This was actually e-mailed to me a little over a week ago, but internet access issues kept me from posting about it.

Genarlow Wilson… has become a symbol for extreme cases of getting tough on sex offenders[. He] ordered released from prison by a judge who called his 10-year sentence for having consensual oral sex as a teen “a grave miscarriage of justice.”

…[T]he state’s attorney general announced he would appeal, which will keep the former honors student and football star behind bars for now.

…

Wilson is serving a 10-year mandatory sentence for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl in 2003, when he was 17. If his conviction is upheld, he will also be placed on Georgia’s sex offender registry.

Emphasis mine.

Regular readers may remember that issues like this are part of the reason I don’t like sex offender registries. Unless the registries are managed in a way to restrict them to truly threatening criminals who should still be in prison anyway, if we can’t trust them to be functioning members of society, there’s too much chaff in with the wheat. It unfairly makes people like Wilson a target of suspicion, even when the nature of his “crime” isn’t the sort that most people think of as dangerous.

Opponents of Wilson’s release said it could lead to similar legal challenges. Georgia prisons currently hold 189 inmates who were sentenced for aggravated child molestation when they were 21 or younger.

If one of those 189 inmates is imprisoned because of something similar to Wilson’s “crime”, then the cost of the legal challenge to every single case is a small price to pay, I think. Opponents of Wilson’s release need to stop and think about the actual matter at hand, and stop trying to confuse matters. A teenager who as consensual sexual relations (regardless of the nature of those relations) with another teen may or may not deserve to be reprimanded by his parents (and that should be left up to them, not a gang of busybodies). He definitely doesn’t deserve ten years in prison and a permanent reputation as a sex offender.

…[A] plea deal is on the table that would spring Wilson in a maximum of five years and also remove him from the sex offender registry. Not good enough, said Wilson’s lawyer, B.J. Bernstein. “It is really ridiculous when you consider that we had a judge that just said it is a misdemeanor that carries no sex offender registration,” she said. “It is extremely, extremely disturbing that the attorney general would take this action now.”

“It is really ridiculous” that consensual oral sex between two teenagers is a crime, whether it’s a misdemeanor or not. Again, I’m not saying it’s something we should encourage, but it’s not really the sort of thing that the legal system is equipped to deal with.

Hopefully the appeal will be over quickly, and Wilson can be out and moving on with his life. He’s served two years in prison already for this. That’s two years too many.