ATLANTA -- After two years of being imprisoned for having consensual oral sex with another teenager, Genarlow Wilson was released this evening.

A throng of family members -- including his mother, Juannessa Bennett -- were waiting outside Al Burruss Correctional Training Center when the 21-year-old to emerge from the prison.

"At the end of the day, the courts made the right decision," Wilson said. "I can't describe how I feel. To all those who supported me, you will not be disappointed."

In a 4-to-3 decision, justices upheld a Monroe County judge's ruling that Wilson's ten-year prison sentence was "cruel and unusual punishment".

Wilson told a news conference outside the prison, "I'm finally happy to see we've got justice now."

He said that among his immediate goals was to get into college.

"His mother is just thrilled. We're all in a little bit of shock," said Wilson's lawyer, B.J. Bernstein.

Wilson was convicted of aggravated child molestation following a 2003 New Year's Eve party at a Douglas County motel room where he was videotaped having oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. Wilson was 17 at the time. He was also charged with raping another 17-year-old girl at the party but a jury acquitted him.

The law was amended in 2006, but the Legislature did not make the law retroactive, meaning the change did not apply to Wilson.

Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears wrote in the majority opinion that the changes in the law "represent a seismic shift in the legislature's view of the gravity of oral sex between two willing teenage participants."

Sears said the severe punishment makes "no measurable contribution to acceptable goals of punishment" and that Wilson's crime did not rise to the "level of adults who prey on children.

State Attorney General Thurbert Baker said he accepts Friday's ruling.

Baker said he hopes the ruling will "put an end to this issue as a matter of contention in the hearts and minds of concerned Georgians and others across the country who have taken such a strong interest in this case."

District Attorney David McDade, who led the effort to put Wilson behind bars, disagreed with the court's decision.

"I too have received and reviewed the decision by the Georgia Supreme Court in this case, and while I respectfully may disagree with the court's decision, I also must respect their authority as the final arbiter in this case," McDade said in a statement released Friday. "I continue to support the efforts of Attorney General Thurbert Baker in striving to make certain that all laws are applied consistently to all parties."

Wilson's supporters were jubilant.

"It's been a long time coming," said U.S. Rep. John Lewis, an Atlanta Democrat. "Each day that this young man spent in prison was a day too long."

Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, who is visiting Georgia this week, called for an end to mandatory minimum prison sentences.

State lawmakers announced they had raised $4,000 toward a scholarship fund for Wilson, and Jackson promised another $5,000 from the Rainbow/PUSH organization.

The state Supreme Court had turned down Wilson's appeal of his conviction and sentence, but the justices agreed to hear the state's appeal of a Monroe County judge's decision to reduce Wilson's sentence to 12 months and free him. That judge had called the 10-year sentence a "grave miscarriage of justice."

Dissenting justices wrote that the state Legislature expressly stated that the 2006 change in the law was not intended to affect any crime prior to that date.

They said Wilson's sentence could not be cruel and unusual because the state Legislature decided that Wilson could not benefit from subsequent laws reducing the severity of the crime from a felony to a misdemeanor.

They called the decision an "unprecedented disregard for the General Assembly's constitutional authority."