G. M. weighs in as well:

... while Herb may not be a professional computer forensics expert, his 35+ years in his profession gives him more credibility than anyone else in this case. His inability to present his expert testimony was strictly an issue of the defense attorney's failure to disclose Herb's finding during pre-trial evidence discovery procedures.

I contacted Horner via e-mail and asked for his side of the story. He told me he had intended to bring laptops into the courtroom to re-create the pop-up porn storm that engulfed Julie Amero on the morning of Oct. 19, 2004. But the court would not give him unfettered access to the Net, and prosecutor David Smith objected to the introduction of evidence he was unfamiliar with. Horner writes:

I arrived at the court house with two laptops. Smith was not happy when he realized what I was going to do. I started the presentation in the form of a narrative, and Smith objected, stating he did not know of the malware defense that I had prepared.... I mentioned to the judge that I would give Smith everything I had. A milk crate full of Microsoft documentation on how the Internet Explorer worked. The file layouts of Internet cache. A copy of the programs I used and the reports.... The judge refused and mentioned that there was no time for that, now the trial must go on.... So with that I was only able to show a couple of slides to indicate what happened. One of most important things that happened here is that there was a REDIRECT to the initial porn hair site. I still stand by that.

Horner adds that he later met with talked to the computer forensics examiner for the state of Connecticut -- not Detective Mark Lounsbury, the prosecution's expert witness -- shortly before the June 2007 hearing during which and ordered a new trial. He writes: