In Texas, a man is serving 35 years in prison for spitting at a police officer. In the state of Washington, a 19-year-old college student sits behind bars on first-degree assault charges for having unprotected sex with his girlfriend. A Georgia woman was sentenced to eight years in prison after consensual sex without a condom, while a Michigan man faced 10 years in prison on a felony charge for allegedly biting his neighbor during a scuffle. The penalties are steep because, according to the laws in these states, the defendants all brandished a deadly weapon: their HIV-positive status.
Such prosecutions are frequent. Thirty-four states have some type of HIV-criminalization law. Depending on the state, it may be illegal to expose someone else to HIV, transmit the virus or conceal your own HIV-positive status from potential sexual partners. This criminalization extends even to cases in which condoms were used or when the virus was not transmitted, as well as to acts, such as spitting or biting, that pose minuscule to no risk.
HIV Status: Prosecuting a Virus
Also from the article:
Pushing back against what they see as a cycle of stigma, shame and incarceration, a growing coalition of organizations, including the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and the Center for HIV Law and Policy, are framing the criminalization of HIV as a civil rights struggle. “This is a targeting of people, based on a stigma against groups that are associated with HIV,” Catherine Hanssens, director of the Center for HIV Law and Policy, told The Root. “And that’s gay people and people of color.”[…]
Rather than a malicious intent to spread disease, activists say that there are many reasons some people keep quiet about their HIV status. The misinformed belief that HIV-positive people are highly toxic, for example, fuels not only social exclusion and familial rejection but has also led to discrimination in employment, housing and child-custody battles. In the military, where it’s illegal for HIV-positive people to have sex, dismissal can mean the loss of benefits.
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