How many readers of Salut! have ever heard of Genarlow Wilson? There is only the most tenuous of French connections, so tenuous that it will have to wait while I rely, for now, on the self-indulgent promise of "more besides" in the banner hovering above these words.
When I wrote about capital punishment a few days ago, the aim was to avoid sounding holier-than-thou about criminal justice systems in Third World or merely different-world countries without also acknowledging appalling injustices in supposedly mature democracies.
An inviting parallel was the tendency of the Land of the Free, or certain of its states, to put to death offenders who commit crimes when juveniles or while suffering what in other countries would be diagnosed as mental illness.
But let me race down the scale of criminal wrongdoing and draw attention to the grotesque case of the afore-mentioned Genarlow Wilson, who is serving a sentence of imprisonment for the heinous offence of engaging in oral sex with a consenting female when he was 17 and she 15. Not just any custodial sentence, but one of 10 years.
At his trial, he was formally treated as a child molester and, as an added penalty, ordered to be placed on Georgia's sex offenders' register for life.
Bizarrely, had Wilson had sexual intercourse with the girl, he would have faced no more than one year in jail and, under a so-called Romeo and Juliet exception in Georgian law, avoided the sex offender registry.
In all emotive cases, and I indeed include that of Nathalie Gettliffe, it is important to check as many sources as possible rather than rely on stripped-down agency reports or partisan online coverage.
It would be wrong therefore to pretend that Wilson and the girl were simply a couple of teens carried away by passion on a date. They were at an unruly New Year's Eve party, drink and drugs were available and an older girl (17) actually claimed later that Wilson had raped her.
He was cleared of that charge - the jury quickly reaching the view that she had consented - and there was no serious argument that he forced the younger girl, actually only a year and a bit his junior, to do anything against her will. Both, in fact it seems most of those at the party, were affected by whatever they had consumed.
As a further potentially aggravating feature, much of what occurred was captured on videotape. The behaviour, of both boy and (younger) girl and onlookers, was therefore less than edifying though hardly out of keeping with the mores of their times.
The following year (2004), state legislators revised their primitive law to make most consensual sex between teenagers a misdemeanour rather than a felony. But they refused to make this retrospective, a decision endorsed by the Georgia Supreme Court when Wilson appealed.
Now, after a well publicised hearing in the Douglas County Superior Court, Judge Thomas Wilson has reduced the original punishment to one of 12 months for a misdemeanour. Since the accused has been in jail for two years or more already, that theoretically should mean his immediate release. But read on.
As it happens, while having no problem with severe (though not inhumane) sentences for people who pose real threats to society in one way or another, I believe Judge Wilson is also entirely wrong in thinking his namesake's conduct merited any imprisonment at all.
Consent was not at issue and the sentencing judge had no moral right - whatever statutory duty Georgia's perverse law placed upon him at the time - to go behind the back of the jury's verdict on rape to punish the boy as if he were still a rapist.
But at least Judge Wilson showed some sign of possessing a sense of proportion, describing the case before him as a "grave miscarriage of justice".
So what next? If you do not know of the case, you are probably thinking that the solid, decent and church-going citizens of Georgia who sought and defended Genarlow Wilson's incarceration in the first place, with a severity that suggested he must also have run over and killed two old ladies in a piece of reckless, drunken driving on his way home from the party, are now seeing the error of their ways. The boy's free to rebuild his life.......
Not a bit of it. The story will obviously move on, but Georgia's attorney general Thurbert Baker has lodged an immediate appeal, keeping the student behind bars. Baker says he wants to "resolve clearly erroneous legal issues created by the order", arguing that Judge Wilson had "absolutely no authority to reduce or modify the judgment of the trial court".
I do not regard myself as an enemy of America. Closer friends of the USA, and its citizens, will point out, as they have in large numbers on the BBC website, that one bad case in one rotten state does not damn a whole country.
Leaving aside the contention I would make, that plenty of other states have sentencing policies that lead to draconian penalties out of all proportion with the level of criminality involved, we can hope that this particular bad case is made good and soon.
And what was the tenuous French link? In his excellent book, The Fall of Paris, about which I wrote the other day, Herbert R Lottman relates the story of a young black American, an employee of the Herald Tribune in Paris, who felt sufficiently stranded and afraid, as the Germans marched into the City of Light, to turn for help to a reporter, Walter Kerr. Could the journalist acquire a bicycle for him so he could join the exodus from Paris?
"But you're an American - you have nothing to worry about," Kerr replied. America was not then at war. "Yes, I do," the young man said. "I was born in Georgia, but they didn't keep records of coloured people there."
He added that since his father had taken him to Jamaica as a boy, he travelled on a British passport. Kerr got him his bike, and off the young man cycled to what I had hoped was the safety of Batz, an island off Brittany*.
That anecdote tells us a story only about historic racism in Georgia. Genarlow Wilson is black. For all I know, however, the state applies bone-headed justice regardless of colour and at least one of the key figures intent on savage punishment - Baker, the attorney general - is also black.
But Georgia clearly has only itself to blame if a wretched act of judicial brutality, made inevitable by madhouse law as it may have been, sullies its name and brings its notion of civilised society into contempt.
* In fact, the young man was turned away at Roscoff and only a letter from Kerr, confirming his US citizenship, saved his skin when he was arrested while cycling back to Paris.
Hutton of Chase me, Ladies, I'm in the Cavalry put it in a rather more straightforward way:
http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Robert Marchenoir | June 13, 2007 at 08:17 PM
And then of course there's the case of the woman facing three years in jail for taking three rolls of toilet paper from a county courthouse (one year per roll, I guess).
http://www.kcci.com/news/13497897/detail.html
Clearly a crime far worse than being caught driving (twice) while having been banned for drink driving. Is this what youmean by "other-world" justice system?
Posted by: Thomas R | June 14, 2007 at 05:15 PM