Cruel and Usual

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.20.07]

In the never-ending attempts to legislate morality, US & State representatives rush to pass complicated laws on all aspects of sexual behavior. Laws are passed with ever more draconian penalties attached. The Hang ‘Em High mentality that pervades the legal community (judges, DAs, legislators, governors, presidents), our adversarial form of jurisprudence, insures injustice. Two recent examples are:

A Connecticut court is siding with the school system in the case of substitute teacher Julie Amero, who has been convicted for four counts of “risking injury to a child.” Amero now faces up to 40 years of jail time for pornographic pop-ups that appeared on a computer she was using in a classroom—pop-ups that she and her lawyers argue were a result of spy and adware on the computer, out-of-date virus software, and an expired firewall license—the perfect storm for pornographic pop-ups, all on a Windows 98 machine running Internet Explorer 5.

Amero was substituting for a middle-school English class and asked the regular teacher permission to use the computer to e-mail her husband. Amero left the room to use the restroom, and upon her return says that she found several students gathered around the machine looking at a web site. A series of unfortunate events occurred from this point on, resulting in a slew of pornographic pop-ups appearing on the screen. The onslaught continued despite Amero’s attempts to close the windows. Amero ran to get help from the teacher’s lounge, where she told four teachers and the assistant principal about the problem, and where another teacher reportedly told her to ignore the pop-ups. At some point, students attested to Amero’s attempts to block the screen with her hands and push students away.

In court, school officials testified that the school’s firewall software had indeed expired, that the anti-virus software on the computer was long out of date, and that there were no anti-spyware tools on the machine. The prosecution’s computer “expert,” a local police officer who investigates computer crimes, testified that the computer’s logs showed that Amero had voluntarily accessed pornographic sites.

A former teacher at the same school told the Washington Post’s Security Fix blog that the school had very few restrictions on what the children themselves were able to freely access on the school’s computers, saying, “You could look at any history in any computer and chances are you would see the children had [visited] inappropriate sites.”

Amero faces sentencing on March 2 and plans to appeal the case.

And this:

Genarlow Wilson sits in prison despite being a good son, a good athlete and high school student with a 3.2 GPA. He never had any criminal trouble. On the day he was to sit for the SAT, at seventeen years old, his life changed forever. He was arrested. In Douglas County he was accused of inappropriate sexual acts at a News Year’s Eve party. A jury acquitted him of the allegation of Rape but convicted him of Aggravated Child Molestation for a voluntary act of oral sex with another teenager. He was 17, and she was 15.

Along with the label “child molester” which will require him throughout his life to be on a sexual offender registry, Genarlow received a sentence of eleven years — a mandatory 10 years in prison and 1 year on probation.

On July 1st, the new Romeo and Juliet law went into effect in Georgia for any other teen that engages in consensual sexual acts. That change in the law means that no teen prosecuted for consensual oral sex could receive more than a 12 months sentence or be required to register as a sex offender.

Had this law been in effect when Genarlow Wilson was arrested, or had been done after the Marcus Dixon case, Genarlow would not now be in jail.

Genarlow and his mother are overjoyed that no one else in Georgia will have to know their pain. In the meantime, however, the legal fight goes on for Genarlow Wilson.

Genarlow has been incarcerated since February 25, 2005.

Update: the act was initiated by the 15 year old. Genarlow didn’t say no; he is doing 10 years without possibility of parole. More here.

Update II: Senator Emanuel D. Jones, a Democrat, sponsored legislation that would make it possible for judges to reconsider the cases of hundreds of young adults, including Mr. Wilson, who are serving long mandatory minimum sentences in prison for having consensual sex with teenage minors. Mr. Jones said the bill was mysteriously left off the agenda of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.

And on Monday, the Senate’s leader, Eric Johnson, a Republican, publicly denounced the bill and said that although Mr. Wilson, now 20, was serving a harsh sentence, he deserved no leniency.