US: Tennessee woman charged with “aggravated prostitution”, unusually sympathetic reporting

An unusually sympathetic report of the case of a 28 year-old female sex worker from Knoxville, Tennessee, who faces between three and 15 years in prison for being an HIV-positive sex worker, was published today in the local paper, the Knoxville News Sentinel.

The report is probably the most balanced reporting I have ever seen of a case of this type, and the reporter, JJ Stambaugh, is to be congratulated on his report.

[The woman] differs from most of the 525 other known prostitutes arrested in Knox County over the past five years in one significant way: she is HIV-positive. [Her] medical condition means that when she turns tricks for a living she’s committing a felony called aggravated prostitution. Women without HIV face misdemeanor prostitution charges that often add up to no more than probation and a fine. [She] is a repeat offender, having been convicted twice of being an HIV-infected prostitute before she was arrested a third time early this year, records show. Despite the fact that she’s never been accused of any type of sexual assault, her criminal history already means she must register as a sex offender under state law and follow many of the same restrictions as rapists and child molesters.

Through court records, the article details the woman’s difficult upbringing, her drug addiction, her mental health issues, and her previous arrests for prostitution.

She was discharged from prison the second time last November. Her most recent arrest for aggravated prostitution came April 10, when she was picked up on Magnolia Avenue during an undercover sting that netted eight other streetwalkers and their customers. She has since been held at the Knox County Detention Facility, unable to make her $15,000 bond, jail records show.

In addition to a history of homelessness, she has also been diagnosed with a neurological disorder and mental problems that include “flashbacks of being raped while working the streets,” according to her pre-sentence report.

The article then highlights why, despite its intentions to protect the public health, using the criminal law in this way may not be in the best interests of the community.

The state law that classifies women such as [the accused] as sexual predators is – in the eyes of one defense attorney who has represented several women charged with the crime – just another way of hurting the true victims of abuse.

“I understand there is a public policy to control the spread of HIV, but I’m not sure that accelerating prostitution to a felony charge and meting out more severe punishment is the way to deal with the crisis,” said Julie Auer Gautreau of the Knox County District Public Defender’s Office. “I think it’s inherently unfair to treat sick people, mentally ill people and drug addicts as criminals who are intent on endangering the public, because that’s not what they’re trying to do.

“It may be that they, in effect, present a kind of public danger, but in the case of every prostitute I’ve ever represented, you are dealing with somebody who is deeply troubled, who has suffered for years, and whose addiction … is the result of some kind of abuse or mental illness or addiction.”

Knoxville Police Department Sgt. Chris Baldwin said the aggravated prostitution law is a necessary tool for protecting public health.

“If you are aware that you have a disease or condition that could endanger the health of others, it’s no less in my opinion than pointing a weapon at somebody,” Baldwin said. “When a customer is exposed, then everybody he comes into contact with – including innocent third parties like his family – are at risk at well.

“What you’re doing is putting another human being in danger, not just their moral but their physical well-being.”

Baldwin agrees that many prostitutes are in dire need of drug treatment or psychological help, but stressed that the risks to public health are urgent when a hooker becomes infected with HIV.

As a sex offender, Moore can’t take part in some residential drug treatment programs available to other addicts because she’s not allowed to live at any place that also houses juveniles, records show.

“Ideally, our position is that prostitutes would be arrested and go to some kind of treatment or rehabilitation, but that very rarely happens,” he said. “We have to focus on it from the law enforcement perspective. That’s what we’re tasked with.”

Finally, the article also suggests that prosecutions of HIV-positive sex workers for “aggravated prostitution” appear to be selective.

[She] is one of 39 women in Tennessee who are on the state’s Sex Offender Registry because they have been convicted of aggravated prostitution, according to Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Kristin Helm. She is one of only two women in Knox County to have actually been convicted thus far of the charge, although the Knox County Health Department says at least 10 HIV-infected local women are known prostitutes.

UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon: criminalising HIV transmission “reinforces stigma”

United Nations Secretary-General Mr. Ban Ki-moon has spoken out for the first time against the criminalisation of HIV transmission.

Speaking at the HIV/AIDS review during the 63rd United Nations General Assembly, held in New York on June 16th, Mr. Ban spoke out about laws and policies that criminalised people with, and at risk of, HIV. He ended his speech by stating:

In recent years, a growing number of countries have taken steps to criminalize HIV transmission.

