aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Evidence, jurors be damned. State senator says it’s rape!
Amy Morton at Georgia Women Vote was watching CNN last night:
CNN tore into Eric Johnson tonight. What was Sen. Johnson thinking when he took the Senate floor and made a number of, uh, misstatements about the case of Georgia’s Genarlow Wilson? (For those of you who have been living under the rock with Sen. Johnson, Wilson was sentenced to ten years in prison for having consensual oral sex. He was seventeen at the time, and the girl was fifteen.) [...]
If justice means nothing, at least think about this reality: every dollar we spend “protecting” children from people like Wilson is a dollar we do not have to protect children from real sexual predators. What sense does that make?
Good for Amy! And good for CNN! I missed the program and couldn’t find it on the web. I did find this transcript from an Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees report on Friday:
EDDIE BARKER, DOUGLASVILLE PROSECUTOR: From what we’ve seen on the videotape and heard from the victim ourself, we do not believe there was any physical force used.
[CNN CORRESPONDENT RICK] SANCHEZ: No physical force? Doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter that it was consensual sex between two teens. Ten years, mandatory, no way around it.
The law that ensnared Genarlow is so illogical that if he’d had intercourse with the 15-year-old instead of oral sex, his punishment would only have been a misdemeanor.
Back to the Georgia legislature, which recently changed the law but didn’t change Genarlow Wilson’s punishment. Why not?
State Senator Eric Johnson took the floor.
ERIC JOHNSON, GEORGIA STATE SENATOR: Mr. Wilson participated in multiple sexual acts with a minor while she was unconscious.
SANCHEZ: Wrong. The girl was not unconscious. The senator also said she was raped. That’s not even what the prosecutor thought.
So we called the senator and asked for an interview.
(on camera) Do you feel bad about the fact that you characterized this as a rape when you were talking yesterday in the Senate?
JOHNSON: No.
SANCHEZ: You don’t have any problem with that?
JOHNSON: No.
SANCHEZ: Because it wasn’t a rape.
JOHNSON: It’s a rape in my mind.
SANCHEZ (voice-over): Here’s what it was in the minds of the jurors. We know; we talked to them.
MARIE MANIGAULT, JURY FOREPERSON: When we viewed the tape, there was absolutely nothing in there that showed us that he in any way encouraged this person, even invited the person to come.
SANCHEZ: So for now, the Georgia legislature has done nothing, leaving Genarlow Wilson behind these walls, hoping some day for justice.
