HIV/AIDS and legal responsibility

Richard Schmidt is a doctor from Louisiana, USA, who was accused of infecting his lover Janice by injecting her with HIV+ blood from one of his patients. Janice alleged that Schmidt had injected her in an act of vengeance after she tried to end their relationship. Scientists were able to determine that Schmidt's patient was extremely likely to have been the source of the virus found in Trahan. Schmidt was found guilty and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

In June 2004 Morat was found guilty under legislation on poisoning (France has no specific anti-HIV laws) of failing to disclose his status to two women, both of whom subsequently became HIV+. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
Femmes Positives are a French group lobbying for a specific HIV transmission-related law that will give them the right to prosecute former lovers.
These two factors have stimulated a massive debate in France over whether HIV+ people should ever be divided into 'victims' or 'criminals' in the eyes of the law, or whether the conventional doctrine of 'shared responsibility' should remain.

In March 2005 Dica was found guilty in the UK of reckless (rather than deliberate) Grievous Bodily Harm against two women. He claimed that the women had fully consented to the risks of unprotected sex with him. However, the prosecution argued that he had actively persuaded one of the women not to use condoms, even though he knew he was HIV+. He also led the other to believe he was HIV negative and a rich single lawyer, when in fact he was HIV positive, unemployed and married with children. He was jailed for 4 and a half years.

May 2005: A mother from Hamilton in Canada was charged with criminal negligence causing bodily harm after refusing pre- and post-natal care and ignoring advice that would have prevented her baby from acquiring HIV. Following the birth of a healthy baby in 2003, the woman became pregnant again in 2004 and changed her health care provider. She did not tell her new doctors of her positive status, so her baby did not receive essential medication. Despite having not breast fed her first baby under her doctor's advice, she did breastfeed the second, leading to the baby testing positive.

In June 2005 Dalley, a New Zealander, was convicted of criminal nuisance after having unprotected sex with his girlfriend and failing to disclose his status. She remained HIV negative, but initially told Dalley's family she was positive. She later admitted she had lied, but charges were still brought due to the alleged mental stress and trauma she had suffered on discovering her boyfriend's status. Dalley was sentenced to 300 hours' community work, six months supervision and $1000 reparation to cover his girlfriend's counselling and other expenses.

In June 2005 the Canadian Red Cross was taken to court after more than 1,000 Canadian citizens acquired HIV from infected blood products in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Red Cross had failed to properly implement HIV and hepatitis screening for some years after tests for the diseases became available. Official charges were dropped after the organisation admitted guilt, issued a full apology and agreed to compensate the victims. As well as a $5,000 fine, they gave $1.5 million (not sourced from public donations) to fund, first, scholarships for affected children and, second, research into medical errors.

Pavlos Gergiou, a Cypriot fisherman, infected his British lover, Janette Pink, during a holiday romance. Ms Pink eventually managed to persuade the Cypriot courts to bring him to trial in 1997. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison. At the same time, the UK government announced that the 1861 Offences against the Person Act was to be revised so that the deliberate, but not reckless, transmission of illnesses would be punishable by anything up to a life sentence. This has not been done, making possible the first ever case of reckless transmission in 2003 (see 'Mohammed Dica').

In 2000 Feston Konzani, an African asylum seeker living in the UK, was diagnosed HIV positive and advised to warn any future partners of his status. He later had sex with three women without telling them that he was HIV+. The women became HIV+ and eventually brought him to trial. Konzani argued that the women had consented to the risk of catching a sexual disease by agreeing to have unprotected sex with him.
In 2004 he was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. The judge told him the sentence was intended to deter other HIV positive people who did the same.