???!!!

I want to point out a piece of news I just read on the AP - you may have heard about this a long time ago, but I heard it only now that a judge (after two years) commuted the sentence:

A black teenager (Genarlow Wilson) from Georgia was sentenced to 10 years in prison without possibility of parole for having consensual oral sex in 2003 with a 15 year old girl when he was 17 years old...

Is this possible? It took two years of him being in prison to have it commuted? It was commuted to one year in prison...(!). How does this whole story relate to him being a black (as opposed to white) kid in Georgia? The U.S. can be stunningly primitive.