Genarlow Wilson Finally Freed

Following a Georgia Supreme Court ruling, Genarlow Wilson, a 21-year-old black man, walked out of prison a free man on October 26 after two years behind bars. Wilson never should have spent a day in prison! A high school honor student, all-conference football player and track star, Wilson was convicted of engaging in consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl on New Year’s Eve in 2003, when he was 17. Under Georgia law, where the “age of consent” is 16, the girl could not be considered to be “legally consenting.” Wilson was sentenced to a mandatory ten years in prison and lifetime registration as a “sex offender.”

In 2006, a year after Wilson’s conviction, the Georgia legislature passed a new law making such teenage sexual activity a misdemeanor punishable by no more than a year in prison. But the legislature refused to apply it retroactively and subsequently blocked bills allowing Wilson to reopen his case. Taking note of the new law, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that Wilson’s sentence violated the Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, stating that it was “grossly disproportionate to his crime.”

From the standpoint of any rational society, Genarlow Wilson committed no crime. We oppose reactionary “age of consent” laws, which deny the fact that young people are, and have always been, sexually active. Our guiding principle is simply that of mutual effective consent. Government out of the bedrooms! This case exemplifies racist and anti-sex bigotry in the U.S. Reactionary “child molestation” laws are aimed at both increasing the repressive reach of the capitalist state and bolstering the institution of the family. According to the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, black teens are five times as likely as whites to be sentenced under the law that sent Wilson to prison. Similar laws across the country were adopted throughout the 1980s and ’90s as the racist capitalist rulers deemed a generation of black youth to be innate criminals who must be warehoused in prisons, mainly through the “war on drugs.”

Wilson’s freedom can be attributed not to the fairness of the state Supreme Court, which had twice turned him down, but to the widespread publicity and outcry against what a New York Times (30 April) editorial called “Georgia’s Shame.” Public figures like former president Jimmy Carter and even members of Wilson’s jury called for his release. Much of the attention flowed from the equally grotesque persecution of Marcus Dixon, an 18-year-old black Georgia high school athlete and A student who was thrown into prison in 2003 under the same law for having consensual sex with a white girl just shy of 16. Amid a wave of publicity, the Georgia Supreme Court reduced his conviction to statutory rape, cutting his sentence to the 15 months he had already served.

After Wilson’s release, Jesse Jackson Sr. stated, “Genarlow Wilson has been set free, but thousands are still imprisoned” (Amsterdam News, 1 November). Many of those are there thanks to the “war on drugs” pushed by Jackson, Al Sharpton and other black Democrats. As a Young Spartacus article titled “Free Genarlow Wilson!” (WV No. 887, 2 March) states:

“The desperate conditions facing black youth—police terrorizing the ghettos, mass unemployment and incarceration, the rollback of affirmative action and resegregation of urban schools—can be eliminated only through the overturn of capitalist class rule by the multiracial working class. We fight to build the revolutionary workers party that is essential to lead the proletariat in this struggle. Black liberation through socialist revolution!”