Showing Porn Vs. Raping A Minor; 40 years Vs. 10 years
This gem of a story comes to us form the quiet corner of Connecticut, So quiet, that it barely registers on the radar of Connecticut MSM. The short story is that a substitute teacher in Windham, Julie Amero, was found guilty of showing porn on aPC to middle school students. From the Norwich Day:
A Norwich Superior Court jury has convicted a 40-year-old substitute teacher from Windham of exposing seventh-grade students at Norwich’s Kelly Middle School to pornographic images on a computer in October 2004.Julie Amero faces as long as 40 years of prison when she is sentenced March 2 for four counts of risk of injury to a minor.
The six-member panel delivered the guilty verdict on Friday after deliberating a little over an hour. They heard testimony from students who saw the images of naked men and women, and from a Norwich police detective.
Amero exposed the students to the images on a personal computer used by the regular classroom teacher, according to Prosecutor David Smith. He said the evidence indicated the images were on the computer “for quite a long time.”
“She allowed the situation to go on and could have turned off the computer,” Smith said. “Her defense is that she was told when she went to substitute teacher training that she was not to touch anything in the classroom.”
One of the students sent an instant message to the regular classroom teacher saying the substitute was accessing pornographic images. The teacher reviewed the computer records and saw that several porn sites, some of them “quite explicit,” had been accessed, Smith said.
Attorney John F. Cocheo, who defended Amero, said this was one of the most surprising verdicts in his 37 years of practicing law and that he plans to appeal.
He said the images came through as “pop-ups” from other Web sites, and that the school should have had screening devices in place to prevent their appearance.
“There were rules in the school system which prevented her from turning off the computer,” Cocheo said. “She really did everything she could to keep the kids from seeing the stuff. It just so happens they caught a glimpse of it and made an issue of it.”
When looking at the Connecticut Sentencing , we find:
§ 53a-70 (a)(2)
First-degree sexual assault to have sexual intercourse with a person under age 13 if the actor is more than two years older: 10 to 25 years in prison with a mandatory minimum of five years if the victim is between age 10 and 16 and 10 years if the victim is under age 10. The combined sentence and special parole must equal at least 10 years
§ 53a-71 (a)(1)
Second-degree sexual assault to have sexual intercourse with a person between ages 13 and 16 if the actor is more than two years older: Up to 20 years in prison (nine months mandatory minimum)
So apparently the jury and prosecutors have never experienced uncontrolled adware pop ups taking over a computer. Shame on the defense attorney for not doing a live demonstration. Reasonable people make dumb decisions when trying to deal with computer problems. Amero should have turned off the computer, but that would mean she’d have to find the power switch, and or have access to the power cable to pull the plug. Not knowing what that set up was, and having been told not to touch anything in the classroom, it seems the more reasonable criminal action was by the school system that would be negligent enough to have a pc in the classroom that could be taken over by adware. There are free proxy servers, adware and spam filters that could be installed at no cost. Unless Amero has a fetish for looking at internet porn in school classrooms, I think there’s enough reasonable doubt here.
How our part time legislators came up with the sentencing guidelines that has showing porn requiring more jail time than raping a minor is even more egregious.
