They Dont't Play Fair In Georgia

Did the white legislators change the law in the article
below so that white kids wouldn't have to go
through what an African American youth is facing.
It seems so in light that after changing the law they
refused to make it retroactive. Read the story and
feel free to comment.


Nothing could have prepared Genarlow Wilson for what happened as he neared the end of his days in high school. He became prom prince, homecoming king — and a child molester.A 17-year-old star football player and honor student, Wilson was arrested on the day he was supposed to take his SATs after police saw a video showing him receiving oral sex from a 15-year-old girl at a 2003 New Year's Eve party. Under Georgia law, the encounter constituted "aggravated child molestation."

The girl said the act was consensual, but in February 2005, Wilson was sentenced to 10 years in prison and a lifetime on Georgia's sex offender registry.The following year, Georgia legislators changed the law to make most consensual sex between teenagers a misdemeanor rather than a felony, with a sentence of no more than 12 months in jail.Yet Wilson, now 21, remains in a legal limbo. Today — having spent two years, three months and 25 days in prison — he is to appear in court to hear a judge rule on a habeas corpus petition seeking his immediate release on constitutional grounds.

"It truly is cruel and unusual punishment," his attorney, B.J. Bernstein, said last week outside the Monroe County courthouse after a hearing before Superior Court Judge Thomas Wilson. The odds of Wilson's release appear to be long. When Georgia legislators revised the law, they declined to make it retroactive so it would apply to Wilson. Then the Georgia Supreme Court rejected his motion for an appeal on the basis that legislators had chosen not to make the law retroactive. This year, a bill that would have allowed judges to review earlier sentences stalled in the Georgia Senate.

Last week, Bernstein argued it was wrong for Georgia to keep Wilson in prison for 10 years and on the sex offender registry now that state law had changed, but Paula K. Smith, the state's senior assistant attorney general, insisted the new law did not apply to Wilson. "The General Assembly passed a statute and they did not make it retroactive," Smith said. "They had the prerogative to do so and they did not." As his attorneys have trudged back and forth between the Legislature and the courts, Wilson's story has become a super-charged Southern morality tale, a lesson in the legal complexities of harsher sentences for sex offenders — particularly when they are young black men.





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