2 CT Convictions

There were recently two court cases held here in Connecticut which have kind of struck me as either an absence of justice or misguided prosecutors. A case of two woman prosecuted for two different crimes with the same outcome, both guilty, neither of which feel right to me.

In the first case, a substitute teacher in Norwich CT was convicted of 4 counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child. She now faces up to 40 years in prison for this offense. So what is her crime? Was she convicted of improperly touching a child? No! Was she convicted of having an affair with a student? Using her power to coerce a child? No! She was the victim of an endless cycle of pornographic pop-up ads on an outdated school computer, with explicit instructions not to shut the computer off. 10 students were exposed to these pop ads, and they apparently had explicit content.

For any of you who have used the Internet for a while will probably remember those types of early porno ads, which kept cascading across your computer. They would not go away until you shut your computer off. My question was how effective was this tactic? I found them more annoying and would be less likely to actually patronize any site that was that intrusive into my web experience, but hey that was me and back then. So now, this poor woman, who seems to be a victim of an outdated computer, with outdated firewalls, (I hope that my son's school has a sufficient firewall, but honestly I have no idea) with incomplete instructions on what to do with the computer now faces more prison time than many hardened criminals who have been convicted of much more heinous crimes. It is a good thing that we are going to incarcerate this woman until she is 80, because obviously she is a porn queen who gets off showing obscene pop-up ads to minors. How ridiculous!!

The second issue is less crazy, but something about the case just fells wrong. A 33 year old, mother of 3 and former teacher was recently convicted of 2nd degree vehicular man slaughter, which means she was drunk, and faces 45 years in prison; 15 years for each person killed in the accident. She has a marijuana cigarette and a Percocet pill in the car, so it does not seem that this woman is a saint.

However, the passengers in the other car were riding in a convertible with the top down and not wearing their seat belts. This information was not allowed to be introduced into the trial, because anything that was done legal or illegal in another car hit by a drunk driver is inadmissible. But this just begs the question if they were belted in would they have been killed? I know I was not on the jury, I did not see any of the evidence, but something just does not feel right about this conviction and the possible punishment.

Don't get me wrong, if you drive drunk you deserve to go to jail. This woman is guilty and should go to jail, but how much should the other driver and passengers be negligent for their own death, considering they were violating CT law by not wearing their seat belts. The family of the victims said she deserves 45 years, that is obviously an emotional outburst. How much is reasonable? I don't know, but 45 years seems a bit excessive to me. Buy hey, that is just me.

What do you think?