We Should All Be Ashamed

I saw a number of interviews with this young man this weekend. He's certainly putting on a positive and brave face after what he's been through. I still find it unfathomable that the State of Georgia would so brazenly try to ruin the rest of this young man's life - though I'm sure this stain will follow him indefinitely. I just think that if we aren't ashamed that our country is still doing this to young, black men, we should be.

With the real specter of WWIII if the neocons throw one last parting wrench into the works of sane global governing by bombing Iran, the small victory today of Genarlow Wilson is welcome news.

Genarlow Wilson, I hope you remember, was the seventeen-year-old Georgia high school homecoming king and 3.2 G.P.A. student, sentenced to ten years for receiving consensual oral sex from a fifteen-year-old back in 2005. Finally this June the Soviet-styled sentencing was overturned after the state of Georgia had already wasted two years of this young man's life. It seemed that the Kafkaesque nightmare was over and this young black Georgian could finally get on with his life.

Yet moments later Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker, the highest ranking black elected official in the state, faxed the celebrating family of young Mr. Wilson that he was appealing the verdict.

As Monroe County Superior Court Judge Thomas Wilson stated in his decision to free Genarlow Wilson, "If this court or any court cannot recognize the injustice of what has occurred here, then our court system has lost sight of the goal our judicial system has always strived to accomplish....If any case fits into the definitive limits of a miscarriage of justice, surely this case does."

Today the Georgia Supreme Court agreed with Judge Wilson.

"Although society has a significant interest in protecting children from premature sexual activity, we must acknowledge that Wilson's crime does not rise to the level of culpability of adults who prey on children ..." Supreme Court Justice Leah Ward Sears is quoted as saying in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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