COLUMBUS – An appeals court has upheld the felony conviction of a former substitute teacher who was sentenced to three months in jail for showing a movie including graphic sex and violence to a high school class.
Sheila Kearns previously apologized. She said she didn’t watch “The ABCs of Death” before showing it to her Spanish classes at Columbus’ East High School in April 2013. The movie has 26 chapters depicting grisly death, such as “E is for Exterminate.”
Kearns was convicted of disseminating matter harmful to juveniles. A 2-1 decision from the Tenth District Court of Appeals affirmed that last week.
It is a first-degree misdemeanor under Ohio law to disseminate matter harmful to a juvenile, but if the material is found to be obscene, the violation increases to a degree felony and the three-judge panel’s majority found the movie met the definition of obscene and the evidence sufficient to lead to Kearns’ felony convictions.
The dissenting judge wrote that neither of the two students who testified in the case stated they saw the segments of the movie that authorities labeled obscene and that, taken as a whole, it wasn’t clear the movie was obscene.
Attorney Geoffrey Oglesby says that Kearns’ poor judgment was unintentional. He says they’ll ask the appeals court to reconsider and might take the case to the Ohio Supreme Court.
Kearns was serving as a “permanent substitute teacher” when she showed the students parts of the nearly two-hour feature film created by 26 directors from around the world. Each director was given a letter of the alphabet, asked to choose a word beginning with the letter, and then created a short tale of death related to the chosen word.
The court stated the vignettes included very graphic violence, sex, child molestation, and rape.
She was also sentenced to three years of community and was required to surrender her teaching certificate.