The Advocate apparently wants Louisiana to decriminalize intentional transmission of HIV

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HIV is no longer a death sentence. But under Louisiana law, it can be a prison sentence.

LINK

Robert Suttle thought enlisting in the Air Force after college in 2003 would give his life structure. Instead, the enlistment process gave the Shreveport resident a life-changing diagnosis: He was HIV positive at age 24.

Suttle was in shock. He didn’t know anyone with HIV. Even as a young gay Black man in the South, he wasn’t aware he was at risk. No one talked about HIV where he was from.

But because it was 2003, he was able to get access to drugs that prevented the debilitating symptoms and painful deaths of the 1980s and early 1990s. For him, HIV was not the death sentence it once was. But under Louisiana law, it would wind up being a prison sentence.

In 1987, Louisiana was one of the first states to enact a law that makes it a felony for a person who knows of their positive HIV status to expose another through any means of contact without the knowledge of the other person.

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Louisiana’s law doesn’t require actual transmission of the virus, the intent to transmit, or even consider whether transmission was scientifically possible to convict. The law criminalizes non-sexual behaviors such as spitting and biting, which are not transmission routes.

And the law in Louisiana is disproportionately enforced based on race and sex. Black men make up 15% of the population in this state and 44% of those living with HIV, but 91% of the arrests for allegations related to HIV crimes, according to an analysis of law enforcement incident-level data and the state’s sex offender registry.

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“Our coalition tried unsuccessfully to get the lawmakers to modernize it in the way that we knew, based on data and based on experience, was really necessary,” said Mandisa Moore-O’Neal, co-founder of the Louisiana Coalition on Criminalization and Health. “Unfortunately, our state has not done the work of modernizing its laws in alignment with science.”

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