The boy was 17 and the girl was 15. They were videotaped while she was performing oral sex on him, apparently quite willingly. Now he’s two years into a 10 year stretch, with no parole — and his appeal was just denied:
Genarlow Wilson, 20, is serving a prison sentence that shocked his jury, elicited charges of racism from critics of the justice system and that even prosecutors and the State Legislature acknowledge is unjust.
He was sentenced to 10 years in prison without parole for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl at a New Year’s Eve party, an offense that constituted aggravated child molesting, even though Mr. Wilson himself was only 17.
With Mr. Wilson — a football player, honor student and the first homecoming king at Douglas County High School — nearing two years in prison, the Georgia Supreme Court declined last Friday to hear his appeal.
Mr. Wilson, who is black, is trapped in a legal vise intended to ensure severe penalties for child molesters and other sex offenders, navigating a maze of legal technicalities that for him seems to hold nothing but dead ends. Some critics of the sentence also say Mr. Wilson is caught in a system that metes out disproportionately harsh sentences to black defendants.
Among the factors giving this matter the not-so-faint odor of racism are these:
1. The age of consent in Georgia is 16.
2. In 2006, the Georgia Legislature amended the statute to provide that oral sex between an under-18-year-old and a 13-to-15-year-old is only a misdemeanor, with a maximum penalty of a year in jail. This revised statute would have thus made the defendant’s conduct a misdemeanor had he committed his crime after the statute’s enactment, but the statute expressly provided that it wasn’t retroactive.
3. Even at the time the act occurred, genital sex between an under-18-year-old and a 14-or-15-year-old was also a misdemeanor.
4. This defendant had no criminal record that would justify an especially long sentence.
It’s a good thing they didn’t have these laws in Shakespeare’s time, or Romeo and Juliet, who were both underage, would have been in big trouble. (And Shakespeare might have been accused of writing child porn.)
Have the administrators of the US legal system ( especially in Georgia) lost all touch with REALITY!? Does anyone in that system REMEMBER that “the law” was mankind’s attempt at creating “God’s law” on this earth? This ‘total insanity” that has Mr. Wilson in it’s grip….ranks right up there with the young Mother who had her young baby taken away for ONE YEAR because she called a “sex hotline” and innocently asked if it was “normal” for nursing Mothers to experience “sexual stimulation” during the baby’s act of nursing?
Lord save us from your followers. Good luck to all, Rollee
The judge that made thedecisions in this case should be investigated including his possible links to white supremecy groups.
This case should be investigated by the supreme court. A young man should not be penalized because there are idiots on the bench.
One would think that our elected officials and all their friends in the legal profession could come up with an Age of Consent (AoC) law that would not create perversions of justice such as this. Yet, hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear of yet another case where the very people AoC laws are supposedly “protecting” are instead being prosecuted under the AoC laws. The recent case in Utah comes to mind where a 13-year-old girl is being treated as both a victim and sex offender for the same act of having sex with her 12-year-old boyfriend.
Are they lawmakers in Utah so damn dumb that they couldn’t envision this happening when they passed that horribly misguided law? The bigger question is: do they really care? I think they don’t.
It’s my opinion that AoC laws aren’t really about “protecting” anyone. They are about controlling and suppressing teen sexuality.
I’m having the same problem..my daughter (15 ys. old)got pregnant by a 20 year old white male we are hispanic and the town we live in the police is white and he did not want to file now he wants to get custody of the child. We were told that we could refile on the charges and the police said he was not going to file.
I guess the law only works where they want it to.