When I posted an item in June about the wretched case of Genarlow Wilson in the southern American state of Georgia, I half expected to be writing a follow up within days.
Surely the grotesque misjustice that had seen him jailed for 10 years for consensual oral sex, at 17, with a girl aged 15 would quickly be put right and the young man freed.
It wasn't. They do things their way in Georgia.
Instead, it has taken the Georgia Supreme Court four-and-a-half months since a judge ruled that the original sentence represented a "grave miscarriage of justice" to confirm that this decision, not a hard one to understand, should translate into Wilson's release.
The fact that it didn't, wilfully prolonging Wilson's agony, is just another indictment of American justice in action.
While I am delighted that he is at last free to rebuild his life, I cannot help wondering what goes on in the minds of the dissenting judges in what was a close-run thing: only by 4-3 did the court find that Wilson had been subjected to "cruel and unusual punishment".
Three members of the panel were clearly content to bring further disgrace on their state, and by extension America, by voting to continue that cruelty until the savage sentence had run its course.
The circumstances were outlined in my original posting. Wilson was jailed as a child molester even though he was one of the girl's classmates and not very much more than a year older than her.
Had they indulged in consensual sexual intercourse, he would have been guilty of a misdemeanour - itself a harsh interpretation of what went on between two reckless teenagers - and been liable to a year in jail.
But Georgia had acute difficulties with joined-up thinking; no "Romeo and Juliet" provision applied in the case of oral sex. The 10-year term was mandatory and Wilson was also, for good measure, placed on the sex offenders' register for life. And when the law was dragged kicking and screaming towards civilisation, legislators refused to make it retrospective, so Wilson stayed behind bars.
If anyone comes across something approaching a coherent opinion expressed by the dissenting judges, those three wise characters who would have cheerfully kept him incarcerated, do let us all know.
There is no need to consider Genarlow Wilson any kind of hero - Jesse Jackson was overstating things a little when he commented "we've endured the crucifixion, and now we see the stone is rolling away" - to believe that he should not have spent a day in prison, let alone more than two years.
He did face a genuinely serious charge, of raping another girl at the same New Year's party where a lot of young people of both sexes seem to have behaved irresponsibly. But the jury cleared him of that, accepting his defence that she had consented.
The sentence for oral sex, an act involving no victim, smacked of the court going behind the back of the jury's verdict on rape. But no, we are told that it had no option (leaving us to query why the higher court took so long to impose some commonsense and humanity).
I am not sure that Wilson was a casualty of the racism many believe to be embedded in sections of American society. There were black faces, too, among those who were eager to keep him in jail. But he was certainly a casualty of bad law, and bad process, and I therefore offer limited "about time" sort of applause for the Supreme Court's narrow and belated righting of a dreadful wrong.
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