The Julie Amero case has created outrage in internet forums and among computer experts all over the country. Briefly, Julie Amero was seven months pregnant and acting as a substitute seventh grade teacher in Norwich, Connecticut. She left the classroom briefly, and while she was gone some of her students used the class computer to surf the web. When she returned a stream of pornographic pop-up ads began to appear. She panicked and tried to stop the pop-ups but did not turn off the computer because she had been firmly instructed not to do so. She was charged with exposing her students to pornography and convicted in January. She now faces up to forty (40) years in prison.

Many computer experts believe that the stream of obscene pop-up ads were caused by malicious spyware and adware programs which users seldom know have infected their computers until too late - after they have done their evil work. It is most troubling that the computer had no firewall protection - apparently because a vendor's bill went unpaid - and that the prosecution did not make a search for spyware.

An excellent suggestion has been offered by Mark Rasch, former chief of the U.S. Department of Justice's cyber crime unit: "Find an independent investigator with no preconceived notions at all and find out what happened." We the undersigned computer science professors at Yale, UCONN, Wesleyan, Trinity, the University of Hartford, and the State Universities urge you to take up Mark Rasch's suggestion, and to delay sentencing Julie Amero until the investigator has filed his report.

Drew McDermott Yale
James Lipton Wesleyan
Ingrid Russell U Hartford
Sarah Tasneem ECSU
John Ridgway Trinity
Brian O'Connell CCSU
David Ahlgren Trinity
Stan Kurkovsky CCSU
Irena Pevac CCSU
Passent El-Kafrawy ECSU
Thomas J. Peters UCONN
Ralph Morelli Trinity
Chip Neville CCSU
Heidi Ellis Trinity
Todor Ivanov WCSU
Jian Lin ECSU
Kehan Gao ECSU
Rathika RiVarma CCSU
R. White CCSU
Neli Zlatareva CCSU
Dong-Guk Shin UCONN
G. Ganchev WCSU
Bradley Kjell CCSU
Huan-Yu Tu ECSU
John Mertens Trinity
Taikang Ning Trinity
Joan Calvert CCSU
Zdravko Markov CCSU

In a case that has become a cause célãbre in the online world, where millions of rogue websites appear unsolicited on computer screens every day, Julie Amero is gathering a network of supporters who claim that she has been wrongly convicted over an incident she says has destroyed her life.

Ever gone to the wrong Web site by mistake, then thanked the deity of your choice that you were able to back out of there before any coworkers noticed? If you'd done that in a school in Norwich, Conn., you might be facing 40 years in jail.

No joke: Substitute elementary schoolteacher Julia Amero was convicted on Jan. 5 of four counts of "Risk of Injury to a Minor" for exposing a classroom of middle schoolers to pornographic images on her computer on Oct. 19, 2004. She faces a maximum penalty of 40 years in jail and was due to be sentenced today, but on Monday, Superior Court Judge Hillary Strackbein postponed her sentencing to March 29.

The angry geek gods of the computer world are besieging Norwich, shredding the credibility of a community on the verge of sending an apparently innocent woman to jail.

For this, every teacher in Connecticut should be thankful. Because if a Superior Court verdict in Norwich isn't tossed out and there's a computer with uncertain protection in your classroom, you'd better worry.

"The court opted to deny / prevent the defense from presenting evidence to rebut the evidence introduced by the state," Volle said. [Julie's Husband]

"The states assertion of a deliberate attempt to access pornographic web sites can only be deemed as persecution of a political nature."

Volle added that two independent forensic investigations had concluded that malicious code had caused the pop-ups, not a deliberate act by Amero.

In another blog post, the director of technical education at security software maker ESET, Randy Abrams, posed the question: "Can a legal system unversed in technology result in a fair trial."

So it is not a specific intent crime; this does not mean that it is a per se crime. There still needs to be mens rea. The mens rea, however, is that there is a disregard for the outcome of the action. Do her acts fulfill this requirement? Based on the facts, I think not. The appellate court will have to decide.

Brian Livingston, editorial director of Windows Secrets, an electronic newsletter about the Microsoft program, said in an interview, “Prosecutors should be chasing the maker of these spyware programs, not hapless teachers who have nothing to do with the images.”

Ms. Amero’s husband, Wes Volle, was emphatic in saying she was clueless about computers and was in over her head once the pop-ups began. Mr. Volle, a graphics designer, accused the school system of sacrificing his wife to deflect attention from its own failure to install effective filters on its computers.

A chat room on the Web site for The Norwich Bulletin has at least 10 pages of comments, including one from a person who had just returned home to the Netherlands after a vacation in New York and Vermont. "Holland is awaiting the outcome of this trial in a state of total disbelief," the poster wrote. "Has the USA lost it sense of reality?"