In theory, this has been done to prevent the spread of infection. In practice, it has done the opposite – reducing the effectiveness of HIV prevention efforts by reinforcing the stigma.

Such measures send the message that people living with HIV are a danger to society. We must instead encourage tolerance, compassion and inclusion.

Today, the Global Network of People living with HIV (GNP+) joined Mr Ban’s call to end HIV-related stigma and discrimination and highlighted similar calls from UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé, who said, in his address to the Meeting of the Programme Coordinating Board, held in Geneva on June 23th that

punitive laws that discriminate against men who have sex with men, sex workers, injecting drug users, migrants and people living with HIV must be removed from the statute books, country by country.

I must say that I’m honoured and proud to be working with both organisations as a consultant to aid in their work towards these goals.

Canada: Hamilton woman pleads guilty to HIV exposure

A 28 year-old woman from the same Ontario town as Johnson Aziga yesterday pleaded guilty of one count of aggravated sexual assault for not disclosing her HIV status to a man she met for a one-night stand in 2007. She will be sentenced in August.

The case was reported today in The Toronto Star and highlights the real problems HIV-positive Canadians are facing due to the current oppressive, discriminatory – and ultimately harmful – legal obligation to disclose before sex. When the woman was arrested in March 2007, police held a press conference saying the woman posed “huge threat”. According to the CBC website on the day of the press conference:

Det. Joseph De Lottinville called [the woman] “a huge threat” to public safety, amid police fears that she deliberately slept [my italics] with a number of people without revealing that she had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Police allege that [she] has known of her HIV status since March 2003, but didn’t follow the legal requirement that people with HIV disclose the condition to sexual partners.

Officers said [she] is believed to have frequented several bars in the Greater Toronto Area, specifically in Hamilton, Brantford and Toronto, particularly in its downtown Entertainment District.

More than 10 men who allegedly had sexual contact with her are being interviewed by police.

This is phrased slightly differently on CityNews.ca, published the same day:

The 26-year-old from Hamilton was arrested on Sunday and police are alerting the public of her case. They allege she deliberately withheld [my italics] her important health information in order to have sex with men she met in bars in and around the GTA.

Detectives say [the woman] frequented bars in Hamilton, Brantford and Toronto on a regular basis and had sex with men she met at those establishments. She was diagnosed with HIV four years ago.

[She] deliberately failed to tell [my italics] one Toronto man about her HIV-status, according to police, and allegedly did the same to other men in order to have sex with them, often unprotected. Authorities are urging anyone who’s had sex with her to seek medical attention immediately.

“From what we’ve learned, she will disclose it sometimes and she won’t disclose it on other times,” Det. Joseph De Lottenville said Thursday.

The use of ‘deliberate’ in these different ways is really interesting. The first allegation that she “deliberately slept with a number of people without revealing that she had HIV” suggests that she intended to infect these men. However the second allegations, that she “deliberately failed to tell” one man that she had a one-night stand with that she was HIV-positive, is purely about nondisclosure. The knee-jerk reaction of the police was to create the myth of a female ‘HIV predator’ when the reality was that she and another man agreed to have (or probably did not even discuss) unprotected sex, putting themselves equally at risk – she of infecting another to HIV, he of becoming infected with HIV. I assume the man had the capacity to protect himself. Did he really need to be specifically warned about the risks? Why, then, is he is not held responsible for putting himself at risk?

And so, even after police released the woman’s name and photo for their ‘fishing expedition’, and even after interviewing more than ten of her other past sexual partners, she was still only charged with one count of aggravated sexual assault for nondisclosure. How then was this woman “a huge threat”? Aren’t the ten or more men who slept with her without using condoms who will have gone on to sleep with others, much more of a threat?

Canada: Prosecutions having negative impact on disclosure; Edwin Cameron speaks out

In my news story for aidsmap earlier this week, I wrote:

Over the past week, the global movement against criminalisation of HIV transmission received its biggest boost since the International AIDS Conference in Mexico last July. In rallies and meetings in Australia, Canada and Sweden leading judges, lawyers and politicians joined with HIV-positive advocates and civil society organisations to condemn the criminal justice system’s current approach to HIV non-disclosure, exposure and transmission.

I’ve already posted more detailed information about the Australian meeting, one of the two events in Canada, and highlighted the situation in Sweden. Below I’m posting highlights from newspaper coverage of South Africa Constitutional Court Justice Edwin Cameron’s speech in Toronto last Friday.

Update: The official text of Edwin Cameron’s address is now available from the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network website. (Une version française est disponible ici). An audio recording, which captures both the passion of his delivery, and some off-the-cuff changes, is available in the same location. Video may also be made available at a later date.

The Toronto Star ran a major article headlined, Judge slams criminalization of HIV, which put forward, without critique, Mr Justice Cameron’s international policy arguments as to why Canada needs to think again about its nondisclosure law.

Canada’s relentless practice of invoking the criminal law against people with HIV and AIDS is only intensifying the stigma surrounding the conditions and contravenes United Nations guidelines, argues a judge of South Africa’s Constitutional Court, who is HIV-positive himself.

African countries that look to Canada as a world leader on human rights issues are getting the wrong message when it puts people with HIV/AIDS on trial for having unprotected sex, even when the virus has not been transmitted, Justice Edwin Cameron said yesterday.

“Canada’s wide approach to exposure offences is sending out a terribly retrograde message to other countries, especially on my own continent, in Africa,” said Cameron, who delivered the keynote speech last night to kick off a weekend symposium on HIV and human rights issues, hosted by the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network.

With human immunodeficiency virus still steeped in so much stigma in Africa that many are afraid to be tested, Canada is not providing a good example of dealing rationally and justly with the epidemic, said Cameron, noting Canada is a “world leader” in targeting HIV-positive people for prosecution.

[…]

AIDS activists, Cameron said, must accept there may be instances in which criminal liability is justified, noting that one example might be the recent case in Hamilton of Johnson Aziga, convicted of first-degree murder for actively deceiving women about his HIV status and infecting them.

But Canada needs to rethink its sweeping use of the criminal law and question why it is singling out HIV-positive people for prosecution when the same Criminal Code powers are not being used against those who expose people to other potentially deadly conditions, he said.

“Let’s take, for example, the two recent health scares, swine flu and the highly, highly contagious forms of tuberculosis. We had a case where somebody got onto an aircraft with a highly transmissible form of tuberculosis, and no one ever suggested that person should be prosecuted.”

“Queer activist” Andrew Brett also wrote about Mr Justice Cameron’s speech on rabble.ca. It’s becoming clear that the fallout of the Johnson Aziga verdict is hitting HIV-positive Canadians really hard. The few I’ve spoken with personally are feeling under attack. Mr Justice Cameron, himself HIV-positive, feels their pain. Brett writes:

Earlier this year, a court in Hamilton, Ontario became the first in the world to convict a man of murder for failing to disclose his HIV-positive status to his sexual partners, two of whom later died of AIDS. Since then, criminal prosecutions have increased and the degree of charges being laid has been elevated.In some cases, Toronto police have even issued “public safety alerts” with names and photographs of HIV-positive people who allegedly failed to disclose their status, asking their sexual partners to come forward. Cameron likened this practice to a proposal by a Swaziland parliamentarian to brand people with HIV/AIDS on the buttocks.

An article published on Tuesday in Xtra.ca, entitled Attempted murder the new aggravated assault? eloquently highlights the impact this culture of fear is having in Toronto.

Rita Shahin, associate medical officer for Toronto Public Health, says that public health can be required by law to tell police if a particular individual has tested positive for HIV.

“When the police get a complaint in front of them then they will come to us with a search warrant and if we have a file on somebody then we have to produce it,” says Shahin.

However individuals who have been tested anonymously — through the Hassle Free Clinic’s anonymous HIV-testing program, for example — will not show up in public health’s records.

Although Shahin says public health hasn’t yet seen a decrease in the number of people getting tested as a result of the recent charges laid, “it’s definitely creating a lot of anxiety and especially for those people who are behaving responsibly it’s [a question of] how do they protect themselves? How do they prove that they’ve disclosed to someone?”

[Angel] Parks [coordinator of the AIDS Committee of Toronto’s Positive Youth Outreach programme] says she’s also hearing from people living with HIV/AIDS (PWAs) who are afraid that they’ll be charged even though they’ve disclosed.

“With any other criminal charge it’s always relied upon for having forensic-type evidence and these cases seems to only be based on he-said, she-said scenarios,” says Parks.

