- While teaching a class Ms. Amero's computer went into some pop-up loop showing a bunch of pornographic images, some of which were visible to students in her seventh-grade class.
- Ms. Norwich didn't do the sensible thing and unplug her computer.
- It's claimed did attempt to push one of the student's away from the monitor. Of course, this cuts both ways because it indicates that she knew the computer was showing inappropriate material.
- The prosecution didn't scan her computer for malware. The defense claims that the computeras infested with pornographic malware. The school's anti-malware software was not up to date.
- The prosecution claims that analysis of her computer indicates visits to pornographic web sites and that these must have been actually manually visited.
So, let's take a step back here. It seems to me that this set of facts is consistent with three theories from most to least innocuous.
Her machine was (innocuously) infected with malware and she froze.
This certainly is possible. It's certainly not hard
to get your machine infected with malware and pornographic websites
do try to trap you with popups so that you can't leave. Turning
off your computer of course solves the problem, but it's easy to
imagine someone computer illiterate, especially as Amero was
reportedly told not to turn off her computer. Clearly, in retrospect
this would have been pretty stupid, but then people in shock
sometimes freeze.
The prosecution's argument against this theory appears to be that links to inappropriate websites were highlighted by the browser, presumably indicating that she had visited them. This could of course be a result of her doing so intentionally, but as far as I know browsers record visits, not mouse clicks, so if you really were infected with malware intended to redirect you to this kind of site it could create this kind of trail. There's also the possibility that someone else was using the computer and went to such sites.
She was visiting inappropriate web sites, got stuck in a popup loop, and
then froze.
If you believe the previous theory, then certainly you ought to believe
this one. It's possible to get infected during ordinary web sites, but
it's even easier to get infected visiting porn sites which aren't
notoriously safe. And when confronted with the frankly embarassing
evidence of your malfeasance you would probably want to hide it by
shutting off the computer, but again it's not crazy to believe that
she would freeze.
She deliberately displayed porn to her class.
In this theory either her computer started to display porn for one of
the previous two reasons and she decided to let it play it for her class
or she intentionally put the computer in a state where it played
porn for them. Obviously this is possible at some technical level,
but it seems pretty implausible to me. Certainly teachers occasionally
do inappropriate things (telling your students that if they don't
accept Jesus they'll go to hell, for instance)
but it's hard to understand what Amero's motivation for showing
porn to her students in public would be. Even if we assume
that for some unfathomable reason she wanted to "corrupt" them
wouldn't it be smarter to do it in some setting where she was
less likely to get caught, fired, and prosecuted? Absent some
explanation (for instance that she's completely crazy) this strikes
me as a fairly implausible explanation.
So, at the end of the day it seems to me that we have two plausible explanations: a completely innocent woman froze or someone who had been misusing school computers in a way that people misuse their employer's computers (I'm not making a moral judgement here, but most employers do prohibit use of their computers and network for viewing porn so this is technically misuse) every day got caught. In either case, it's pretty hard to see how this merits a 40 year prison sentence. I don't know of any evidence that this caused any of the children any long term harm, but even if it did, consider that in CT if you got in your car drunk and killed somebody, the sentence would be more like 10 years.
