Posted on 06/11/2007 11:05:28 AM PDT by John Cena
ATLANTA — A Georgia judge on Monday voided a 10-year sentence given to a man who was convicted while a teenager of having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl.
Monroe County Superior Court Judge Thomas Wilson voided Genarlow Wilson's sentence and dropped it to misdemeanor aggravated child molestation with a 12-month sentence, plus credit for time served. Under the new ruling, he will not be required to register as a sex offender
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Don’t get me wrong, I hate child molesters, these creepy predator types preying on little kids. I think those guys ought to be burned alive, which makes it pretty tough for me considering the fact that I am a public defender and part of my job is representing these people when I get assigned their cases. They only make up a relatively small percentage of my caseload, but it’s still way too many. But I have to say, some of these sex crimes aren’t that serious. A lot of these people having to register these days are not predators. A lot of them are just young guys, normal red blooded American males, who for some reason or another will get mixed up with some girl who is not quite old enough, often it’s only by a year or two or even just a couple of months. Usually they aren’t even guys ought there looking for younger girls. Circumstances of their lives put them in contact with someone, they hook up, and they get in trouble for it. I’ve seen a lot of cases where the two really felt like they were in love, even cases where they end up later getting married. Often they’re only a few years apart and at the same maturity levels.
I just don’t look at guys in this circumstance the same as I do some creepy jerk who gets off molesting innocent little kids. But a lot of these guys end up going to prison, and every one of them will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of their lives. It really sucks to have to register as a sex offender. I think I might rather die than have to do that. Their neighbors are going to know about it. They’re employers are going to know about it. Local law enforcement will know about it and harass the crap out of them every chance they get. The registration requirements seem to be designed to make it nearly impossible for people to be 100% in compliance and we are always getting new “failure to register cases” where the guy may have just registered a couple of days late or something. There are so many traps and pitfalls for these guys. For instance, in my state they have to tell the authorities ten days before they quit their jobs. Most of them don’t know they’re going to quit ten days before they do it. And there is hardly anywhere they can actually live where they won’t be within several thousand feet of one of the growing list of types of places they have to live several thousand feet from.
Enforcement has gotten a lot tougher on these guys too. The feds are even getting involved now when it seems like they never used to. I’ve had three clients in the past few months that the feds have ended up charging for failure to register. More and more people are getting charged, and the laws are getting tougher and tougher. There’s no “whittling away” to it. Exactly the opposite is happening. And this isn’t just in my state, it’s happening everywhere. Politicians are all jumping on the bandwagon, making things tougher on child molesters. For the most part this is a good thing, but we’re going a little nutty with it and it’s causing some results most never envisioned. So me personally, I’m glad to see Georgia back off slightly and make it such that where the actor is under eighteen and he has sex with a teenage girl whose only a couple of years younger than him (or even his same age), he’s not going to have to go to prison for a long time and have to register as a sex offender the rest of his life. It used to be that way in my state and I wish they’d go back to the day when really minor sex offenses like that where the one convicted is not a predator were misdemeanors that didn’t require lifelong sex offender registration.
I don’t really want to whittle away at the laws, make it okay to have sex with younger and younger people. I just don’t like us going nuts with the laws, going way too far, and excessively punishing teens for fairly normal teenage behavior. I little jail, some other punishment, some counseling maybe, but prison and lifelong sex offender registration for consensual sex with a person around your own age? That’s crazy.
Setting up a hysteria while giving a wink and a nod is not right either. Either prohibit the acts (beyond experimentation) or sanctify them.
Considering promiscuous teen activity "normal" does not help the teens or society.
How many of these "really in love" couples are together in a year, two years, five years?
How many of them have kids? How many of them have multiple kids? How many of them have abortions?
I agree that we should change bad laws. That doesn’t help the poor slobs who are already getting screwed because of bad laws though. Like I said before, if your kid or someone you really care about were in a similar situation as this boy, you’d feel differently about this. You’d want his lawyer to do whatever he possibly could to save the boy. You’d want the judge to reconsider the sentence. You wouldn’t call him an “activist judge” if he set it aside. You’d think he did the right thing and think of him as a decent man. I don’t know whether this judge had jurisdiction to do what he did. Our judges in my jurisdiction probably couldn’t get away with that if the State appealed his ruling. My off the cuff guess is that his latest decision will get overturned on appeal. Then boy would have to hope for clemency or a pardon. If he doesn’t get that he’ll spend most of his youth in prison and have to register as a sex offender, for having consensual sex with someone around his own age.
