Pop-Up Porn: The Trial of Julie Amero

Three days from now, on May 18, former substitute teacher Julie Amero is scheduled to be sentenced in a Connecticut court for allowing seventh-graders to see pornographic websites. That is, unless the sentencing is delayed again, which has happened since her conviction in January. Delays in sentencing sometimes mean that the prosecution is no longer as sure of its case as it once was. There are good reasons that the prosecutors in the Amero case could be reconsidering, but first let's try to get some of the basic facts straight.

Everybody agrees that on October 19, 2004, Amero was substitute-teaching a seventh-grade class at Kelly Middle School in Norwich, Connecticut. Everybody also agrees that at some point, pornographic images began to appear on a computer screen that students were using. At the trial, police detective Mark Lounsbury testified that his software (aptly named ComputerCOP) determined that such sites were accessed during the time in question. After this was explained to the jury, they convicted Amero on four counts of injuring the morals of a child.

What the jury was not allowed to hear, but what computer expert W. H. Horner determined, was that these pornographic images came from "pop-ups." As anybody who has spent more than five minutes on the Internet can agree, pop-ups are annoying, pesky little things that usually don't pose a threat to one's job, however. But in this case, Amero realized they could, so everyone also agrees that she tried to keep students from viewing the images. (The disagreement is over how vigorously and effectively she tried.) But, according to Amero, she had been told not to turn off the computer because she had no password, and since the person who had turned it on for her in the morning wasn't present, she couldn't turn it on again if she shut it off.

Horner also found that the computer in question had outdated anti-virus protection software, no Internet filter, and no anti-spyware software. Since these kinds of protection seem to be the school district's responsibility, Horner's evidence in this regard shifts at least some of the blame off Amero's shoulders.

But how much really belongs there in the first place?

For twelve-year-olds, the Internet has been as much a fact of life as television was to those born in the U. S. after 1950, say. This was brought home to me recently not by the Amero case, but by reading Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers, by Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Among the many fascinating findings Regnerus presents, he makes the point that debates about the content of traditional public-school sex education classes,". . . oral sex or anal sex or gay or lesbian sex are quickly becoming utterly irrelevant, since a few clicks on a mouse will bring any of us to a demonstration of exactly how each is performed and 'experienced.'" Internet porn is ubiquitous and easily accessible, despite all that parents and teachers can do, and chances are that most of the students in Amero's class had seen worse things elsewhere than they saw on that fateful October day.

There are two issues that must be distinguished in this case. One is the technically-informed question of whether the physical evidence supports the contention that Amero voluntarily visited the websites in question, heedless of the fact that students were also seeing them. My judgment on this is that if Horner's testimony is to be relied on, Amero was caught between the rock of letting popups proliferate like flies on a dead horse, or the hard place of turning off the computer and losing whatever utility it had (and nobody seems to talk about what the machine was being legitimately used for at the time, except to say that students were looking at a hairstyling website, which doesn't sound like academic activity). And maybe she didn't realize how serious the matter was, although she evidently made some attempt to deflect students' attention away from the machine. But now she's facing the possibility of a forty-year jail sentence.

Which brings us to the second issue: the hypocrisy factor. Now don't get me wrong: porn is bad. While it may be true that, as G. K. Chesterton allegedly said, the young man knocking on the door of a whorehouse is really looking for God, that doesn't mean it's a good thing to go there. We have made the choice as a culture both to receive the manifold good things that the Internet brings, and to allow at the same time the huge Internet porn industry to profit from the millions of small evils committed by everyone who looks at their wares. To single out one person in one particular circumstance and lock her away for most of her natural life because she did not stop a student from what he or she could do outside the classroom any day of the week strikes me as cowardly, hypocritical, and pretty dumb, too.

The trial of Julie Amero reminds me of another trial held a long time ago, by a similar bunch of concerned citizens who had posted spies, not in a school computer, but near a place where a woman met her adulterous lover. The spies caught the two in the very act. The woman's lover they allowed to go free; but they hauled the guilty woman before another person they hoped to get in trouble, a troublesome preacher who had been challenging the concerned citizens' unquestioned authority to say what was right and what was wrong.

The preacher's name was Jesus. The concerned citizens were the scribes and Pharisees of Jerusalem around 30 A. D., all ready to take the woman out and stone her to death, as their law required.

All Jesus did was to write in the dust of the street (the words were not preserved for us), and then say, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." And St. John records that one after another, beginning with the oldest, her persecutors quietly slipped away, until there was nobody left except the woman and Jesus. He told her to go and sin no more.

I think Julie Amero has learned her lesson about computers, about pornography, about students who see pornography, and a whole lot about the creaky, hypocritical system of law in Connecticut. Her lawyers (who do not work for free) have promised to appeal, but that will take time and money. If you think justice has not been served in the Amero case, you can inform yourself further and then contribute to her defense at the website listed below. And if you do think justice has been served in this matter in all respects, then I just hope you never get the chance to judge me!

Sources: For the time being, Wikipedia has an entry for Julie Amero at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Amero. It lists many news reports and other information, along with her personal website http://julieamer.blogspot.com/index.html, where contributions can be made. I thank Peter Ingerman for drawing my attention to this case, which is well summarized in a USA Today article at http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2007-02-22-julie-amaro_x.htm.
Forbidden Fruit has just been published by Oxford University Press.