Teenage Sex Offenders? - two recent cases
It's a crime what courts do to kids just being kids
Bill Johnson
October 27, 2007
Rocky Mountain News
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_5733028,00.html
You want your jaw to drop into your lap, your eyes to well up? You should take a peek at my e-mail inbox or listen to the voice mail that arrived on Friday.
There was Sheldon Page, who hadn't slept the night before and picked up the paper the moment they threw it on his doorstep. He read in this space on Friday of the elementary school boy now facing criminal charges for allegedly slapping a female classmate on the buttocks. He called.
His 14-year-old grandson was due in court Friday afternoon for sentencing. His anguish had kept him awake. A 13-year-old girl had told her mother the boy touched her bottom during a game of tag in May.
The boy ultimately pleaded guilty to sexual assault and was placed in a juvenile facility Tuesday.
"It is the most outrageous thing I've ever heard of," Sheldon Page, 51, said. "He is a kid, a teenager playing a kid's game, and now they've made him a criminal."
There was the lawyer who wrote to tell of his client, a fourth-grader charged with sexual assault for putting his hand in the pants of a female fourth-grader. The police picked him up at school. "Common sense has left the building," he writes.
There was Catherine - who, like almost all who called or wrote, asked that I not use a last name. "Tell that boy's parents to leave the country because it will be hell on earth from now on," she said. Her grandson was 11 years old when an 11-year-old girl told her parents they were on the playground swing together and she could feel his genitals.
"He was convicted of sexual harassment, and life has been hell ever since," Catherine said. Now 13 years old, he has registered as a sex offender, sees a probation officer once a month and must undergo lie-detector tests. He cannot go more than four blocks from home without his parents, she said. At school, he is not allowed to touch anyone and must use a private restroom.
"Tell those parents I feel sorry for their son and them," she said.
And then there was Mel. His story is typical of the more than a dozen I've heard since Friday's column appeared. Mel is 63. He has a 12-year-old boy. It was late in the last school year when a shoving match broke out at the boy's school. About eight kids were involved. One kid suffered a cracked lip and a few bruises. The cops came for only Mel's kid and one other. Assault and intent to commit injury were the charges. Mel hired an attorney, took his boy out of the school after he served a one- day suspension and got him a tutor to help him finish the school year. He also put the boy in counseling.
"With that many witnesses, there was no way we could win. Our lawyer told us," Mel said, "that the best thing we could do is take a deal or spend $20,000- plus for a trial."
So his boy took the deal, which wasn't much of one. Forty-five days in jail, deferred, the judge ordered, plus two years of supervised probation, 75 hours community service, anger-management classes, court costs, $600 restitution, a two-year restraining order and a written apology to the victim.
"It was a schoolyard fight, and not much of one at that," Mel said in an interview. "You just don't know what such a little thing can lead to until you get tangled up in it."
He remembers the trip he took with his boy to the juvenile detention center - "a zoo," he called it. It broke his heart, he said, to see the large number of children sitting on the floors in jail clothes.
A counselor testing his son found him not to be an angry child or a criminal, but a kid who didn't think before he acted, he said.
"In hindsight," Mel said, "I think he was showing off to his peers. Should my son have been punished? Certainly. I don't understand why the other six weren't charged. They should also go after real criminals, not just those who are the easiest to get."
His boy is doing well in a new school, he said. His probation officer sees him every other month now. "There's nothing they need to talk about," Mel said. "My son is a good kid."
Still, everywhere they go, there is a constant fear they might run into the other boy. "Until a parent experiences this, they don't have a clue about how the system works and how crazy it is," he said. In total, the schoolyard fight cost him about $10,000.
"It doesn't make any sense. And after all of it, I have to tell you I've lost faith in the criminal justice system. It's a terrible thing to say, and a worse thing to feel."
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Brenda Goodman
New York Times
October 27, 2007
ATLANTA, Oct. 26 — After 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, Ga., and smiled shyly as he walked into the arms of his waiting mother and young sister.
Mr. Wilson’s mother had skipped up to the prison door to wait for him.“I ran around inside the house 20 times,” said Juanessa Bennett, his mother, describing her reaction to hearing that her son would be set free.
Mr. 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-to-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.” Mr. Wilson said he was in “total disbelief” when he first heard the news of the court’s ruling from another inmate who had heard it on the radio.
“It didn’t seem real,” Mr. Wilson said. “I stopped trying to figure the courts out.” He got a laugh from reporters who asked where his welcome-home party would be.“ It’s not going to be any more parties for a while,” he said.
Mr. Wilson, who is black, was 17 when he was caught on videotape having oral sex with a 15-year-old girl at a drug- and alcohol-fueled New Year’s Eve party in 2003.
Mr. Wilson was convicted of aggravated child molestation for the act, 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. The law, critics said, was meant to keep child molesters behind bars, not to curb teenage sexual activity. The jury was not told of the mandatory sentence before it issued its verdict.
The year after Mr. 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 the legislature declined to apply the law retroactively to Mr. Wilson. That set up a test of wills between the lawmakers and judges, as Mr. Wilson’s lawyer appealed to both camps to free her client, who had been an honors student and star athlete.
Writing for the majority Friday, Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears noted that changes to the law made after Mr. Wilson’s conviction “represent a seismic shift in the legislature’s view of the gravity of oral sex between two willing teenage participants.”
“The severe felony punishment and sex offender registration imposed on Wilson make no measurable contribution to acceptable goals of punishment,” she wrote.
But dissenting judges said the legislature had clearly not intended to make the new law retroactive to Mr. Wilson’s case.
As a result, Justice George H. Carley wrote in a dissenting opinion, the punishment should not be deemed cruel and unusual. Justice Carley said the majority decision represented an “unprecedented disregard for the General Assembly’s constitutional authority” and wrote that it would open the door for others convicted of aggravated child molestation to be “discharged from lawful custody.”
Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker indicated in a written statement that he would not challenge the court’s decision.
“I respectfully acknowledge the court’s authority to grant the relief that they have crafted in this case,” Mr. Baker said. “I hope the court’s decision will also put an end to this issue as a matter of contention in the hearts and minds of concerned Georgians and others across the county who have taken such a strong interest in this case.”
A diverse group of supporters, including a conservative talk show host and a prominent New York hedge fund manager who pledged $1 million for bail, had called for Mr. Wilson’s release.
Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, called the case “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Georgia in modern times.”
“Each day this young man spent in jail is one day too long,” Mr. Lewis said in a statement. “It was unbelievable for this young man to go through what he went through.”