Incredible. I hope this kid gets some form of reparation.
and We thought being DF was Bad
by purplesofa 16 Replies latest jw friends
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purplesofa
Genarlow Wilson is free ... but others are not Published on: 10/28/07
Several months ago, Genarlow Wilson was not optimistic Georgia courts would ever rule in his behalf. Interviewed in June at the Burruss Correctional Training Center in Forsyth, he pondered his chances.
"I'm really praying for the best, but at the same time I'm expecting the worst," he said.
Rich Addicks/AJC (ENLARGE) Genarlow Wilson smiles Friday after being released from jail after almost three years. If he had pled guilty, he would have been on the sex offender registry for life. On Friday, Wilson got the best. He won his freedom after the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that "... Wilson's sentence is grossly disproportionate to his crime and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under both the Georgia and the United States Constitutions." Later that day, Wilson left the prison, flanked by his attorney, B.J. Bernstein, and his mother, Juannessa Bennett.
Wilson, who served nearly three years of a 10-year sentence, may be the most extreme example of a teenager entrapped by the state's regressive sex laws. The conduct that led to his felony conviction took place at a sordid 2003 New Year's Eve Party, when he was 17 and the girl just two years his junior.
But Wilson is not the only young offender caught in a maze of draconian sex laws. Many young people are trapped on the state sex offender registry for nonviolent and consensual sex acts as teens.
The registry is a prison sentence in its own right, fencing even low-risk offenders off from most of society. Georgia law bars offenders from living or loitering within 1,000 feet of schools, day care centers, parks, rec centers or skating rinks. Last year, the General Assembly added churches, swimming pools and school bus stops to the list, and, for the first time, placed limits on where offenders could work. Now, sex offenders can't hold jobs near schools, child care centers or churches.
In his long journey toward freedom, Wilson turned down plea deals that would have sprung him from jail because he felt that he'd never be free if he were on the sex offender registry. "I just don't feel I'm a sexual predator," he said.
Those sweeping limits have stranded other young offenders with virtually no place to go. Also convicted at age 17 of having oral sex with a 15 -year-old, Jeffery York, 23, of Polk County has resorted to sleeping in a camper van in the woods to comply with the registry. When she was 17, Wendy Whitaker, 28, of Harlem had oral sex with a teen about to turn 16; her sodomy conviction landed her on the registry and forced her and her husband to move twice already.
Now that the Supreme Court has issued a common-sense ruling that sex between teens is not the equivalent of adults preying on children, it's the Legislature's turn to act on reason. Lawmakers must amend the sex offender registry law so that it distinguishes between two immature high school kids hooking up at a party to a pedophile molesting the toddler next door.
Teens convicted of consensual sex acts are not a risk to society, a fact that the General Assembly conceded when it changed the law under which Wilson went to prison. In February 2005, a Douglas County jury convicted Wilson of aggravated child molestation for having oral sex with a classmate about two years younger than him. The conviction hinged on one fact: the two-year age gap.
The gap allowed prosecutors to charge Wilson with aggravated child molestation, which, by a strange twist in Georgia law, carried a mandatory minimum 10-year sentence that could not be commuted by the parole board or the governor.
A year after Wilson's conviction, the Legislature admitted the unfairness of criminalizing sexual behavior between two consenting high school students and rewrote the law so that similar behavior is now a misdemeanor, punishable by no more than 12 months in jail. Yet, the Legislature did nothing to help the teens tripped up by the old law.
The public understands that teenage sex, sexual misconduct, violent sexual abuse and sexual predation are not the same thing and deserve different treatments under the law.
"For families in Georgia, the differences between those things matters a lot," said attorney Lisa Kung, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights. "Through this Supreme Court ruling, the public finally understands what these laws can do to a Genarlow Wilson, or a Wendy Whitaker or a Jeffery York."
Wilson acknowledges his behavior at the raucous New Year's Eve party, where participants drank and smoked marijuana, was hardly model conduct. "Just being a teenager, you make a lot of mistakes, but you ought to learn from them. And I think I have."
With this Supreme Court ruling, the General Assembly ought to learn from its mistakes and stop treating erring teens as dangerous predators.
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AuldSoul
You read it correctly, folks. Until recently, oral sex (a pleasure that never results in unwanted pregnancy) was considered worse in Georgia than conventional sex.
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WTWizard
Who is making these laws and copying Ted Jaracz's work? Lazy lousy stupid good for nothing bums they are. Plagiarizing laws is not cool. Especially when those making them are 98-year-old fogeys that think sex between people under the age of 98 is immoral and should be illegal.
I say we should make the age of consent for sex be that no one has the right to force, threaten, coerce, or trick anyone into consent. This includes those in the Tower that use their bogus authority to force a child to have sex with them while on hounding calls or even at the door. And it should be made much worse an offense if the victim is coerced into silence after the event--that is what does most of the damage!
When are these old fogeys going to allow teenagers to consent to sex with each other? I would like to see what would happen to them if their great-great grandchildren couldn't find a marriage mate or a date because of the application of their stupid laws. Rape is one thing--consensual sex, especially when between two teenagers, is quite another. We do not need any barriers between people that consensually want sex with each other. Even as the barrier of homosexuality is coming down, we don't need to erect age barriers so that those of us in our 30s and up are stuck with unending celibacy on account of some stupid laws.
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dinah
I'm about to go read more of the story, but my gut is telling me the girl was white. Her parents probably flipped cos she blew a black boy and called the cops.
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Makena1
Bingo! http://www.abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=3782694 The case has always been about much more than age or consent -- it was also about race. Wilson is black and his sex partner is white. "The good thing about this case is that at least it resolves the issue for Genarlow Wilson for the moment," said Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School. "But the fact that we continue to have these incidents remains for me a problem in trying to achieve racial justice in America." Today represents a victory for Genarlow Wilson, but some like Ogletree say it's also a reminder that we still have a long way to go. Sorry about the lack of formatting -using firefox and not IE
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purplesofa
Wilson is black and his sex partner is white
Im so glad he is out and free.
dinah,
I never suspected that, never gave it any thought....but it makes sense now.
purps