This story boils my blood. I’ve been following it for awhile, hoping it would never reach the point that it just has. A teacher has been convicted of four felony counts including “risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child” — punishable with up to 40 years in prison — because the computer at the school she was substituting at was infected with porn popups.

In brief, a 7th grade substitute teacher who knew nothing about computers asked a full-time staff member to log her into the classroom computer so she could use it throughout the day. When she stepped out of the room for a moment, the kids had gotten on the computer, and a hair style web site they visited triggered a trojan virus on the computer and started popping up porn ads. The teacher tried to block the screen and make the popups go away, but — and here’s the kicker — the computer was almost ten years old, was running Windows 98 (an operating system so old Microsoft no longer releases security updates for it) with Internet Explorer 6.0 (popup central, right there), with out-of-date virus protection and no adware protection. If you have ever used an unprotected computer on the internet, you know that trying to close popups is a futile exercise. Imagine how scary it was for someone who didn’t know anything about computers.

The teacher immediately went and got help and notified school administrators. However, she was arrested, tried, and convicted in the biggest farce of the justice system I have ever seen. The school, state attorney, and police maintained that the teacher was visiting porn sites intentionally. A simple check of the (obviously outdated and unprotected) computer by an actual computer expert proved that it had been infected with the viruses that loaded the porn popups well before the substitute teacher ever used it. However, the judge didn’t allow the testimony; the jury believed the police computer “expert” who said the logs of IE proved she had gone to the sites intentionally (they don’t — the logs can’t discern if the addresses were typed in or initiated by pop-ups); and the lawyers involved were too incompetent to understand what the hell was was really going on.

This innocent woman’s life has now been completely destroyed. She has a conviction for damaging minors and is facing 40 years in prison because the school was too incompetent to keep their computers protected from basic spyware and viruses, because the state prosecutor is a moron, because the judge was biased in not allowing the defense’s computer expert to testify, because the police “expert” was obviously an incompetent shill, and because the jury was full of technologically illiterate dumbasses who believed everything that the other idiots said.

This is truly frightening. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and has been convicted for something the school’s IT people are actually culpable for. People in the justice system need to be educated about what they’re dealing with, or they should not be allowed to prosecute/judge/deliberate on such cases. Ignorance, incompetence, fear, and idiocy by all those involved have just destroyed an innocent person’s life — a substitute teacher, of all things. The prosecutor who went after her, the police who collected the “evidence”, the jury who convicted her, and the judge who allowed it should all be held responsible for their part in a massive failure of our “justice” system.

Read Police, school get failing grade in sad case of Julie Amaro at USAToday.com.