Porn pop-ups may land teacher in prison

A substitute teacher in Norwich, Conn., faces up to 40 years in prison because of pornographic images that popped up on her classroom computer in 2004. Several students at Kelly Middle School in Norwich saw the images appear. The teacher, Julie Amero, was convicted by a jury earlier this month on four counts of risk of injury to a minor. She is slated to be sentenced on March 2 in Norwich Superior Court. The prosecution insists that Amero actively visited the sexually explicit Web sites, Assistant State's Attorney David J. Smith told the Norwich Bulletin.

Others, however, argue that Amero's conviction and the penalty she faces are a travesty of justice. Her lawyer, and several computer security experts, say that Amero was the victim of spyware and Web sites that were programmed to display an incessant stream of pop-ups, including explicit ones. "We analyzed the activity log and noted that there were spyware/adware programs installed on the hard drive," W. Herbert Horner, a computer consultant who testified for Amero, wrote on a blog published Monday. Horner said he wasn't allowed to deliver full testimony during trial. "If there is an appeal and the defense is allowed to show the entire results of the forensic examination in front of experienced computer people, including a computer literate judge and prosecutor, Julie Amero will walk out of the court room as a free person," he wrote.

Security experts who were not part of the trial have also come to Amero's defense. One of them is Alex Eckelberry, chief executive of antispyware company Sunbelt Software. "It's clear that we have a miscarriage of justice here," he wrote on his company's blog. "The forensic evidence and expert testimony showed clearly that after a visit to Crayola.com, someone went to a site about hair styles which loaded a javascript that spawned pop-ups." Eckelberry also penned an editorial for the local paper in Norwich. Amero's attorney is planning an appeal after sentencing, the newspaper reported.

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