Good afternoon. Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast. Today is Wednesday, January 31st, and I'm your host Anastasia Yuglova.

Today's podcast concerns the case of Janarlo Wilson, accused at the age of 17 of an act of aggravated child molestation with a 15-year-old

girl.

Janarlo, however, does not fit the profile of a sex offender.

He was an honor student and star athlete who was being

recruited by the nation's top schools including Columbia and Brown

Universities. He had never been in trouble with the law before, but Janarlo's

been languishing behind bars for two years now.

With eight more to go, Cato's director of the Project on Criminal Justice Tim Lynch

ponders Janarlo's predicament and the Byzantine laws that got him into it.

Tell me what happened to Janarlo Wilson that landed him behind bars for 10 years.

Well, Janarlo Wilson is a 19-year-old and he's currently in his second year of prison serving a 10 year sentence for child molestation.

When you look at the facts of what actually landed him in prison, he and his friends were having a party at a hotel room and they were drinking and then some of their high school friends, girls came over to the hotel and they were partying they were drinking they were smoking pot and

some of them had sex and it turns out that when the police found a videotape of the

party they found out that Janarlo was 17 and that he was having sex with a 15 year old and this violated Georgia law.

In fact, it's a felony under Georgia law for a 17 year old and a 15 year old to have sex.

So he was accused actually of rape and child molestation.

But when you look at the facts, it was basically some teenagers having sex, and when the case

went to trial, the jury came back and said that he was not guilty of rape, but they found

that he was guilty of child molestation because under the letter of the law, it's just

illegal for a 17-year-old to have sex with a 15-year-old. And the penalty for violating that law turned out to be a 10 year mandatory minimum sentence.

So that's why he's in prison right now.

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