It depends. I seem to remember plenty of states these days have reciprocal disclosure requirements.
No.
For the prosecution to withhold exculpatory evidence from the defense is an error of constitutional dimension (Brady v. Maryland). But many, perhaps most, states have rules that require reciprocal discovery.
In general, these things make sense. If your defense will rely upon an alibi, it’s not fair to simply be able to spring it at trial; the state should have proper notice so they can investigate it.
If Smith uttered words substantially similar to these in a court of law, it is perjury. Installing a screensaver or a browser toolbar on a Windows machine can cause uncontrollable pornographic popups. Installing any software, in fact, can cause the popups. Claria Corporation’s Gator and Exact Advertising’s BargainBuddy software are extremely well-known examples even among otherwise uninformed people. Gator in specific often gets installed without the user’s knowledge, and it isn’t the only one. There are very plausible ways to get them without “physically click[ing] on” anything remotely related to porn.
If the prosecution used his “expert” testimony in court, the trial is fatally flawed because he is incompetent beyond belief.
Thanks, Bricker. I know that criminal trial rules in the US are by default very slanted towards the defense, and rightly so, to compensate for the other overwhelming advantages the state has in resources, expertise, experience, credibility, etc. I guess I just assumed that this was another such instance.
On the other hand, unless I’m terribly mistaken, there’s absolutely no rule that requires the defense to furnish the prosecution with its defense strategy or theory of the case. If tomndebb’s correct to say that the excluded evidence was simply a printout version of evidence on the computer’s hard drive, a hard drive that the prosecution had plenty of opportunity to go over and must have known that computer data would be used at trial, why would the printout logs be excluded if they’re simply replications of something that’s already in evidence? (Assuming, of course, that the computer hard drive was part of the body of evidence, which I think is a safe assumption given that a witness for the prosecution gave testimony based on the website code.)
EDIT:
Perhaps the website code was in evidence, but not the data on the hard drive. Something that would seemingly be pretty poor legal strategy for the defense if part of their case relies on the computer logs. So it may be dumb, but still possible.
I’m twice the lawyer that aclubs is, having watched both My Cousin Vinny and Legally Blonde. Wouldn’t the prosecution have to prove mens rea, which is to say that not only was the teacher surfing porn, but she had premeditated showing it to the kids? Obviously this is not the case, but I don’t know why.
Again, not necessarily. The crime involved may be strict liability (in which case all one has to show is that the person did it), such as statutory rape, or may require varying standards of intent, such as premeditation, recklessness or negligence. Without seeing the statute I could not tell you which was required here, but I am guessing premeditation isn’t the answer.
I’ll buy that.
Hmmmm. It requires a person to “wilfully or unlawfully cause or permit any child…”
I honestly have no clue what standard that equates to. I learned Crim Law pretty much through the Model Penal Code which has different terminology and I have not really practiced Criminal Law since.
Outraged Morally Indignant Voice: They are if we SAY they are! And we’ll make damned SURE of it if we have to!!!eleven!
Speak for yourself, dude! My parts are very clean. I wash them frequently…with lots of slippery soap…
(In other words, I agree with you. This is beyond stupid. The kids are IMHO going to be much more harmed by the stink over this than the images themselves. Has anyone figured out WHY nudity is harmful, yet? I’ll admit, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I don’t get the logic there. As a lifelong human, I find nudity–and the acceptance thereof–to be rather relaxing…much more so than the alternative.)
You don’t know that. The expert presumably examined both the web page and the machine in question. His testimony would then be based on the fact that there were no screensavers, browser toolbars, or adware installed that could have caused the browser to navigate to the site.
You cannot draw any conclusions about his testimony until you’ve read it all.
Remember that there’s a difference between “in evidence” and “in possession of the prosecution.” It’s not terribly meaningful to place a hard drive “in evidence,” if you’re offering the data that’s allegedly on it. If he wanted to use the logs as evidence or as foundation for testimony, court rules most probably would have required prior notice to the prosecution.
Now, you can usually satisfy that notice requirement with a sweeping declaration about every bit of data that’s on the hard drive, if you don’t want to spill your theory of the case ahead of time.
See? I learn something new everyday.
Helpful too, because I just started as a paralegal today. 
Bricker: Note the conditional in the first sentence of the post of mine you quoted. It’s possible the news people misquoted him or took it so badly out of context it is effectively a misquote, but it is very difficult to imagine any context which could make the exact words he was quoted as saying a true statement. It is like quoting a lawyer saying “Juries disregard the law involved regardless of instruction.” in an article on jury nullification.
Badly out of context would be the key factor here.
Here’s one idealized possibility that rehabilitates him:
Q: Is it possible that those sites came up without any mouse clicks?
A: No. You have to physically click on it to get to those sites. I think the evidence is overwhelming that she did intend to access those Web sites. I examined both the browser history, the registry, and the entire hard drive carefully. The browser history was not altered, and every page visited was devoid of Javascript or other scripted pop-ups or HTML redirects. There were no instances of “adware” or “malware” installed that would have caused the browser to initiate that page load. To be sure, I examined cached versions of the pages visited and verified that the lack of pop-ups found during my examination was also true at the same time the incident occurred.
Sure, Bricker, but let’s think about this supposition of yours for a minute. The implication is that she deliberately showed the pop-ups to the children. On purpose. For what purpose? We know not, but you have to assume she was getting her jollies off in some way. In which case she’s essentially a pedophile. Which there might be evidence of on the hard drive of her personal computer at home or elsewhere in her home. Or anecdotal evidence from people in her past. And it seems to me that if she had guilty knowledge of this and its probable discovery during the course of a police investigation, you have to think she’s have been a lot more eager to take that deal the DA offered her. But she wasn’t.
At bottom, one has to do an awful lot of “supposing” to arrive at your position justifying the DAs actions. Far simpler and more reasonable to assume the DA is the witch-hunter he appears to be. Occam wins again.
Here are the observations, solicited outside the courtroom, following the trial, by the defense witness and the prosecution witness:
The Strange Case of Ms. Julie Amero: Commentary by Mr. Herb Horner
The Strange Case of Ms. Julie Amero: More information in the interlude
The Strange Case of Ms. Julie Amero: Commentary by Detective Mark Lounsbury
From the links provided by tomndebb
Which seems to contradict what the manufacturers of the software say.
Not at all.
The implication is that she deliberately looked at websites like meetlovers.com and femalesexual.com, and she carelessly, negligently, failed to ensure that the kids would not be able to see them too. We assume she was looking at them for her own purposes, not that she was a pedophile or even an ephebophile. She failed to protect the kids under her care from seeing these images, and was charged with “risk of injury to a minor.”
It’s you that are adding the ad-hoc assumptions about her being a pedophile to the mix, and then complaining when the evidence wasn’t adduced to support a theory that only you have advanced. The Occam solution is that she was careless in her own web surfing habits when the kids were present.
That may be. But what ComputerCOP apparently does is glean the list of visited URLs from the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs. It’s my understanding – open to correction if I am wrong – that for a URL to appear in that key, it must have been typed into the URL address field, not clicked-on, spawned by a Javascript command, or be the subject of an HTTP redirect from another page.
So the presence of meetlovers.com and femalesexual.com in that registry key creates a rebuttable presumption that they were typed in to the address bar.
Right?