Imprisoned over teen sex, he has slim hope of release

ATLANTA —  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.

The mandatory sentence provoked an outcry from members of the jury that convicted Wilson. Even the author of the 1995 law responsible for imprisoning him held a news conference urging legislators to pass a bill allowing judges to review cases involving consensual teenagers.

“No one in their right mind ever thought a prosecutor would take that bill and use it in such a way,” said Matt Towery, the Republican former state representative who sponsored the bill.

The videotape was found in a hotel room after a 17-year-old girl reported that she had been gang raped. In the video, that girl appeared severely intoxicated.

Wilson was charged with rape of the 17-year-old and aggravated child molestation of the 15-year-old, but the jury acquitted him of the rape charge. The “aggravated” aspect of the charge refers to oral sex, which then carried a more severe penalty under Georgia law than intercourse.

Four other male youths pleaded guilty to child molestation of the 15-year-old and sexual battery of the 17-year-old and a fifth pleaded guilty to false imprisonment, but Wilson refused to enter a plea bargain -- five years in prison with the possibility of parole -- because he would remain classified as a sex offender. Georgia has strict laws prohibiting sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of school bus stops, child-care centers and playgrounds.

“It’s a life sentence itself, just being on the register,” Wilson said in a telephone interview last week. “A sex offender continues to do wrong, and they know it, but with me I was in a situation where I had no knowledge it was against the law. They don’t teach about this in school.”

It is a legal case that has inspired all manner of celebrity endorsements: Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban declared he would boycott Georgia until Wilson was free; former President Carter wrote a letter in support of Wilson to Georgia Atty. Gen. Thurbert Baker; even Baker’s pastor, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who leads the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, has condemned the “crisis in leadership” among Georgia’s legal establishment.

“This is a race issue and this is a class issue: the scales of justice fallen down on those in our community that can least afford to defend themselves,” said Georgia state Sen. Emanuel Jones, who sponsored the bill that would allow judges to reconsider the cases of young adults serving long sentences for engaging in consensual sex.

“What Genarlow did on that infamous night,” he added, “is not that different to what most kids do on most weekends.”

Yet some Georgians balk at the manner in which Wilson became a cause celebre.

“This is no choirboy,” said Eric Johnson, the Republican Senate president pro tem, who opposed the bill that could have freed Wilson. “He made his own bed. Anyone who watches the videotape knows that.... This is a guy who made decisions to go out with his friends, drink, take drugs, and have multiple intercourse with at least two girls: one semiconscious and one a minor.”

Towery said Georgia legislators formed negative opinions of Wilson after prosecutors distributed the videotape around the state Capitol. “Legislators had no business seeing that video,” he said. “But they formed their own opinion as if they were a jury.”

Those who oppose Wilson’s release say it would open a floodgate for other cases. Nearly 190 people who were sentenced when they were younger than 21 are serving time for aggravated child molestation, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections.

The exact number of inmates that could be affected is unclear because the department classifies offenders according to age at the date of sentencing, rather than when the crime was committed.

“Georgia has fixed the law so others won’t be caught up in it, but we can’t go back and handpick who we will change sentences for,” Johnson said.

In the Monroe County courthouse last week, Wilson, dressed in a white prison jumpsuit with blue trim, held his head high and stared intently at the latest judge to consider his fate. Behind him sat his mother, Juannessa Bennett. She had not slept for two nights.

“I’m on pins and needles just waiting,” she said outside the courtroom. Her answer was firm when a reporter asked her what she thought the courts and Legislature were missing.

“Heart,” she said. “They want to be old school, but to be old school you’ve got to have heart and prayer.”

jenny.jarvie@latimes.com