Genarlow Wilson — sentenced to 10 years in prison for consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17 — has become a cause célèbre, the unlikely figure at the center of a national struggle over competing views of justice.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has come to his defense. So has former President Jimmy Carter. So has the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of Atlanta's historic Ebenezer Baptist Church.

CYNTHIA TUCKER MY OPINION • E-mail Tucker Recent columns: Genarlow Wilson should be free  TB case lands in bureaucracy web  Warming? It's already burning  Illegal students a fine investment  Falwell was GOP's prophet of intolerance  We're headed for urban greatness — if we can tame traffic  Massacres are casualties of a worn military

Wilson's supporters have portrayed a young man with good grades, college aspirations and no criminal history, tripped up by a rigid law that criminalized adolescent recklessness. The severe sentence — mandated by a Georgia law since revised — has been dissected in national media and discussed in countless blog posts and e-mails, all denouncing a criminal justice system that would mete out 10 years in prison for teenage behavior that was foolish but hardly malevolent.

On the other side of this morality tale are prosecutors and legislators who insist that they are defending young girls who were misused by a gang of drug-addled, predatory young men. Douglas County District Attorney David McDade is furious that he has been painted as a racist, incensed over "disinformation" he says has mangled the facts of the case.

He notes that all the teens involved are black — "If I had turned a deaf ear to these young ladies and their families when they cried out for help, I would have been accused of turning a deaf ear to African-American victims." He further points out that five other defendants pleaded guilty and were sentenced to as much as six years in prison and status as sex offenders. McDade has contended that Wilson wants to be a "martyr."

The low-key figure in the middle of this outsized battle of wills is a young man who just wants to reclaim his life — a prison inmate alternately buoyed by the favorable press and fearful of inciting the envy of fellow convicts.

"A lot of people don't want to see you do good. They want to see you down like they are. So I pretty much isolate myself," Wilson said Monday in an interview at Burruss Correctional Training Center in Forsyth.

When fellow inmates tease him about his celebrity, he shrugs it off, he said. "I'm fighting for my freedom. I'm just trying to piece my life back together."

He spends time reading, he says, because books "take me outside this prison." Among those books are Rick Warren's "The Purpose-Driven Life"; Barack Obama's memoir, "Dreams from My Father"; and all six Harry Potter books.

Wilson, who faces a Monroe County judge today for an appeal hearing, freely admits to poor decisions on that fateful night that robbed him of his carefree youth. On New Year's Eve 2003, he and a group of other teenagers — boys and girls — gathered in a Douglas County motel room for an evening of sex, drugs and exhibitionism. A video camera captured scenes of drug-addled conversation, tedium and squalid sex.

But a jury found that the only sex crime Wilson committed was on a technicality. He was found not guilty of raping a 17-year-old, who claimed she was too impaired to consent to intercourse. They did find him guilty, however, of aggravated child molestation against a 15-year-old, who willingly performed oral sex on him and others. At the time, the law drew a bright line, with Wilson on one side, an adult, and the girl on the other, a child.

"The decisions I made were not some of the best ones," he said, "but I don't think one mistake should cost you 10 years in prison and a lifetime on the sex offender registry."

The Georgia Legislature apparently agreed because it revised the law last year; under the "Romeo and Juliet" provision, the sex act between Wilson and the 15-year-old would be a misdemeanor. But the General Assembly refused to apply the law to Wilson's case.

Some legislators continued to condemn Wilson and the other boys in the room as out-of-control predators. "If I was the parent of one of the girls in that hotel room, I would want those boys put away for 10 years, if not executed," said state Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah).

Any parent who watches that video would undoubtedly be appalled. But the behavior of virtually all the kids in that motel room was unseemly, reckless and irresponsible. Holding drug-and-alcohol-addled adolescent boys to a higher standard than drug-and-alcohol-addled adolescent girls takes the law back to the '50s — the 1850s.

While Wilson ponders his latest appeal — "I'm praying for the best, but I'm expecting the worst" — one of his co-defendants, Narada Williams, has already been released. After discussions with state Sen. Kasim Reed (D-Atlanta), McDade agreed to support Williams' request for parole; Reed helped Williams to enroll at Fort Valley State University. (Williams, however, remains on the sex offender registry. Wilson rejected a plea because he didn't want that stigma.)

Surely, it has become clear that Wilson doesn't belong behind bars, either.

• Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays.