Comments on: Teacher Porn Conviction Sparks Tech Debate

Substitute Teacher Found Guilty Of Exposing Seventh-Grade Students To Pornography On Computer

[seanv137]

i find it rather laughable that a 7th grade female teacher would purposefully show internet porn to her students and think she could get away with it. it has always seemed ironic that when it comes to child porn, nobody wants to crack down and punish the people who make it or the people messing with our computers that are making millions off the adware and spyware.

[taddles-2009]

Porn pop ups are made so that when you click on them to close them they just start up another pop up. It's infuriating when you get caught in the loop of these nasty spyware things but ANYONE can get caught by these things. Seeing that *** come up on the screen in a class room full of kids ould make anyone panic. Maybe if the prosecutor would do his job instead of trying to get another kill on his resume he might have bothered to have the computer logs checked.

This is more the fault of the school for not bothering to put in decent anti-spyware or firewalls.

[susanhelit]

12 jurors agreed - so the odds are very strong that there's more to the story, and this is just another bunch of garbage where a journalist slants a story heavily one way to make us all outraged, for fun and profit (and ratings!).

[susanhelit]

And the article is messing up the penalty too - she faces from no jail time up to 18 months.

I get so tired of stupid journalists thinking it's fun to freak people out with slanted and inaccurate stories.

[taddles-2009]

Justice is blind and she is served by the incompetant and the stupid.

We need an IQ test for prospective jurors to weed out the morons like Steinmetz.

[susanhelit]

Sounds to me like this article isn't reporting the whole story - there's a little line from the juror about the other students noticing this going on - sounds like they testified that she was causing the popups.

Unless we've got evidence of a seriously subnormal IQ, I just don't see how she'd take, "Don't turn the computer off" to include, "Even if it's showing *** videos to the kids". Just doesn't fit - she could have covered the screen, or turned it off.

[mtredhawk200]

Computer crimes are easy for prosecutors, and fluff up their conviction rates. The fact that the person being prosecuted may not be guilty of anything other than not being computer savvy doesn't matter. A lot of 18 and over young people are going to federal prison for "child porn" that is made and distributed by 16 and 17 year olds who are old enough to know what they're doing! Do you know that 3 or more "suggestive" pictures on your computer of anyone who looks under 18 will get you a 5 year minimum sentence, and you are guilty untill you can prove you're innocent? What about the teacher who left the kids unsupervised? Shouldn't the school be held responsible for firewalls on their own computers? Big brother is watching, but can't seem to catch the real criminals.

[linfinster]

That is outrageous! I can't believe that this case even went to court. Anybody with half a brain knows what it's like to have this happen to you, if you own a compter, of course. Shame once again on our justice system! What a waste of time and lives. Yeah, she was dumb not to cover it up, but that shouldn't get you 20 years in the slammer!! What a joke our system is!

[billpl-2009]

I can't believe what I'm reading??!!??

the students were left alone on an unprotected computer???

...you know *** straight that the kids clicked on the sites. The kids know better than she, where to find all the porno stuff.