“Now they’re are even more afraid of what the consequences will be when they do disclose… like what if things fall out in a relationship where disclosure has happened? What can they do to protect themselves to ensure they can provide a credible defence if such an incident did occur?”

Because public health also deals with complaints against individuals for nondisclosure this is a scenario Shahin has seen play out.

“That’s why we have to really investigate the complaint to sort out, is it true? Is there a basis to the complaint or is it a relationship that’s gone sour where somebody’s being vindictive?”

Both Parks and Shahin recommend the recently published HIV Disclosure: a Legal Guide for Gay Men in Ontario, produced by the HIV and AIDS Legal Clinic (Ontario).

“It is meant to target gay, bi and men who have sex with men,” says Parks, “but the information contained in it is applicable really to any person living with HIV…. They talk about how to protect yourself against malicious lies or attacks.”

It’s going to take some time before public opinion catches up with the idea that the Canadian criminal justice system’s approach to HIV nondisclosure is at best flawed, and at worst, severly and negatively impacting on the human rights of people living with HIV, as this comment from a Toronto Star reader (agreed with by 15 others, and disagreed with by only one) suggests:

The carrier should still be charged: If a person with HIV has unprotected sex with another person who doesn’t have HIV and doesn’t inform his or her sexual partner that he or she has HIV, that person should be charged. I think the same would apply to someone who has herpes and doesn’t inform his or her partner that he has it. Just because the unsuspecting sexual partner doesn’t get HIV from the carrier doesn’t mean that the carrier shouldn’t be charged. It would be like saying that if you go into a bank to rob it and you are carrying a gun but don’t use the gun, you shouldn’t be charged with bank robbery. That doesn’t make sense.

No, actually, its the gun analogy that makes no sense. Or is it the case that people with HIV are now thought of in Canada not just vectors of transmission but actually walking deadly weapons? It seems that when it comes to HIV-positive people, attitudes in ‘conservative’ Texas and ‘liberal’ Ontario are exactly the same.

Global prosecutions league table sees Sweden on top

I’ve just done a rather quick and dirty calculation of prosecutions for HIV non-disclosure, exposure or transmission per capita, based on GNP+’s Global Criminalisation Scan data, and produced this rather interesting league table.

Despite Canada, the US and Australia being disproportionately represented on my blog, due to the sheer number of prosecutions taking place, Sweden, Norway and New Zealand have actually prosecuted the highest proportion of people with HIV in their respective countries.

Having just returned from an excellent conference organised by HIV Sweden in Stockholm (on which I reported today in this aidsmap.com news story, highlights of which are below), it really comes as no surprise that Sweden and Norway head the league of shame.

And last Tuesday, Mr Justice Cameron addressed a meeting in Stockholm organised by HIV Sweden to discuss HIV and the criminal law in Sweden and other Nordic countries.

The meeting heard that Sweden’s laws were often applied selectively and discriminatory, including the recent case of an African migrant woman who had gone to the police after being raped by two men.

However, rather than charge her assailants, the police charged the woman with HIV exposure. The case is still ongoing.

Peter Gröön, of Stockholm County Council, shared data showing that African migrants – ten of the 16 people prosecuted in the past five years – also received longer prison sentences than their Swedish counterparts. Mr Justice Cameron told the meeting that this kind of HIV exceptionalism, which is fuelled by stigma, must not be tolerated. “We want [HIV to be treated] neither better, nor worse than any other disease,” he said.

The meeting also heard that a coalition of grass roots and civil society organisations in Norway might lead to an abolition of Norway’s current HIV exposure and transmission law, Section 155, which has led to ten prosecutions the past five years.

The law, which does not allow HIV-negative people to consent to unprotected sex, and makes little distinction between HIV exposure and transmission, places the burden on HIV-positive individuals to both disclose HIV status and insist on condom use in order to be able to avoid potential prosecution.

Through a campaign that has included providing every MP in Norway with information about the inequities of the law, and a major newspaper article from Mr Justice Cameron, published in May, representatives of HIV Manifesto and HIV Norway were hopeful that the law will be repealed during the country’s revision of the its Penal Code.

The meeting also heard that a similar opportunity might also be possible in Sweden later in the year, during the pubic debate that will follow a proposal to lengthen prison sentences for assault (the law under which criminal HIV exposure and transmission is prosecuted in Sweden).

