Thursday, March 01, 2007

Perjury in the Amero Trial?, Part Deux

I just realized something today, that escaped my notice yesterday. It has to do very much with the loss of accuracy in the accounts of what the students claim to have seen.

You see, the police deferred the interviewing of students to Principal Fain who knows nothing about establishing fact from fiction, establishing the context of an assertion, or what might might prejudice the sworn statements of a witness. And that's why something very curious happens with the students who the police identify as victims instead of witnesses.

When Sgt. Belair testifies that all the students assert seeing something inappropriate on the monitor we and the jury are led to believe that these students saw the inappropriate material under Julie Amero's supervision AND during the time period that the police claim the computer logs show pornographic traffic. Belair testifies to this because he believes Fain has properly screened these students whose statements the police transcribe from Fain's original dialogues.

What goes very wrong is that no one investigates the allegations with an unprejudiced eye. And what you'll learn next may surprise you and render the trial a mistrial.

Our attention turns to Student #4 [S4]. On October 19, S4 had Julie as a substitute teacher in Language Arts approximately between 9 and 10 o'clock and he's heard rumors that Julie was surfing for porn and he or his parents believe he saw something inappropriate.

He describes seeing people in bathing suits on a body rating site so naturally both police and those of us independently investigating the case try mapping what he saw to the porn images and decide he's seen women in lingerie [after all Julie admits to seeing porn and this seems to fit]. But we're all wrong!

Update and correction:


You see, Student #4 also had homeroom with Mr. Napp prior to 9 a.m. and the interview with Girl #2 [G2] that Belair threw out in yesterday's blog says she saw the same site on the monitor. The only class she has in this room is homeroom. This means S4 and G2, see the monitor while in homeroom BEFORE the porn logging activity. In fact what they witness but falsely remember as belonging to Amero may belong to Mr. Napp's browsing in homeroom while Julie is out or before Julie gets there.

So what are they reporting? Possibly this. Mr. Napp's machine logs the access of a dating website prior to 8 a.m. called eHarmony. In 2004, the national website craze was something called Hot or Not? where users would rate all kinds of things including the looks of potential dates. What S4 and G2 may have seen was an artifact of Mr. Napp's or a student's search for a romance date.

Furthermore this activity may have seeded the Orbitz pop-up [for, say, a singles cruise] and maybe the hair-styles site [to look good on a date] that Julie finds on the machine when she returns from the ladies room with students looking at the monitor.

In other words, S4's testimony may relate to Mr. Napp and not Julie. And the trigger for the subsequent porn - the hair-styles site may have been the trailer to Mr. Napp's morning activity and not anything having to do with Julie's use.

But here we encounter a second malfeasance. Napp is allowed to investigate Julie's network activity with Mr. Hartz and they exclude Napp's potential duplicity by focusing on computer activity logs starting after 8:38 when homeroom has ended. They assume Julie is guilty inadvertently veiling Napp's morning browser activity.

Troubling stuff, no?

Digg It! | Add to Del.icio.us | Add to Technorati

No comments: