What's new and news, from your daily source of leftist extremism:
Does Wal-Mart's reputation in Connecticut need to be damaged further? Apparently so, as commonweal documents Wal-Mart's SLAPP lawsuits to muzzle opponents to the proposed Groton store.
Tom Swan ran a session at the Democracy for America Night School, Holding Elected Leaders Accountable. (PDF link here.) It's a guide to help plan effective constituent meetings with elected officials.
Speaking of DFA, the Norwalk / Silver Star DFA will be having a universal healthcare discussion at their meeting tonight (no linky, website down).
There's also a Planned Parenthood phonebank in New Haven, an Amy Goodman appearance at Connecticut College, and a Bridgeport Young Dems meeting tonight - for more info, see the events calendar in the top left.
It's rare that a statement is so brazen that it's able to shock me, here in 2007, but this one does it:
Harwe, 26 at the time, was rushed to the hospital, where she learned that her left vertebral artery had been crushed. In the days and years that followed, Harwe suffered from paralysis, vision loss, weakness and coordination problems, a paralyzed vocal cord and an inability to swallow. Today, she still uses a feeding tube.
Harwe plans to tell state lawmakers Monday that she had no idea stroke was one of the risks of cervical manipulation by a chiropractor. The legislature's Public Health Committee is considering legislation that would require chiropractors to inform patients, both in writing and verbally, of the risks and possible side effects of their treatments.
State chiropractors say the legislation is unnecessary and unfairly punitive. They argue that a state law requiring a patient to give informed consent before a procedure is excessive given the statistically remote risk of injury and death.
"[A]t best this proposal is a misplaced attempt at patient advocacy and is perhaps prejudicial against the chiropractic profession," said Dr. Matthew N. Pagano, D.C., president of the Connecticut Chiropractic Association.
Below you'll find a bunch of Courant copy and LTTEs and one man's observation of the failure of the press to cover this properly until the blogs stepped in.
Folks keeping up on this might be familiar with the sloppy administration of the PC and fact that the defense did not get to show all of its evidence.
But here's something that escaped me until now. The prosecutor showed porn to the jury that the children never saw. Isn't that horribly prejudicial?
To make his point during the three-day January trial, prosecutor David Smith projected lurid images from the porno websites for the jury to see. These were detailed images that no students saw - and that experts say Amero never "purposely" clicked her mouse on.
And there is a nice open letter to the court here -
(also appears in the Courant somewheres) http://technosteve.b...
From that letter:
An excellent suggestion has been offered by Mark Rasch, former chief of the US Department of Justice's cyber crime unit: "Find and independent investigator with no preconceived notions at all and find out what happened." We the undersigned computer science professors at Yale, UCONN, Wesleyan, Trinity, the University of Hartford, and the [Connecticut] State Universities urge you to take up Mark Rasch's suggestion and to delay sentencing Julie Amero until the investigator has filed his report.
Via Region 19 BOE Gazette, use of hearsay as evidence uncovered in the Amero case, as well as a suggestion that students actually made CDs of pornography from the same (male) teacher's computer a year later. (Yes, the latter is a rumor as well, but nobody's proposing sending him to jail. FK, any more info here?)
Who is the American leader, in all of our history, who was most impactful at conjoining his religious beliefs and political action? It's not Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell or any of the agents of intolerance on the right. It's Martin Luther King. That is, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. I often imagine King and other leaders before and since in the black church (yes, including Sharpton and Jackson) saying "I've got your religious left right here".
I think its great so many groups popped up espousing progressive religion, but I fear too many of them are in the mold of trying to appeal to conservative evangelicals - mostly southerners - who would vote for Satan before they would vote for a Democrat (I take pride in the fact that the bulk of haters vote GOP). Instead of liberals going to the existing religious left who pioneered political action and faith decades ago and saying "guide us", people created brand new organizations that too often ain't fooling anybody (If I hear anyone else say "we have values too" or any other empty platitude I'll go postal) and aren't - ironically - preaching to anyone.
Faith and spirituality don't mean pandering to bigotry. (Via Oliver Willis)
Ask your legislator to sponsor the petitioning date change, S.B. 1310. Information and testimony from yesterday here. Because elections matter, dammit.
Steve Bass at PC World has a column today suggesting ways that readers can take action in response to the miscarriage of justice in the Julie Amero case, including contributing to the Julie Amero Defense Fund.
Last week, Bass received a fascinating email from a man who served on the 6-person jury that convicted Julie Amero. His logic in finding her guilty of four felony counts is beyond disturbing, as it essentially comes down to this juror's opinion that Amero was guilty because someone with her lack of computer training shouldn't be serving as a classroom teacher.
Finally, this podcast called The Malware Report discusses the implications of the Amero case for all Connecticut teachers, including this alarming conclusion from Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use:
In Connecticut, there is now a precedent: if the school district's technical system is not absolutely, totally secure and if there is ever a situation where a student accidentally views pornography or spyware is accidentally downloaded which delivers pop-up porn sites, then whatever teacher is supposed to be supervising the students is at high risk of arrest and conviction."
"Every teacher in the state is now in a position where they are totally dependent on the expertise of the technology director to ensure they are not subjected to such arrest and conviction. If their technology director fails at any time, the teacher is the one who will get the 'go to jail' card.