US: Thoughtful criminalisation discussion on US radio

On Monday, National Public Radio included a thoughtful and relatively balanced 30 minute discussion about the criminalisation of HIV transmission in the US and Canada. You can hear the discussion here.

Participants included Jon Wells, who interviewed Johnson Aziga for The Hamilton Spectator (and who provides some further insights into Mr Aziga); Regan Hofmann, editor-in-chief of POZ Magazine, who eloquently, subtly, and patiently, explained why many of these prosecutions (but not that of Mr Aziga) are wrong; and Jonathan Turley, professor of public interest law at George Washington University who blogs about the law. In the interview, he explains how so many of poorly-written HIV-specific US state laws came to be – a late 80s reaction to the myth of ‘patient zero’; fascinating.

New Zealand: Article examines implications of ‘HIV predator’ case

After all the hysterical media reporting surrounding the current ‘HIV predator’ case comes a thoughtful analysis of the situation from the New Zealand Herald. The article also usefully includes a summary of the most important criminal HIV transmission cases over the years.

I include the first few paragraphs below. Click here to read the full article.

HIV-positive: The case for disclosure
By Chris Barton
Saturday Jun 06, 2009

Many questions arise from the case of the 40-year-old HIV-positive man charged with wilfully infecting three other men with HIV and attempting to infect a fourth.

Not just why the man, now in custody with name suppression, allegedly did what he did. Or why it took so long for the police to stop him. Or why our laws are so out of date that doctors and other health professionals are uncertain about what to do when they come across such reckless behaviour. Or why HIV is not a notifiable condition.

Puzzling as all that sounds, the greater mystery here is why did the man’s sexual partners participate the way they did? Why, after decades of messages honed from the reality of the Aids epidemic 25 years on, did they not practise safe sex?

Past cases include:

1994 Kenyan musician Peter Mwai sentenced to seven years jail for having unprotected sex with five women and infecting two with HIV. Deported in June 1998 having served four years in jail here, Mwai died in Uganda in September 1998.

1999 David Purvis, a 31-year-old Pakuranga invalid beneficiary, sentenced to four months jail for committing a criminal nuisance by having unprotected sex with another man who did not contract HIV. Pleaded guilty.

2001 Former male prostitute Christopher Truscott held in “secure” care (he has escaped many times) in Christchurch after being prosecuted in 1999 for having unprotected sex with four men. Intellectually impaired, Truscott seemed unable to comprehend the implications of his HIV infection.

2004 Zimbabwean Shingirayi Nyarirangwe, 25, was sentenced to three years jail after pleading guilty in the Auckland District Court to four charges of criminal nuisance and three of assault relating to unprotected sex with several women.

2005 Justin Dalley found guilty of criminal nuisance by failing to inform a woman he was HIV positive – sentenced in Wellington to 300 hours’ community work, six months’ supervision and told him to pay $1000 reparation to the woman to cover her counselling costs and expenses. The woman did not contract HIV. Soon after, Dalley was acquitted on a second, similar charge because on that occasion he did wear a condom – possibly setting a legal precedent that by wearing a condom an HIV positive man is taking “reasonable precautions” against infection and need not disclose his HIV status.

Current A New Zealander originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo awaiting trial on charges that he had unprotected sex with a woman and infected her with the virus. It is possible he also infected other women.

US: Judge gives HIV-positive pregnant woman longer prison sentence ‘to protect unborn child’ (updated)

A judge in Maine has more than doubled the prison sentence of an HIV-positive woman in order to protect her unborn child, according to a report from The Bangor Daily News. The judge admits he based the decision entirely on the woman’s HIV status.

The 28 year-old woman, from Cameroon, had previously pleaded guilty for having fake documents. She was not legally entitled to be in the United States and was planning to seek asylum. The case has now been taken up by the Maine Civil Liberties Union.

Both prosecution and defence had asked U.S. District Judge John Woodcock to sentence the woman to 114 days, or time served (she has been in custody since January 21st). However, citing the welfare of the woman’s unborn child, the judge sentenced her to 238 days (to coincide with her due date of August 29th).

Woodcock told [the woman] at her sentencing on May 14 in U.S. District Court that he was not imposing the longer prison term to punish her further but to protect her unborn child. He said that the defendant was more likely to receive medical treatment and follow a drug regimen in federal prison than out on her own or in the custody of immigration officials. The judge also said that his decision was based entirely on her HIV status. If Tuleh were pregnant but not infected with the AIDS virus, he would have sentenced her to time served.

