Julie Amero: School Teacher Faces Prison

Julie Amero, 40, was a substitute school teacher who is now facing up to 40 years in prison for child endangerment. Amero may be a school teacher but she is not computer literate and needs her husband to leave her notes on doing simple things such as using email and instant messengers. However, prosecutors are charging that Julie Amero, their school teacher, was actually surfing for porn right in front of her students.

Julie Amero's Side of the Story

Julie Amero was working at Kelly Middle School in Norwich, Connecticut on October 24, 2004 as a substitute teacher to a seventh grade class. Amero had just returned to the classroom that was teaching after stepping out for a bit and Amero says that she noticed two of her school students in front of the computer. The website that they were looking at was a hairstyling site and this was later proven when the schools computer was examined. At that moment however, Julie Amero saw websites popping up and every time she closed one more came up. All of the popup were pornographic in nature and this prompted Amero to run and find a school teacher who could fix the computer.

The teachers told her that it happens all the time and simply ignored her. When asked at trial why didn't she turn off the computer in the school, Julie Amero says that the regular teacher of that classroom had told her not to turn it off because he didn't want to have to sign in again. Amero was also asked why had she not covered up the monitor with something like a coat or sweater, but unfortunately for this teacher, she had not brought either one of those to the school with her.

That night a few of the children told their parents what had happened at school and angry parents contacted the school who soon told Amero that she was not welcome back. After that Julie Amero was arrested by the local police on the charge that she risked injury to some of her students at the school.

Prosecutors Case

The prosecutors have charged that Mrs. Amero was obviously surfing porn right in front of her students in the school, because the computer history showed the websites. Their "expert" police officer testified that time-stamped logs showed that someone in the school classroom had purposely gone to those sites and that they were not pop ups.

Not Given Her Day In Court?

At the end of the day it seems that Julie Amero was railroaded and that teacher's defense was not given the chance to actually defend her. The judge in the case would not allow the defense to show that these logs from the school computer are the same whether or not someone clicked on a porn link or had pop ups open up on the computer screen.

Another sad fact is that the school was running Microsoft Windows 98 on the computers in the school and they had failed to pay for a new year of service with the antivirus and firewall programs, so they were disabled. The school also did not have any spyware software installed on the computers even though they were connected to the internet and could be accessed by the school students. The prosecution also admitted that it had not scanned the hard drive for viruses and Trojans, so they are unaware of any programs that might have actually loaded the adult pop ups.

This story has not made national news and because of that too few people even know about this case. I myself stumbled across online and the internet is the only place to read about it. Bloggers and IT professionals are the ones following the trial of Julie Amero and they themselves would like to know why IT pros were not called into to look at everything. This is someone's life we are talking about but nothing was done to look at the whole picture before determining guilt or innocent. The jury has ruled with the prosecution and has found her guilty; Amero is now waiting to see what her sentence will be. Julie Amero was convicted of four case of endangering a child and each count brings 10 years in prison. Sentencing will begin for Amero on March 3, 2007.