After serving more than two years in prison for having consensual oral sex with a fellow teenager, Genarlow Wilson shook the hand of a warden Friday at the Al Burruss Correctional Training Center in Forsyth and smiled as he walked into the arms of his mother and sister.
Wilson, who is now 21, was released just hours after the Georgia Supreme Court ended his 10-year prison sentence. The court said the sentence for the act, which was considered a felony at the time, violated the Constitution’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
In a 4-3 ruling, the court’s majority said the sentence was “grossly disproportionate” to the crime, which “did not rise to the level of culpability of adults who prey on children.”
Wilson was 17 when he was caught on videotape having oral sex with a 15-year-old girl at a drug- and alcohol-fueled party in 2003.
Wilson was convicted of aggravated child molestation, a charge that carried a mandatory minimum prison term so harsh it shocked his jury and prompted an international outcry from critics who asserted that prosecutors had been overzealous and racially motivated in prosecuting the black teen. The jury was not told of the mandatory sentence before it issued its verdict.
The year after Wilson was sentenced, the Georgia General Assembly changed the law to make consensual sex between teenagers a misdemeanor punishable by no more than a year in prison, but declined to apply the law retroactively.
“The severe felony punishment and sex offender registration imposed on Wilson make no measurable contribution to acceptable goals of punishment,” Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears wrote for the majority.