[…]

In sentencing Tuleh, Woodcock said that the law required he take into account a defendant’s medical condition in fashioning a sentence. Although a defendant’s medical condition most often is used to lower a sentence, the judge found that there was nothing in the federal sentencing guidelines to prevent him from imposing a sentence longer than the guidelines recommended because of Tuleh’s HIV status.

“My obligation is to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant,” he said at Tuleh’s sentencing, “and that public, it seems to me at this point, should likely include that child she’s carrying. I don’t think that the transfer of HIV to an unborn child is a crime technically under the law, but it is as direct and as likely as an ongoing assault.

“If I had — if I were to know conclusively that upon release from imprisonment a defendant was going to assault another person,” Woodcock said, “I would act in a fashion to prevent that, and similar to an assault, causing grievous injury to a wholly innocent person. And so I think I have the obligation to do what I can to protect that person, when that person is born, from permanent and ongoing harm.”

The Maine Civil Liberties Union told The Bangor Daily News.

“We are enormously sympathetic to the desire to ensure that Ms. Tuleh receives adequate health care, including prenatal care,” Zachary Heiden, legal director for the MCLU, said in an e-mail. “Federal immigration law has developed in truly arbitrary and punitive ways. Here, even a federal judge could not get assurances that Ms. Tuleh would not be deported before the end of her pregnancy. He could not get assurances she would not have her medical care arbitrarily cut off. That is wrong.

“Judges cannot lock a woman up simply because she is sick and pregnant,” he said. “Judges have enormous discretion in imposing sentences, and that is appropriate. But jailing someone is punishment — it is depriving them of liberty. That deprivation has to be justified, and illness or pregnancy is not justification for imprisonment.”

The sentence was objected to primarily by the prosecution, however.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Lowell objected to Woodcock’s decision. Lowell said Tuleh’s sentence set a precedent that “could affect the many other sorts of cases that come before this court in which defendants have serious medical conditions. In the end, Bureau of Prisons custody is designed to incarcerate,” Lowell told Woodcock at the sentencing hearing. “Incarceration is mostly designed for the purpose of punishment, deterrence and community protection. The Bureau of Prisons is not well-designed to accomplish necessarily the end of providing medical care to a defendant and her unborn child.”

The US Attorney’s office has appealed the sentence to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, but arguments will not be heard until late July. The MCLU is also planning on submitting amicus curiae briefs on the issues of HIV, pregnancy, immigration law, and prisoner rights.

Update: June 18th The woman will now give birth in hospital rather than prison after Judge Woodcock heard new evidence that she will be looked after in the community, according to a report in The Bangor Daily News.

“I recognize that the sentence turned out to be controversial,” he said. “I can certainly understand how some have misinterpreted what the court intended to do in this case.”

Woodcock said that what he had wanted to do was “to step in between the prison system and the social [safety] net” to ensure that Tuleh remained healthy and that the child was born healthy.

“At the time of the sentencing, I had no clear understanding of what the community could do,” Woodcock said.

[…]

A three-judge panel in Boston has agreed to hear the appeal on an expedited schedule, but oral arguments are not expected to be held until late July and early August. In addition to appeals filed by the prosecution and the defense, a group of 15 individuals and organizations have filed in Bangor and Boston a “friend of the court” brief in support of Tuleh.

Woodcock said Monday that he found the brief “articulate and helpful” in making his decision about whether to release Tuleh on bail.

More details at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women site here

Click here to see the results of the paper’s poll asking whether a judge should be able to impose a longer sentence in order to protect an inmate’s unborn child?

US: Padieu gives TV interview, highlights Texan ‘injustice’

It wouldn’t happen anywhere else, but three days after Philippe Padieu was sentenced to 45 years in prison after being found guilty of six counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, after having unprotected sex without first disclosing his HIV status with six women who subsequently tested HIV-positive, he gave a TV interview to CBS 11 News.

In it, he essentially repeats the same accusations of bias and lack of evidence that he made in court prior to be sentenced.

I thought the trial was just public opinion turned against me. It wasn’t a fair trial at all… The reason I’m serving 45 years is because I had an ineffective counsel. I had no money…

However, seeing him say these things in the flesh makes me appreciate that he has a point. In particular, since Texas has no HIV-specific law, the bar is set much higher in proving that he actually infected the six women with HIV. Although phylogenetic analysis linked his strain of HIV with the six women’s, that is not enough to prove the direction of transmission, and – notably – the timing.

