Many people do not know that you can be imprisoned for knowingly passing on HIV to sexual partner and not disclosing your status. In some states across the U.S and Canada people with HIV have been sentenced to years or even decades in prison for having sex without telling their partners they’re infected, even when they practiced safe sex, or didn’t infect their partner. Spitting or transmitting HIV-infected bodily fluids is a criminal offense and states can and will treat the transmission of HIV, depending upon a many different factors, as a felony and others as a misdemeanor. These actions are called criminal transmission of HIV, this is when you knowingly pass on the virus in an intentional or reckless way.
When the route of potential transmission could be determined, the majority of cases involved unprotected sexual contact. The people in those cases confound stereotypes or prejudiced notions: HIV-positive defendants and their accusers have included gay and straight couples in one-night stands, dating relationships or even years of marriage.
Many states are stricter than others. The least restrictive state in the United States is California, which just recently reduced its penalties for knowingly exposing a partner. The law at first was a felony offense that would get and offender anywhere from 3 to 8 years in prison, and is now a misdemeanor and only 6 months of jail time. While in stricter states like Arkansas, Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio it’s a crime to have any type of sexual contact with a partner without disclosure, even if you did not transmit the virus. In some cases engaging in sexual contact without disclosing a positive HIV status to purposely transmitting HIV/AIDS is looked at as an attempt to murder someone. In one case it did murder someone, Larry Dunn’s lover disclosed her HIV status and he killed her. He said that “She killed me, so I killed her”. He is currently serving a 40-year sentence. People have done time before for spitting, scratching, and biting but, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), spitting and scratching cannot transmit HIV, and transmission through biting “is very rare and involves very specific circumstances”.
Of the 33 states that have HIV specific laws, 24 of those states require you to disclose that information to your partner. Out of those 24 states, 14 require you to share this information with needle-sharing partners. Within the 33 states that have HIV specific laws 11 of them criminalize behaviors such as biting, spitting, and throwing bodily fluids, but most of these are often in the context of prisons and correctional facilities.
I believe that people do know should know that you should not knowingly pass on the disease, but I don’t think people realize the consequences that face them if they choose to do something this reckless to another person. If you knowingly pass on the HIV virus to a person who is unaware of your status then I believe it should be a felony, like it is in the more stricter states like Arkansas, Michigan, new Jersey, and Ohio. People should want to protect their partners from this deadly life altering virus. But these laws are also not put in the perspective of most new cases of HIV result from unprotected intercourse with an HIV positive person who has not been tested.
Until recently, criminal punishment was basically unheard of for infectious diseases other than HIV. Officials have the authority to quarantine the sick to contain epidemics, but this power was typically granted to health authorities. Very few criminal laws take aim at diseases. At least two states have laws against exposing others to “communicable diseases,” but only if exposure happens through routes most commonly associated with HIV, such as sex, sharing needles or donating blood. And while some states have laws that specifically punish exposure to tuberculosis, syphilis or “venereal diseases,” HIV exposure is almost always punished more severely. At least 35 states have criminal laws that punish HIV-positive people for exposing others to the virus, even if they take precautions such as using a condom. While national experts have condemned these laws, state health officials have mixed opinions.
In the last decade there have been about 550 cases of this happening, where people have actually been convicted, or pleaded guilty. Nick Rhoades was a 33-year-old man who was knowingly HIV positive. He met 22-year-old Adam Plendl on a social networking site and they agreed to meet at Plendl’s home in Cedar Falls, Iowa where they had unprotected oral sex and protected anal sex. Several days later Adam Plendl finds out that Nick Rhoades is HIV positive, and goes straight to the hospital to get tested. The results came back negative because Rhoades used a condom and was protected. But, since this was a sex crime the nurse was legally obligated to tell authorities. Months later, Nick Rhoades was charged for violating the Iowa’s criminal transmission of HIV. The statute did not require that transmission of the virus occur, only that a defendant be HIV positive, and have sexual contact that could result in the transmission of the virus, with a person who did not know the defendant was HIV positive. During his appearance in court Nick Rhoades admitted to being HIV positive and that he did engage in sexual activity with Adam Plendl, knowing his own status.
Nick Rhoades was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Which sent the public into an uproar, and led the judge to reduce his sentence of 25 years to just 5 years of probation and he was freed from prison. Even though he is free from prison, for the rest of his life he will be registered as an aggravated sex offender, and he cannot be alone with anyone under the age of 14. Then in 2010, he challenged his guilty plea. He stated that because he had started treatment for HIV in 2005 and his load was “ undetectable”, he was not breaking any of Iowa’s criminal transmission of HIV laws. But the courts said that, “there was an insufficient basis in fact to justify a finding that Rhoades violated the statute by engaging in intimate contact that “could” result in transmission of the HIV virus”. Scientists did not yet know that if you are “undetected” when you cannot pass the virus onto another host. Then in 2014, the revised the law to fit medical advances, which meant Rhoades was allowed to withdraw his guilty plea. In Nick Rhoades case his 25 year prison sentence was absurd to many, especially because he did not infect anyone and because Plendl did not want to press charges in the first place.
In general, there is little data on how widespread the knowledge of laws that affect HIV prevention actually is. In the early 1990s, many states had passed laws to implement name-based HIV surveillance to improve HIV prevention and the epidemic. A widely held community concern was that people at risk for HIV had high levels of knowledge of the laws and the laws would discourage those from seeking HIV testing. However, a multi-state study found that only 15 % of participants could identify their state law, and that HIV surveillance was not associated with deterrence to testing. Public health surveillance laws are relevant to different populations than those subject to HIV-specific criminal laws, but the context of a widely contested public policy is similar. These data suggest that high levels of knowledge of HIV-specific criminal laws and correct understanding of the content of the laws should not be assumed, but known. This data further suggests that public health practice focuses on the known public health implications of these laws. Knowledge of HIV specific laws among people who have HIV is not at all well known. But it also depends on the state that you are living in.
In the U.S 33 states have HIV specific laws that protect people from the harm of the HIV virus. If you knowingly pass the virus to another host, you will have to deal with the consequences of the law. People who have the HIV/ AIDS virus should not be having risky unprotected sex. That is how the whole epidemic started to begin with.