I was thinking about this last night, but I can't even begin to think of a good solution. What would you do, if they let you run the laws for a day?

Rather than HIV-specific legislation, would it be a bad thing to criminalize any "deliberate" infection of a "disease or agent" that "prove fatal"? That is, rather than targeting HIV, just leave the law as that--'deliberate' with a 'fatal' medical conclusion?

That way if I, a straight/gay/bi man/woman infect my partner/person/co-worker/bus driver with AIDS/anthrax/ebola over a bus ride/dinner/sex and the court determines it was a a likely "fatal" condition and it was determined to be "deliberate" then I'm on the hook?

That would get all the accidental or simply negligient from not knowing people off the hook and also not be a law aimed at gays.

It's fraud, not a sex crime. HIV and sex are the methods, but if we're going by intent, it's fraud.

Satisfaction may be an intangible, but it's certainly something one gains from inflicting pain as a matter of revenge or personal gain. Fraud also allows for monetary damages in an easier way than simple sex crime charges.

We can't use your method, Joe, because the loophole is clear: HIV itself is not the cause of death. By your rationale, a savvy lawyer can argue that parents are to blame for all death.

@3 You're right, yeah. I wonder if a good solution even exists for this.

McNeil Island Gay sex offenders campground and sauna.

If I ran the laws for a day, here's how I'd do it: Anybody found to have infected someone else with HIV (whether knowingly or unknowingly, ie: the whether the initially HIV-positive person did or did not know they had HIV) should be on the hook.

The hook? Assisting in payment for HIV-related medical costs.

When a woman is impregnated (intentionally or unintentionally), the paternal father is then on the hook for providing (at the very least) monetary care. The prohibitive cost of raising a child (particularly when the child is unwanted/ unplanned) inspires many people to take care and use protection.

If the same monetary fines were leveled for a sexually-transmitted life-long illness, then two things should logically occur.

1) People will start getting tested for HIV because being fined is always to their detriment, regardless of whether or not they knew. So it's better to know and take concrete steps to avoid infecting others.

2) People will begin taking more care to be sexually responsible, out of a desire not to transmit (and be fiscally responsible) for an STD that significantly impacts remaining quality of life.

I suppose it could be argued that victims will purposefully get HIV in order to maintain fiscal solvency, in much the same way that it's argued some women get pregnant on purpose to maintain fiscal (or romantic) solvency. No system is perfect. But in my opinion, if anyone gets life-debilitating STD (or pregnant) in order to be fiscally solvent, the jokes on them. Free money < unwanted STD or pregnancy.

Why not just make it that people who take reasonable precautions against passing on HIV cannot be prosecuted? So someone who intentionally or recklessly infected people could be charged, but someone who just, say, had a condom accident couldn't.

Is there some problem with this that I've overlooked?

@6,

The problem is, what do you do with someone who's broke and can't pay? They get to walk away scot free? I'd argue that being infected with an eventually fatal disease is significantly more harmful than winding up pregnant, especially since there is always the option of terminating the pregnancy.

Sex is complicated and messy, and having laws that punish people for not taking an HIV test or not disclosing their status before they even touch someone else aren't going to work.

@3, "We can't use your method, Joe, because the loophole is clear: HIV itself is not the cause of death." I'm not sure what that means, precisely. Obviously it's the opportunistic infections that kill you, but HIV acts to reduce the immune function so that the opportunistic infection takes hold. It's just not a difficult thing to argue "beyond a reasonable doubt."

The argument goes like this: what was the proximal cause of death? Karposi's sarcoma. What is the probability that an HIV-negative individual would get KS? Very, very low. Can we, to the limits of human ability to comprehend cause and effect, say that the KS was caused by the HIV? Yes.

What's the problem with that?

I think Baconcat is on the right track.

Criminalize the fraud aspects of it, not he HIV+.

What about someone who has reckless sex for decades, and never gets tested? Aren't they showing a depraved indifference to human life by not being tested, even if they don't technically know they are infected?

Saying it takes two people in these situations is NOT saying the young, stupid and foolish are the only ones blame -- just the opposite. It is saying that there are two people involved with all the accompanying variables that come with that.

Criminalisation doesn't stop behavior, or else no one would speed or murder.

Until we have documenting cameras on every sex act, with binding legal contracts signed before insertion, it's all so much hot air.
Let's get those cameras and contracts rolling, folks. Brother!

Kids need to be innoculated to go to school. Would it be so crazy to require everyone to get an HIV test once every three years? (And make it illegal to discriminate against the HIV-positive in work and health care situations, of course.)

I don't understand why this law stops people from getting tested, I really don't. You get tested, if you're HIV positive you tell your partners that you're HIV positive, and you don't get arrested. Easy peasy.

@16: I favor once a month, at least until prevalence rates start dropping substantially, but that would be my solution, yes. Although it needs to be an antigen test, not antibody - antibody tests don't register positive until the end of Primary HIV Infection (PHI) and PHI is when you have the greatest per-sex act risk of transmitting, by an order of magnitude or two.

It seems the problem here isn't one of unintented consequeces, i.e. you throw the few pricks who infect guys with HIv into jail and then rates of testing go down across the board. What this debate really seems to be about is how much are you entitled to know about your sex partner and when are you entitled to know it.

It seems to me no one is entitled to any information from their sex partner. However one is entitled to the legal protections against harm resulting from malicious behavior. I suggest prosecution for HIV transmission when you can show malicious intent i.e. you are intending to infect someone. If you're positive and you don't disclose for fear of rejection, or because you were never asked, that shouldn't be here or there, no one should be forced to disclose medical information to a one night stand (though hopefully they should feel a moral obligation to). Malicious intent is the key: you are HIV-positive and there is no shadow of a doubt that your intention was to infect someone. This could be established by either a pattern of putting people at risk (as the story in the earlier post of criminalizing HIV transmission demonstrated), coercion through showing documents that falsify one's status, etc.

Also if I recall correctly, a certain sex advice columnist once posited an ingenious solution to the legal complexities involved in criminalizing HIV transmission by arguing that new HIV infections should be treated like paternity cases. Because it "takes two to tango" a positive partner who knowingly infects an unsuspecting partner with HIV should pay half of all his health bills. That seems fair.

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