This is an interesting article on the subject...
The Harsh Wages of Sin: Why Genarlow Wilson is Languishing in Prison
By SHERRY F. COLB
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Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007
Last month, the Supreme Court of Georgia denied a motion to reconsider the criminal conviction of Genarlow Wilson, a young African-American man who is serving a mandatory ten-year prison sentence for aggravated child molestation.
Such a development would not ordinarily signal a gross injustice. When people are convicted of crime, and no procedural errors precede the convictions, appeals (along with motions to reconsider) routinely fail. The crime of conviction, moreover, appears - by its name - to be a serious one for which a ten-year prison sentence could well be appropriate.
Appearances, however, can be deceptive.
Based on the evidence - which included a videotape of the crime while in progress - the conduct for which Wilson now spends his days behind bars was consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he, Wilson, was himself only 17 years old.
Readers may recall the case of Marcus Dixon, an 18-year-old African-American man who was originally sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for aggravated child molestation in connection with having intercourse (which the jury did not conclude was ****) with a 15-year-old girl. In Dixon's case, the conviction and sentence were overturned on appeal, because the Georgia Supreme Court concluded that the intent of Georgia law was to classify conduct such as Dixon's as misdemeanor statutory ****, for which the maximum sentence is one year. In the case of oral sex, however, there was arguably no room for this construction of Georgia law, so Wilson was unable to benefit from the Dixon precedent.
Because Wilson and a 15-year-old girl engaged in nonprocreative sex, his conduct fell squarely within the terms of the aggravated child molestation statute. And though the Georgia legislature subsequently passed a "Romeo and Juliet Law" limiting sentences in cases like Wilson's to one year of incarceration, this law was not written to apply retroactively.
Crime and Harm
If we did not know that Wilson's disturbing predicament had arisen in the United States, we might assume that we were hearing about a case in a theocracy. His case, however, sheds light on a disturbing fact regarding our criminal justice system, a reality about which we have grown complacent: people in the U.S. are routinely condemned to spend years in brutal prisons as punishment for behavior that harms no one. As Sam Harris persuasively argues in his book, The End of Faith, and as others have also argued, this treatment of victimless crime is symptomatic of a criminal law that is strongly influenced by religious views about sexual morality.
When I begin my course in constitutional criminal procedure, I ask students for a definition of "crime." Though responses vary, the typical answer is that crime is a harm that criminals in our society inflict on their victims. Everyone acknowledges, of course, that criminal legislation ultimately defines what is or is not a crime, but the aspiration of the criminal law - by my students' lights - is to identify harmful behavior and try to put a stop to it, through prohibitions and penalties.
