Judge Orders Genarlow Wilson Freed From Prison; State Fights Back

Earlier this year, I mentioned the story of Genarlow Wilson (pictured), a teenage football star and outstanding student whose future looked bright before he was locked up for having consensual oral sex with a fellow high school student. Wilson, who was 17 at the time, got ten years, thanks to an archaic Georgia law.

Yesterday, Monroe County Superior Court Judge Thomas H. Wilson ordered that Wilson be freed, arguing that "Wilson's 10-year prison sentence 'would be viewed by society as "cruel and unusual" in the constitutional sense of disproportionality.' The judge also changed Wilson's felony conviction to a misdemeanor without the requirement that he register as a sex offender." Unfortunately, Wilson remains in jail because Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker has decided to appeal the ruling.

Baker argues that it is his "responsibility to follow the laws of Georgia as they are written, not how some may wish they were written." (You can read Baker's defense of his decision in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.) In this case, however, I tend to agree with civil rights veteran Rev. Joseph Lowery, who says to Baker (as quoted in the AJC), "You are expected to be more than some robot obeying the whims [and errors] of some heartless machine... Where is your conscience, that you would allow this travesty to occur on your watch?"

Hat Tip: My sister, Whitney

Image from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.