Back in 2002, Genarlow Wilson, a 17 year old football standout and honor student at Douglas County high school in Georgia, was being recruited by colleges all over the country and had just been named homecoming king by his fellow students.

Then one night Genarlow participated in an act that millions of other teenagers his age do every weekend: the senior received oral sex from a 15 year old sophomore. Unfortunately for Genarlow, because of a loophole in an outdated law, it was a felony for him to receive oral sex from the girl, even though having intercourse would only have been a misdemeanor. It was also irrelevant that the girl initiated the act, which both the girl and the prosecutor admitted in the sexual abuse case that followed. Gernarlow would be convicted of aggravated child molestation and sentenced to TEN YEARS in prison.

The case gained national attention from New York Times editorials, to ESPN cover stories, and on Mark Cuban’s HDnet and blog. The legislature in Georgia even went as far as to close the loophole in the law that made what Genarlow did a felony, yet they refused to fix the wrong committed to Genarlow and enact the law retroactively.

Finally, though, after four years on Monday, it seemed like justice was finally served. After suing on the ground of Habeas Corpus a judge ruled rather emphatically in Genarlow’s favor. From the New York Times:

In his ruling on Monday, Judge Thomas H. Wilson, the chief judge of the Towaliga Judicial Circuit, said it would be a “grave miscarriage of justice” for Mr. Wilson (no relation) to have to serve the remaining eight years of his sentence.
“If this court, or any court, cannot recognize the injustice of what has occurred here,” the judge wrote, “then our court system has lost sight of the goal” of “justice being served in a fair and equal manner.”

That brings us to Asshole Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker. Who decided hours after the ruling, in which the judge let Genarlow out on time served, to appeal the decision. So Genarlow has to stay in jail pending an absurd appeal because the Attorney General can split the hairs of the law while keeping an innocent man in jail. Because after all, as he says, ”the law is the law.” Now a case already wrought with controversy will undoubtedly create more protests, and a wrong that seemed for a moment to be righted, will continue on, at least for now, into the ever increasing halls of injustice.

Trevor Timm is a Blast Magazine staff writer