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July 22, 2008
For Teacher, All's Not Well Because It Hasn't Ended
Remember that substitute teacher who had the misfortune of using a malware-infected PC in front of her students? The one who was charged with exposing kids to porn? And how the conviction was thrown out and we all said “woot!” because her nightmare was over?
“Unbelievably, more than 13 months after [Judge Hillary B.] Strackbein set aside Amero’s conviction on charges that she allowed seventh-graders to view pornography in her classroom, the state is apparently still planning to bring Amero back to trial.
“Which means that as long as Amero is on the trial list, she must live with this hanging over her head.
“Why? Perhaps overworked state prosecutors are too busy to file the paperwork to abandon the case. It’s more likely that this is all an elaborate face-saving maneuver that must slowly unwind so that nobody will ever look bad.
“There is no indication that state investigators are taking another look at the now discredited work done by the Norwich Police Department, which concluded that Amero was responsible for the storm of porn pop-up messages that took over her classroom computer on Oct. 19, 2004.”
This is a column, not a news report, so the bias is evident. But some facts remain, and they’re not very nice.
As a non-lawyer, I can understand keeping the option to reopen a case if it involves a murder or something where someone was done lasting harm. In this case, it seems like Ms. Amero has suffered far worse than any of the students who were exposed to a fleeting glimpse of pornography on a computer.
On the other hand, if you go read the comments on that column, you’ll see a few founts of human compassion:
“Yeah, it’d have been real diffuclt for Amero to have thrown a sweater or something over the offensive screen rather than having kids see it.”
I’d propose that any harm one could mitigate by throwing a sweater over it shouldn’t be used as the foundation of four years of legal harassment.
(Link)
Posted by mhall at 6:48 PM | Add Comment
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