The Case of Julie Amero

I still vividly remember the day back in 1998 when all the top executives for the company I worked for gathered at my desk to view our product as it crawled across the face of Mars. Excitement was high, and well it should have been, as we were making history!

I opened up the internet and logged onto what I thought was the NASA site. At about that same moment, one of the execs asked me a question, and in responding, I turned my head from the computer screen.

And that's when it happened: a cascade of pornography, one lurid image after another, each more graphic than the next.

Instinctively - immediately - I switched off my screen, my face red with shame, embarrassment, mortification.

Lucky for me, everyone in the room - all adults, mind you - understood that sometimes porn comes in univited, and there was no negative impact for me.

Not so for a substitute teacher in Conneticut named Julie Amero.

One day in October 2004, Amero was subbing for a seventh grade language arts teacher at Kelly Middle School when she opened a web browser and out poured porn. Some of the students saw the ads as Amero was struggling to shut them off.

"I went back to computer and found a bunch of pop-ups,” Amero said. “They wouldn’t go away. I mean, some of the sites stayed on there no matter how many times I clicked the red X, and others would just pop back up.”

(Who can't relate to that?)

Anyway, some of the kids - seventh graders remember, kids who statistically spend more time on porn sites than any other - went home that night and mentioned the incident to their parents. Some parents made a fuss and Amero was arrested.

In January of this year, she was convicted on four counts of "injury or risk of injury or impairing morals of children". She's looking at 40 years in prison!

Mmmm, I don't know about you, but that sounds a lot more like something that would happen here in Saudi Arabia than in the United States of America. The muttawa are big on "impairing morals" issues; are notorious for censorship of both internet content and access; and love to scapegoat rather than deal with the root issue of problems. Apparently so do the US courts.

After reading some of the discussions on this case, I can't help but shake my head and wonder what the courts - and the parents - were thinking when they pushed forward against an innocent teacher who just happened to open up an infected web browser on a computer which had no working firewall.

As they say, there by the grace of God go I.
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Julie and her husband have set up a reference blog with links to the courts, school administrators, lawmakers and others, as well as a Defense Fund. If you feel so inclined, drop them a note. There's also a Paypal button on the site for direct donations.

Another blogger is donating $1 for every comment posted on her site thru today.

And a quick search on Google brings up a 312,000 additional links including this one which paints a picture of Amero as a caring teaching professional; this one that looks at the legal perspectives of the case with some high-powered links; and finally this one written by Alex Eckelberry, president of Sunbelt Software, a Florida software company that specializes in anti-spyware, firewall and other protection technologies for computers, who offers an eloquent and technical defense.

Thanks to Cynthia at Don't Gel Too Soon for giving me the heads up on this story.

And finally - interestingly enough, a similar case occured in 2003 in England. The man in that case was cleared by forensics - something the courts in Conneticut apparently weren't interested in Amero's case.