Back in October of 2004, Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in a Connecticut middle school found herself in a bit of a bother. Well, actually that’s all it should have been but it led to Amero facing a 40 year prison sentence and the case has highlighted the intense neo-luditism that continues to prevail in not only the US justice system but justice systems the world wide.


As a brief history of the events, Amero was using a PC in front of the class when she was hit with a porn storm. That’s basically it. Up cropped some pop-sups with ads for porn sites, the kiddies were emotionally devistated and crippled for life and the teacher was set upon by the law. During the court case the State Attorney asked Amero why she hadn’t pulled the plug on the computer. Amero responded that she had been told never to pull the plug on a PC while it was active. She also testified that she told four other teachers and the school’s assistant principal about the problem, but that no one responded with any kind of help. In contrast the school asserted that Amero spent the entire day surfing porn sites in a classroom filled with students, an activity which seems highly unlikely. Perhaps if the school had bothered to updated their filtering system all of this would have been avoided but as W. Herbert Horner of Uncasville, the defense’s computer expert testified the filter system was hoplessly out of date and the pop-ups were a direct result of viruses that had already infected the computer. All of this fell on deaf ears and the judge in the case displayed an ingorance of computers and the internet which was shocking and quite frankly he should have excused himself from the case before it even began. Of course he didn’t and on Friday May 18th 2007 sentencing will begin.

Anyone interested in contributing to Julie Amero’s defense fund ( her legal costs are massive ) can do so here: http://julieamer.blogspot.com/