Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Drawing Evidence Missing in the Amero Trial

As those of us who doubted the verdict in the Julie Amero trial began to investigate the case found, the Norwich Bulletin's coverage of the matter was dumb-founding. They left the impression from the trial that students were exposed to class long doses of pornography yet Amero pleaded innocent to the charges. The two perceptions didn't match.

On this blog I am a vocal and loud advocate that schools get with it in terms of technology and I recommend lots of great free and commercial products [that I make not a dime off of] that I think are worth having in class.

So an idea came to mind. I wrote Wes Volle, Julie's husband, and asked him to draw a picture of what Julie's classroom looked like using GE's Imagination Cubed Virtual drawing tool. It took Wes a few tries but he finally produced this rudimentary sketch.

Say what! The teacher who had a direct line of sight at Julie's computer sees little more than pictures in browser panels. She doesn't see porn but some students report fantastic pornographic details.

We'll talk about this more. By the way, Julie's screen was a 14" or 15" Dell monitor based on what we know today.

Are you all getting the idea that there's something very wrong here?

You'll see that the PC monitor is facing the teacher's desk and the corner of a windowed wall. Clearly students aren't being exposed to much of anything.

Later, we found out Julie had a Team teacher in the classroom. Someone who reported nothing about pornography - just Julie "surfing" throughout the period. So I asked Wes for a diagram showing where she sat. I got this diagram back:



Keep in mind that the arrow indicates the direction the monitor was pointing and that when a student approached her desk she swerved the monitor at a further angle away from the class. This detail provided in the student's own sworn statement.

Are you getting ill yet that Julie lost her child based on this and on March 2 she'll be sentenced to provide yet another pound of flesh for the hungry, frightened mob in Loonsbury?

We'll return to these drawings soon and an analysis of student vernaculars that aren't acquired by the accidental exposure to a single sexually explicit photo.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Impairing the morals of the students".

Hmmm.

How exactly does one go about proving such a nebulous idea of "impaired morals"?

What would be the qualitative evidence of such?

What would be the quantitative evidence of such?

Did someone use a spoon to carve out his/her eyes after seeing some objectionable material?

Did someone run amock, indiscriminately firing bullets into a crowd, their mind forever marred by an image of nudity?

Did they swear off religion/boy scouts/marble club because of what they saw?

Where is the injury? Do they have black eyes? Are they babbling shells of their former selves? Did they run home and light their house on fire? Did they pitchfork their puppies?

Maybe we should call the local CSIs and get them on the case here. Dust for prints. Swab for DNA. Measure skid marks.

Show me the injuries.

Oh, sorry, you can't. No-one can.

But I can show you a law that needs to be stricken from the books. Because in it's current form and in the hands of certain members of Law and Order, it is a much more dangerous tool to be used against the good folk of Connecticut than even the most potent machine gun.