June 13 (Bloomberg) -- Say what you will about casual sex among teenagers. Call it normal or immoral. Unhealthy. Inevitable. Say it demeans girls or empowers them.

What you can't say is that a 17-year-old boy deserves to spend 10 full years in prison because a 15-year-old girl willingly performed oral sex on him.

You can't rightly call him a child molester because of that, and you shouldn't force him to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

That's what happened to Genarlow Wilson, formerly a B-plus student, star athlete and popular guy at his suburban Atlanta high school. Colleges were courting him when a debauched 2003 New Year's Eve party in a hotel room near Atlanta sent his life down a different path.

Genarlow turned 21 behind bars, where he has now served more than two years of his 10-year sentence, ineligible for parole.

``If any case fits into the definitive limits of a miscarriage of justice, surely this case does,'' wrote Superior Court Judge Thomas H. Wilson, who isn't related to the prisoner.

The judge, no doubt, had hoped to end the ordeal this week when he reduced the felony conviction to a misdemeanor, sentenced Genarlow to one year, credited him for time served and ordered his release.

But the judge overstepped his bounds, Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker says. He is appealing, and Genarlow stays behind bars for now.

District Attorney David McDade, whose office prosecuted him, could let Genarlow go free in the meantime if he would agree to bail. Standing firm in the face of public outrage and protests, he won't.

Bond Hearing

Genarlow must wait at least until a July 5 bond hearing. So much for the immediate release that Judge Wilson ordered.

Spread the blame widely on this one. Heap a lot of it on state lawmakers furthering their careers by getting tough on child molesters, not pausing to exempt consensual teenage oral sex from the mandatory penalty for aggravated child molestation: 10 years with no parole and a lifetime on the state's sex offender registry.

Only after Genarlow's conviction did they fix the law to declare it a misdemeanor if the victim is no younger than 14, and the accused no older than 18. A year is the maximum now.

But that fix, called a Romeo and Juliet exemption, isn't retroactive. A bill that would have given judges discretion to re-sentence younger prisoners, including Genarlow, died under heavy lobbying by McDade.

Friend to Victims

McDade, who has won recognition as a friend to crime victims, wasn't acting like one when he gave legislators a videotape of the party that led to Genarlow's prosecution.

Not only was the oral sex captured on tape, the video also showed a 17-year-old girl -- who claimed she had been gang-raped -- having intercourse. Genarlow's jury decided what happened to the older girl wasn't rape, though McDade has continued to characterize it that way as have legislative leaders justifying their refusal to give Genarlow a break.

It isn't clear whether the girls' faces were obscured in the video. But the idea of a prosecutor distributing a sex tape to lawmakers in the name of victim protection is bizarre at least. The young women and their families can't possibly be grateful for help like that. We aren't talking about Paris Hilton here.

Fitting the Crime

When the law mandates a fixed sentence, as this one did, it prevents prosecutors and judges from tailoring sentences to fit the facts of the case and outrages occur. Most states have such laws for some types of crimes, as does the federal government.

The ironies in Genarlow's case abound. If he had had intercourse with the 15-year-old, it would have been a misdemeanor because Georgia already had a Romeo and Juliet exception for statutory rape.

An ex-lawmaker who was key to passing the child molestation law that ensnared Genarlow has said he meant it to protect youngsters, not get them tossed into prison.

And now a judge trying to undo an injustice may have exceeded his authority. While he has the power to declare a sentence unconstitutional, the judge may have gone too far in converting a felony conviction into a misdemeanor. He could have sent the case back to the prosecutor for further action.

Judge Wilson may be the only one in this case who isn't following the letter of the law. That would be the biggest irony of all.

The law's aim should be to resolve conflicts fairly.

But, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked, ``This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.''

(Ann Woolner is a Bloomberg news columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Ann Woolner in Atlanta at awoolner@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 13, 2007 00:13 EDT