Sure. But it’s also possible that she did something inappropriate.
We selected 12 impartial members of society to listen to her claim that she did nothign wrong, and listen to the claims of the police that she did so something wrong, and decide who was more credible.
They evidently decided that she wasn’t as credible in her denials as the police were in their accusations.
Now you come along, having NOT heard the detailed testimony, relying on accounts from her lawyer, and apparently decide that the jury got it wrong.
On what basis do you arrive at that conclusion? You credit her lawyer’s (and her) account of the events over the police version, but you haven’t heard the police version in detail.
These are not mutually exclusive intents. If I have a car that I know to dangerously defective, and I sell it to you anyway because I need the money and I don’t care if the brakes fail on you, I’ve done something that is both malicious, and profit-minded. I would say that knowlingly designing a piece of software that redirects someone’s computer to your porn site in such a way as to make the computer unusable similarly falls under both categories.
Frankly, I don’t really care what the police version is; unless her lawyer is outright lying about the police testimony, their expert testimony was perjurious (any computer expert who testifies that the only way to go to one of those links is to type it yourself is either incompetent or lying, which means he either lied about being an expert or lied about the technology). The jury, being a bunch of sheepish cows (but only six, not the twelve that you, in your ignorance, asserted above; you of all people should know to check your facts before posting) believed his silly nonsense because they were selected by the jury selection process to be ignorant of anything technical that might have allowed them to see through the lies told by the prosecution’s star liar.
Please, Bricker, there’s no way to paint this as “the jury is always right”. The police expert lied, the judge was pissed at having to try the case at all, and the jury sheeped it. Miscarriage of justice all around.
So based on what you’ve written above, I’m just going to assume you’ve never disagreed with the outcome of a court case. Including ones dealing with suspicious rape allegations and murdered ex-wives of famous athletes. Including any that you may have participated in, as a lawyer.
It must be great to have so much faith and confidence in the system. I wish I lived in your world.
You’re absolutely right about the jury being six people. My mistake.
However, that’s about all you got right. Unless you’re relying on another news source, this is what I read:
Their expert testified that from a given page, you have to physically click on it to get to it – as opposed to her testimony that it just popped up on its own. The expert did NOT testify, as you said, that typing the link was the only method to open it.
That testimony is not inherently flawed. Assuming he examined the code on the page, he could easily and correctly find that there is no scripting that would pop up the link.
I am intrigued by this statement from the story in the Hartford paper.
Sounds like the inverse of the old “got off on a technicality” routine, to me. (Give her a fair trial, and then we’ll hang her.)
(The defense witness showed up at trial with printouts of the actual logs of the events of the day, but were prevented from testifying, completely, on the objection of the prosecution that they had not been given access to those printed logs–the same logs that were on the computer hard drive in the possession of the prosecution.)
I’m also intersted in the fact that the pop-ups began at a point where the teacher had left the room. It seems a pretty nasty rush to judgment that she was the one who tripped into the pop-up nest when there were a bunch of unattended seventh-graders with access to the computer (that the school system had failed to secure). (The inadmissable printed logs had the time stamps, of course.)
It looks as much like incompetent counsel as anything else.
Oh, I don’t know. If the judge just refused to hear the defense witness say “It’s a print out of the evidence THEY are holding” maybe the counsel has a good shot at an appeal, rather than having to remove himself as incompetent. Since IANAL, I have no clue what this does to their appeal chances.
If that’s the case, it is an error that undermines confidence in the result of the trial, and SHOULD be addressed on appeal.
The grounds for appealing a guilty verdict by claiming ineffective assistance of counsel involve a high bar that must be met by the appellant. She must show both that her attorney’s error fell below that objective standard required for minimally competent representation and that she was substantially prejudiced by the error. Here, for once, it looks like she might actually be able to do that.
