p2pnet.net news:- American school teacher Julie Amero, facing jail after being accused of letting students look at online porn during class, is off the hook, for now at least.

She’d been convicted of four felony counts of “risk of injury to a minor,” but a Connecticut Superior Sourt judge in charge of her sentencing set aside a guilty verdict, says the IDG News Service.

“Her pleas for help after the guilty verdict gained national attention and were answered by lawyers and a team of computer security experts who banded together to disprove the state’s evidence,” says the Norwich Bulletin. “Most of them immediately argued the porn was the result of adware-generated pop-up ads on a computer lacking adequate filtering software.

Sunbelt Software president Alex Eckelberry helped organize the computer team and, “As you can imagine, I’m very pleased at the outcome of Julie Amero’s sentencing today,” he says on his blog, going on:

However, there’s still the specter of a new trial and so the show isn’t over yet.

This event was a testament to the power of a community of people coming together in a common cause.

One day, perhaps someone will write a story of this experience. It’s certainly been one of the more amazing events in my career.

Right now, because the case is going to a new trial, I still can’t discuss much of the case publicly.

Amero, formerly a substitute teacher at Kelly Middle School in Norwich, Connecticut, was charged after an October 19, 2004, incident when, “a classroom computer exposed Amero’s seventh graders to pornographic images,” says IDG.

“She was facing up to 40 years in prison after her Jan. 5 conviction.

“The prosecution had charged that Amero had endangered her students by accessing pornographic images, and the case had become a cause celebre in the antispyware community, which has portrayed her as an innocent victim of a malicious spyware program.”

“Assistant State’s Attorney David Smith, who prosecuted the case, acknowledged Wednesday the ‘erroneous evidence,’ presented to jurors, based on a follow-up examination of the computer at the state police crime laboratory,” says the Norwich Bulletin . “He gave no indication whether the state planned to pursue the charges against Amero.”

The story carries a timeline of events.

Slashdot it!

Also See:
IDG News Service - Teacher in spyware case granted new trial, June 6, 2007
Norwich Bulletin - Amero gets new trial in porn case, June 6, 2007
blog - Some comments on the Julie Amero case, June 6, 2007

If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 10:48 am and is filed under Crime. 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.

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