As for the comments about advocating appeals and jury nullification, I guess I can understand opposition to jury nullification, even though I’m all for it in certain cases, but I don’t see how you can be opposed to appeals. That’s been part of our system as long as we have been a country. It was part of the colonial system before that, and the right of appeal has been a part of the systems we based our judicial system on for hundreds of years. The Constitution grants the Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction and every state constitution sets up appellate courts for hearing appeals from trial courts. What is conservative about being against appeals? Again, you’d change your tune if you felt you or someone you care about was was screwed in a trial court. Jury nullification used to be a part of our system, and still is to some degree, but that I’ll leave for another post in another thread.
Wilson received the mandatory sentence for the crime that he was convicted.
You do realize that the 2 victims were black also, don't you?
Isn't a black girl who says she was raped deserve the same justice as a white person?
Howzabout you imagine your daughters in a similar situation.
(Why is the girl not the rapist?) Because she was not of age and he was of age, according to GA law. Under 16 vs over 16. Ever heard the term “jail bait”?
Isn't that an unfounded assumption? I'm sure there are plenty of 15 year-olds with money
No, we don’t have to sanctify anything. We can just try to make our punishments fit the crimes. Would up to a year in jail be a “wink and a nod?” I don’t think so. We can have meaningful punishments that deter folks without going overboard.
“Considering promiscuous teen activity “normal” does not help the teens or society.”
Making it a crime as bad or worse than crimes like burglary, grand theft, aggravated assault, etc., does not help the teens or society either. It is not behavior we want to encourage. It is however behavior that has been going on since the beginning of time. It’s one of those things we can expect to happen on a regular basis no matter what laws we have in place. We should try to discourage it, but prison and lifelong sex offender registration? That’s just overkill that will cause us more problems than it solves. Prison is expensive. People tend to come out of prison worse than they were when they went in, especially when you stick some teenage boy in prison who is likely to be subjected to homosexual rape and all other manner of abuse. And making people register as sex offenders who are not predators is counterproductive too. These people are not likely to be particularly productive members of society. They’re already pariahs as felons, but it’s even worse for them because prospective employers and people in their communities will think of them as sicko perverts and not want to have anything to do with them. It’s really hard for them to get ahead in legitimate society. The temptation to try to get ahead by less than legal means has to be really high for them. It’s not like they have a lot to lose. I’m not at all saying we should do away with sex offender registration, but we should use a little common sense and good judgment in determining who has to register.
“How many of these “really in love” couples are together in a year, two years, five years?”
Hardly any of them, but that really isn’t relevant. That’s going to be the case with any teen “love.”
“How many of them have kids? How many of them have multiple kids? How many have abortions?”
Some sexually active teens have kids. Some have abortions. Teens shouldn’t have sex. People in general shouldn’t have sex outside of marriage. But again, I’m not advocating teen sex, or sex outside of wedlock in general. I’m just saying that prison and lifelong sex offender registration is over the top punishment for consensual sex between people around the same age.
OK. What about a 50 year-old man? Is she capable of consenting to sex with him?
Oh look, a strawman.
How do his grades count for anything? He broke the law— both civil and moral. She did too, but she gets off because the law considers her a minor.
I am objecting to the not-so-subtle bias infused into this article by mentioning that he is an “honor student”. I’m playing with semantics by pointing out that his deed was NOT honorable.
Did she offer this service? Or, did he coerce her into it? I fail to see what the woman ever gets out of this practice. It seems that all of the pleasure belongs to the man. That is why he is dis-honorable and selfish.
Someone earlier on this thread said that no one had ever been convicted of this. That is patently untrue because I had an employee who spent a year in jail (out of a sentence of three) for this in Wisconsin, and he wasn’t the only one so sentenced.
I really am shockedatthe attitudedisplayed on this thread. There are many here who seem to think that it is this young man’s “right” to seek his pleasure where he can find it with no regard for the consequences to the girl, or to his own future. I certainly hope you are not raising your own children with that attitude, or this society is doomed.
I repeat: Keep it zipped.
The jurors said they were outraged by the sentence. He's either guilty or not, the sentence doesn't matter. Some said they wouldn't have convicted him if they knew what the sentence was.
Gee, makes you feel good that your fellow citizens have that power whether you are guilty or not.
Point is that he was acquitted of a rape that I believe he did and convicted of a crime the jury believed he did and now their crying about his sentence and trying to turn it into a racial issue when all involved were black.
Another predator back on the streets. He'll be on oprah and with jessee and al and have a book deal. Let's not forget gma.
Then civilization codified what was considered to be right and wrong. And while different regions of the world established their local customs, there were some universal concepts.
