Judge Hillary B. Strackbein threw out Amero’s earlier conviction last year. Authorities had accused the teacher of intentionally causing a stream of “pop-up” pornography to appear on the computer in her middle school classroom in 2004 and then allowing her students to view it.
But after Amero’s conviction, forensic computer experts rallied to her defense, recognizing immediately that Amero’s classroom computer was infected with malicious adware and spyware.
The computer experts have since formed The Julie Group, an Internet community with a mission to draw attention to cases in which confusion about computers yields bad law, Ars Technica reports.
Connecticut authorities maintain they were ready to retry Amero and stand by their initial charges.
That didn’t sit well with The Julie Group, which noted after the plea that, “Justice would have been full exoneration with a deep, heartfelt apology from the prosecutor for not fully investigating the possibility that malware had infected the computer in the classroom where she was substituting.”
