TWO YEARS: That is how long it took our "justice" system to fix an atrocious sentencing that served anything but justice. Genarlow Wilson was finally released Friday after two years of a 10-year prison sentence. Though the end result was finally made right, his case demonstrates incompetence within the legal system. The sequence of events was not simply bad luck -- it resulted from poor judges, lawyers and legislation when easy solutions were well within grasp.
When Wilson was 17, he and several others were caught on tape having consensual oral sex with a 15-year old at a 2003 New Year's Eve party. Though she was just two years younger than him, because she was under the age of consent Wilson was convicted of aggravated child molestation. Provisions do exist for consent to be taken into account when the two parties are similar in age, but they only apply for sexual intercourse. Prosecutors offered plea deals to 21-year-old Wilson and his co-defendants, but while co-defendants accepted deals, Wilson did not want the label of being a "sex offender" or "child molester." Instead he went to trial where he was declared guilty by a jury that did not know that aggravated child molestation carried a 10-year minimum mandatory sentence.
Since then, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld a decision Friday that Wilson's punishment was cruel and unusual under state and the U.S. Constitution. After two years in prison, Genarlow Wilson was allowed to return home to his family.
Clearly, Wilson made a mistake. According to testimony, Wilson and his friends drank bourbon and smoked marijuana at the party. They may have taken advantage of the situation of an intoxicated, underage girl. Such crimes should not be taken with a grain of salt, but no one believes the crime deserved 10 years in prison -- not even the state of Georgia. The year after Wilson was sentenced, the Georgia General Assembly changed the law to make consensual sex between teenagers a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of one year in prison. Strangely, they wrote the law so it could not be applied retroactively to Wilson's case.
Lawyers and judges in the state of Georgia failed to act properly in Wilson's case from day one. The letter of the law, rather than the spirit of the law, was applied in this case. The harsh mandatory 10-year minimum sentence was intended to keep child predators in prison, not to punish teenagers who had a lapse in judgment. The prosecutors in this case should not have applied these charges to Wilson in the first place and, instead, should have charged him more appropriately for the crime he committed.
The second error was the writing of the legislation. It is unconceivable to me what could have been gained (besides the avoidance of retrial requests) by not allowing the law to be applied retroactively. No justification of this aspect of the law has been made by legislators of that state through the media and, likely, none exists. If this act is only punishable by a year today, there is no reason it should be punishable by 10 years just a year ago.
Even the Georgia Supreme Court decision, the very decision that freed Wilson, makes one shake his or her head. In a case with well-documented injustices, the Georgia Supreme Court only ruled 4-3 to uphold a lower court's ruling that the sentence was cruel and unusual. Justice George H. Carley argued in a dissenting opinion that the ruling would set a dangerous precedent. "Any and all defendants who were ever convicted of aggravated child molestation and sentenced for a felony... similar to Wilson are entitled... to be completely discharged from lawful custody," Carley wrote.
To Carley, the potential of a bad precedent is more important than setting right Wilson's case. That decision shows complete ignorance of the consequences of law. The 10-year sentence was clearly disproportionate with the crime, but it seems that Carley did not understand that a young man's life hung in the balance of his opinion. Nor did he consider the emotional impact of the wrongful sentence within both Wilson's family and the community. While Carley surely could recite the trivial details of Georgia law, he clearly needs to reach outside of himself to find an ounce of compassion.
Genarlow Wilson committed a crime, but became the victim. He became a victim of overly ambitious prosecutors, he became a victim of poorly written legislation, and he almost became a victim of judges without any emotion or sense of reality. Unfortunately, these judges or legislators face no retribution or prison time -- they continue to live comfortably with neither chance nor hope of improvement.
Rajesh Jain's column runs on Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at rjain@cavalierdaily.com.
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