He noted that all six women had multiple partners, and that he had sex with three of them before he tested positive (which means he could have infected these women before knowing his status, which definitely would not be a crime).

I think it was an injustice. You couldn’t say anything about these woman in court. You couldn’t bring up their past sexual history.

However, some of his other allegations are more difficult to swallow, including saying that the six women were “very vindictive.”

You could blame them because they failed to take responsibility. They lied. They were involved in a conspiracy. They formed a hate group. I believe they should step up to the plate. They are just as responsible as I am…There’s rage. There’s vengeance. Admitting knowledge is not admitting responsibility. Hate and anger is fear and guilt in disguise.

Mr Padieu will now appeal and is looking for a new lawyer.

US: Young, recently diagnosed gay man in Washington State arrested for HIV exposure

A 22 year-old gay man from Spokane, Washington, who was diagnosed HIV-positive in August 2008 has been arrested and charged under Washington’s HIV exposure and transmission law following a complaint from a bisexual married man whom he met on the internet for casual sex.

The case highlights the great divide between criminal HIV laws and accepted practice amongst men who have sex with men. In particular, the Washingon State Appeals Court upheld in 1999 that if someone who knows their HIV status has unprotected sex with someone else without first disclosing then this is considered to be “acting with intent to inflict harm”.

Yet, the details of the case, which have been revealed in a series of stories published by local papers and TV in and around Spokane, suggest that the man had no intention of inflicting harm.

In yet another US trial by media, he was interviewed following his arraignment, by local TV station KXLY, during which he admits his (moral, rather than legal) guilt.

In a jail house interview Thursday afternoon [he] says he willingly had unprotected sex with men he met in online, on chat lines and in People’s Park without telling them he had HIV. “I can’t count but I think there’s a few that didn’t know,” [he] said…The 22-year-old contracted the virus from a former boyfriend and has known he’s HIV-positive since August but he continued to have unprotected sex and admits he only told about half the men he has the virus. “I wanted to apologize to everybody I’ve come into contact with and haven’t told,” he said.

[…He] said he had “no idea” why he was having unprotected sex, but claims that Spokane’s gay community isn’t as concerned as it used to be about the virus. “Nowadays if somebody has HIV they don’t care, they don’t care about asking,” he said. [He] is now sorry he wasn’t more careful with the married man that went to police. “I want to apologize to him and his family for putting him at risk, his wife at risk. Their lives are pretty much ruined from this point on if it comes back positive on them.”

The story doesn’t stop there, however. Citing police concerns that the man had sex with around 70 men since his diagnosis, Spokane’s public health department is launching an outreach campaign, including ads on craigslist and manhunt, and posters in public cruising areas, encouraging people to undergo HIV testing.

“We understand there may have been a number of anonymous sex partners that could have been exposed to HIV and because of this we are doing some extra outreach efforts,” said Lisa St. John with the Spokane Regional Health District. This type of outreach is something the health district has never done before. They want people to know they’re not affiliated with any kind of police investigation.

Last week, according to a story from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that number is now up to 80. Public health officials appear to be incredulous that a gay man with HIV could have so many sex partners (they obviously live very sheltered lives).

“Since I’ve been here we’ve not had an investigation of this magnitude,” said district spokeswoman Julie Graham, who’s been with the district for at least five years. According to court documents, [the accused man] signed health district paperwork last year warning him it was a crime to expose people to the virus without telling them. But [his] friends told police that he routinely meets anonymous men on the Internet and that he often visited a local park to have sex.

[…]

The health district has a process for discouraging risky sexual behavior, which can include issuing a cease-and-desist order, which if violated, can land the client in the court system. “On a rare occasion that we find out that someone has intentionally put others at risk, we would take the actions first to keep that from happening,” Graham said. “This is our first time where we have had our records subpoenaed by police as a first step.”

The person making the most sense was the accused man’s father, who apparently only discovered his son’s HIV status a few months ago. Both parents are supporting their son, and their response has been heroically pragmatic.

“I just feel that unsafe sex by anybody is real dumb in this place and time in the world,” [his father] said. “I blame both equally.”

Unfortunately, Washington State laws don’t blame both equally. The man has now pleaded not guilty, and a trial is set for July 20th.