From Maura's diary below on the Julie Amero case, this MSNBC clip was from 1/26/07. I'm sort of glad I missed it because it's the typical, I would say Fox Noise except now all of the 24/7 news channels do this sort of garbage, instant analysis of the legal cases in usually lurid detail. Nancy Grace of CNN probably the pre-eminent example because she's on every night, blathering away. Susan Filan seems cut from the exact same cloth.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about an outrageous miscarriage of justice here in Connecticut.
In short, Julie Amero, 40, was a substitute teacher in Norwich two years ago. A public computer in the classroom where she was assigned as a substitute teacher one day experienced an endless loop of popup ads, some for porn sites with nude pictures, caused by malware installed on an unprotected system running Windows 98 and an old version of IE. She was a total computer novice who thought clicking the red "X" in the popup window would make the windows go away. Instead, as we all know, it just spawned more popups. The ONLY instruction she was given was to NOT turn off the computer. She was a total computer novice and had no idea what to do aside from clicking the "X" to close the browser window. When she asked other teachers (including the school's computer teacher) they told her it was no big deal, that it happened all the time. She reported the incident to the assistant principal at the end of the day who also said not to worry about it.
Only a handful students even saw the pictures that flashed on the screen. The monitor was turned away from the class.
The Norwich prosecutor convinced the jury that Julie Amero was some kind of sex-crazed pregnant porn-fan who deliberately spent her day as a substitute teacher surfing porn sites in front of students. She had what appears to be well-meaning yet incompetent counsel, someone who was as technology ignorant as she is. The 6-member jury was not allowed to hear most testimony of defense technology experts. Julie now been convicted of four counts of felony injury to a minor and can be sentenced to up to 40 years in prison. Her special education degree is useless. Her life has, quite literally, been destroyed by an overreaction to a handful of adolescents seeing a handful of images of naked people for a few seconds.
I spoke with Julie and her husband Wes a few days ago. They had just been interviewed by an AP reporter and were hopeful that national news about her case would help her gain public support. The AP story hit the wires today. John Christofferson's piece has been picked up by at least two hundred papers around the country and may get TV coverage today. Julie has also been contacted by national TV programs, but has been advised to decline on-camera interviews until after her sentencing in March.
Julie's case really hit home with me, having taught in public schools for nearly a decade. I know that substitute teachers usually get no technology training at all. For the Norwich community to have overreacted so insanely over a handful of 7th graders seeing a few flashes of naked bodies on the screen of a computer that Julie had no responsibility for seems like a cartoonish modern day witch-hunt to me, fed by hysteria over risks to minors from the internet, widespread ignorance about technology, and sensationalism in the media about the handful of women teachers nationally who have been accused or convicted of having sex with students.
I spoke with Julie and Wes Volle, her husband, after I saw that someone had started a blog in her name. Wes and Julie confirmed that this site is legitimate and that they have started a legal defense fund for Julie. I invited Julie and Wes to live-blog with us here at MLN, which they agreed to do soon.
Talking with Julie, I found her version of events to be believable and heartwrenching. She and Wes hope to appeal her conviction, but are struggling just to pay their mortgage with their existing legal bills and Julie unable to work. They've contacted a number of attorneys about the case but have not yet found expert counsel willing to take the case pro bono or at any cost that would be affordable to them. At the end of our hour-long conversation, I attempted to lighten the mood by asking about her baby. After all, I had read in news and blog reports that she was pregnant at the time of the incident, and I assumed her baby would be one of few happy aspects of Julie's life.
Well, I really put my foot in it. Experiencing overwhelming stress after her arrest on felony charges, Julie miscarried. To make this tragedy even worse, Julie had been fighting infertility for years, and after investing thousands of dollars in fertility treatments, this was the only time Julie and Wes had succeeded in conceiving. Two years after losing that much-wanted pregnancy, Julie and Wes can barely afford to keep their home much less pay for fertility treatments. They have given up on their dream of children and are simply hoping to keep Julie out of prison in the short term and clear her record on appeal in the long term.
Raising awareness about Julie's case and her legal defense fund is one way we can help. If you have other ideas, please add them in comments!
Wow. I don't know how we missed this story here at MLN. This is lunacy.
It's our own version of The Crucible here in Connecticut, only involving widespread hysteria and ignorance about Internets rather than witchcraft and set in Norwich, CT rather than Salem, MA.
Why should a substitute teacher, nearly computer illiterate, be convicted of four felonies just because she was assigned to a classroom containing a computer hopelessly infected with malware and spyware? Since when did districts give substitute teachers training on how to stop the endless cycle of popups if such a situation occurred? Since when should a substitute teacher (or any teacher) be held CRIMINALLY RESPONSIBLE because the bozos who were supposedly technology experts in the district failed to pay the invoice for filtering software and security updates and let kids in 2004 have access to a machine running Windows 98 and an outdated version of IE, hopelessly riddled with spyware, malware, and trojan horses because they FAILED to do basic regular maintenance on it?
Julie Amero, 40, of Norwich, has been fired as a sub for Norwich Public Schools. Worse, though, she's a convicted felon - a Norwich jury convicted her of four counts of "injury or risk of injury to, or impairing morals of, children", each carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years. She faces a possible 40 year incarceration at her sentencing in March.
This is insane. Computer security experts, techie bloggers around the country, and even editors at PC Magazine have been up in arms about this for a week. Lots of links to bring everyone up to speed about this outrageous local case are below the jump.
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