State v Amero - A Miscarriage of Justice?

State V. Amero

A Miscarriage of Justice

Why did she not plead guilty?

This entry was posted on 1/28/2007 11:55 PM and is filed under Amero,Other Voices.

John C Sharp on In Security brings more information, including that Julie Amero was pregnant at the time of the incident and the arrest, and cites Fox News for covering the story ~~rather well..~~ Looks more and more like the School District hiding behind this poor woman

[Update: "rather well" was editorial excess on my part. ]

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4/24/2007 3:24 PM Mike Butkus wrote:
I first heard of this "problem" from a librarian blog. First: I have been involved with educational technology since 1991, at the college level and now 9 years at the public elementary level. I'm currently a public school tech coordinator. Two: After reading many stories from many sites I have changed my "guilty" opinion I chose due to story the DA has stated in the newspapers to disbelief of such an inept and incompetent prosecution.
Failure: The school district should receive the first lawsuit. I believe it's federal law to use decent filtering system. E-rate, a federally funded rebate for school technology requires it. Almost every school get E-rate technology funding. Failure to filter will have E-rate request back 3 years of those refunds as a punishment. That can be a chunk of change. Then there are state laws requiring schools to protect children from Internet porn, most states have them. Where was the school on that?
Failure: The police personnel or DA that worked this. They must be as clueless with technology as much as the victim Julie Amero. Spyware on older Win 95/95/ME computers without firewalls will cripple a PC in a few days. Ever since 2001 spyware has invaded most computers without specific protection to the point of needing to format the hard drive to get rid of it. Go ahead, Google "spyware won't go away". All that was needed to be done was go to the "hair site" the students visited and view the source code. That will show spyware programs injected into the web site's HTML codes. Microsoft didn't spend millions in developing IE patches the past few years for nothing. They finally created IE 7 specifically stating it "helps" prevent spyware and pop-ups. Isn't that what happened here?
There is not much else to say. I think the school and former DA should start taking to their lawyers, they are going to need it. I say an easy $350K settlement split between the school and DA office. If they think they have a case outside of whatever technology challenged area they live in, they will be wrong. If they don't agree, that's when you double that settlement price when any PC person rips apart the "story line" the DA gave. Anyone that ever owned a PC from 2000-2004 would know about spyware. My wonder is, if the students knew they could get porn from one school PC, then they knew they could go to any old PC in the building and do the same. What did the district do about that? If nothing, then the school is responsible for violating current federal and state laws on protecting public school children.
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