Thank God. Common sense seems to have prevailed somewhat in the great state of Connecticut:

The opportunity for a new day in court marks a reversal in fortune for Amero who faced sentencing this week that could have landed her in jail for forty years. Amero was convicted of endangering children after several students saw pornographic thumbnails on a computer screen.

Despite testimony that the monitor did not face the children, that Amero asked for help from other teachers and a vice principal, and that the schools IT administrator allowed the school’s filtering software to expire, Amero was found guilty.

Security experts around the internet have rallied to Amero’s defense, arguing that it is clear that the computer Amero was using was infested with pop-up software, but the school’s IT administrator told the jury he’d never heard of such software.

Judge Hillary B. Strackbein granted the motion for a new trial filed by Amero’s new lawyer, William F. Dow, after a state laboratory’s examination of the computer’s hard drive after the trial contradicted evidence presented in court.

“The jury may have relied, at least in part, on that faulty information,” said Judge Hillary B. Strackbein, according to the Associated Press.

Eric Sites, the CTO of the security software company Sunbelt who examined a copy of the hard drive for the defense, hailed Wednesday’s ruling.

“For a real computer expert, it was easy to see there were inaccuracies in the testimony given by the prosecution’s expert witness, and I think the pros was truly led astray by the assertiveness of their witness,” Sites said.

The IT administrator of the school said he had never heard of software that flings porn popups at you?

Wow. Talk about covering your ass. After all, if the security software was updated earlier than 5 years before this happened, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

Anyway, hopefully this will be the last we hear about this ridiculous case. Honestly, I can’t see why it has gotten this far to begin with.