Somewhere in the 20th century, the Sex Positive Agenda got momentum from Reich, Kinsey, and Feminists. They say we should not make any moral judgments on sexual pairings regardless of sex, age, relation, marital status, number, or species of partner(s). They see sexual release as a birthright that everyone should exercise with anyone and everyone. This is contrary to the historical record. The dawn of a new age.
The genie isn’t going back in the bottle but kids in America were not always this promiscuous in schools and certainly the schools and media did not encourage it to the degree they do today.
However, you are parsing the meaning out of the English language. If one attains the title of "Professional Engineer", it is a different meaning than saying that one is in engineering as a profession. By the same token, the "Honor Student" title is something that this young man earned, and may properly - under the rules of English - be applied in describing him in this case.
You state that you are objecting to the not-so-subtle bias in the article, but your words do not convey this meaning when you dismember the language haphazardly to support your point.
From your post:
I really am shockedatthe attitudedisplayed on this thread. There are many here who seem to think that it is this young man’s “right” to seek his pleasure where he can find it with no regard for the consequences to the girl, or to his own future. I certainly hope you are not raising your own children with that attitude, or this society is doomed.
I have said absolutely nothing resembling the attitude you address in the above quote. For you to insinuate that I support or (worse) promulgate this attitude to my own children is, frankly, insulting. It is also a sign of a poorly thought out argument. "Keep it zipped" can be applied to more than one's trousers - and equally applies when spewing without basis.
He’s likely to end up in the sack with Oprah.
As I said in another post, I’d bet there were no fathers to any of those involved.
I have daughters, and I have imagined that. I wouldn’t like it at all. That’s why I try to teach my children to be good, honorable, moral people who use good sense. Will my children have sex before they get married? Realistically, probably so. Will they have sex as teenagers? As much as I don’t want that to happen, it’s pretty likely to happen. Statistically a very high percentage of teens have sex. I know I did when I was a teenager, but mostly I just thought about it, constantly. I would be very surprised and extremely disappointed if I were ever to learn that any of my daughters were out “whoring around” at parties having sex with all sorts of guys. I doubt that happens very often though with teens who have good parents who are doing their jobs. Unfortunately there are a lot of terrible parents out there though. I know a little about that. I’m a small town public defender and one of the many things I do is represent every single juvenile who gets in trouble in my county whose parents do not hire them private counsel, so I end up representing better than 95% of them. Most of the teenage girls I deal with it seems are sexually active. Many start at a very young age. Too often their parents are trashy people who were screw ups when they were younger (and still are), a bunch of selfish lame brain drug addled losers who do not care about their kids enough to actually parent them, not that they have what it takes to be great parents even if they tried. The longer I do this the more I think that perhaps forced sterilization isn’t such a bad thing after all in certain cases. I’m only halfway kidding about that.
If my 15 year old daughter had sex with a 17 year old boy would I want him strung from the highest tree with the shortest rope? I suppose it depends a lot on what happened. If he did something like spike her drink and take advantage of her while she was passed out, I’d want him nailed hard. If it was purely consensual, I’d be very upset and would want the kid to get in trouble, but not in a whole lot more trouble than my daughter would be in with me. I have smart kids. I trust them to use good sense as they get older. They need to be held accountable for their bad actions. If they do something wrong I don’t blame it all on the other kids they were with. You know whenever I have a group of juvenile clients who do something wrong it seems like most all of the parents come in my office and tell me their kid is a good kid who just got in with the wrong crowd. It’s always the other kids’ fault. I say b.s. to that. I won’t cut my kids that kind of slack. I’ll hold them accountable for their actions, because I want them to learn to to take responsibility for their actions. Mostly I represent adults. My frequent fliers, the ones who will get in trouble over and over again, tend to be incapable of taking responsibility for their actions. It’s always someone else’s fault. They’re always in the wrong place at the wrong time, always with the wrong crowd, or the police are always picking on them. I try my hardest to get them to take responsibility for their actions because I know that until they learn to do that I am going to see them over and over again. And of course I’ll see their kids over in juvenile court until they graduate to the big leagues and end up in adult court where I’ll likely see them again and again. It’s a vicious cycle. I’m swimming in a sea of irresponsibility at my job. I won’t have that at home.
“Somewhere in the 20th century, the Sex Positive Agenda got momentum from Reich, Kinsey, and Feminists. They say we should not make any moral judgments on sexual pairings regardless of sex, age, relation, marital status, number, or species of partner(s). They see sexual release as a birthright that everyone should exercise with anyone and everyone. This is contrary to the historical record. The dawn of a new age.”
Sure, prior to the 20th Century no one under the age of 18 ever had sex. Whatever.
Good, this kid deserves to get on with his life.
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