Free Julie Amero!
My old pals at DownloadSquad have taken up the cause of Julie Amero, and I feel it’s high time for anyone concerned about justice in the digital age to join them. If you’re not familiar with the details of the case, Amero was working as a Connecticut substitute teacher when, in 2004, she found herself facing an endless barrage of porno popups on a computer in a classroom she was supervising. If you’ve ever been stuck on a computer with an old browser, no pop-up blocker and no anti-spyware software installed, you may have experienced the chain of events that led Amero to this predicament: after clicking on a seemingly innocuous banner ad or URL, you find yourself confronted with a graphic popup. As you attempt to close it, more popups show up, in an endless stream of unwanted vulgarity. If you’re an experienced computer user, at this point you’d probably hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and kill iexplore. Or you might just shut the damn thing off. But Amero wasn’t an experienced user, and had been told not to shut down the computer. She ran to the faculty lounge for help, and was met by shrugs of indifference.
That should have been the end of the story (at least for Amero; for the school, it should have been the catalyst for a plan to upgrade its network and security infrastructure, or at least install a half-decent popup blocker). Instead, Amero found herself in the midst of a Kafkaesque journey through the legal system, culminating in her conviction last month for endangering her students by exposing them to pornography. Confident of her innocence, Amero had refused a plea bargain that could have given her probation and a chance to wipe the case from her record. Instead, she went to court and found that her expert witness wasn’t even allowed to offer evidence of her innocence, including technical information proving that the popups were driven by adware on the classroom computer.
Amero’s sentencing hearing is March 3rd, and she faces a maximum of 40 years in prison. DLS recommends contacting Connecticut’s Board of Pardons and Paroles to ask that Amero be pardoned. Here’s the contact info:
Connecticut Board of Pardon and Parole
(203) 805-6605
Chairman Gregory Everett
Rowland Government Center
55 West Main Street, Suite 520
Waterbury, Connecticut 06702
You can email Chairman Gregory Everett at greg.everett@po.state.ct.us
Cyberporn and its effect on minors are serious issues and should be addressed aggressively by law enforcement authorities and elected officials. But jailing Julie Amero won’t do anything to protect a single child. All it will do is destroy the life of an innocent woman who has already gone through far too much pain and suffering.
