A real prince of a guy, Trevis Smith, was sentenced to five and half years in court today after being convicted for knowingly exposing two women HIV by having unprotected sex with them. Neither of them were infected.Now, I don't disagree for a moment that this guy is a dick (apparently, a latex-free one). Maybe he was just reckless, maybe he was angry and really wanted to infect them, maybe he just really likes bareback sex. I don't know.
What I do know is that the prosecutor, Bill Burge, is totally talking out of his ass when he "argued that Smith knew the dangers of HIV and he knew that he had a responsibility to disclose his condition to his sexual partners.
'It was just a matter of luck' that neither was infected," Burge said.
Not exactly. Our friendly neighbourhood AIDS page on Wikipedia gives a very useful table of estimated rates of infection per 10,000 exposures. Rates of exposure for receptive penile-vaginal intercourse...survey says...10.
Ten per 10,000. That's an infection rate of 0.001%. [Correction: 0.1%] Not exactly a matter of "luck," then. More like a 99.9% chance that the woman wouldn't be infected. I would take those odds.
I don't deny that these women probably went through a few hellish months waiting for their test results. Sucks to be them. Insist on a condom next time. And yeah, our Trojan horse really should have disclosed his HIV status. (Like, as if he'd ever get laid again.) But imprisonment -- particularly for more than five years -- is ridiculously punitive.
What really frosts me is the perpetuation of an impression of HIV that is years out of date. Yeah, it was pretty scary back there in the 1986, when you didn't know if you could get it from drinking fountain, but I'd like to think we've moved on in the intervening two decades.
Five and a half years for a 0.1% chance he harmed them? How much would he have gotten if he'd driven them home after a movie? Those cars are deathtraps, I tell you. It would have been only a matter of luck if she'd gotten out alive.
7 comments:
I have to indulge my tendency to number-related pedantry here -- 10 in 10,000 is 1 in 1000 is 0.1%.
Not that it makes the slightest difference.
You're absolutely correct. I only dabble in numbers -- you're the real deal.
Isn't five years rather more than that other guy, the one who really did set out to infect other people deliberately, served?
Here
is the link to the relevant SCC decision in case anyone is interested. Interestingly, the Court split three ways on what kind of frauds vitiate consent. The majority decision starts at para. 77.
Probably the Court did not know the numbers back then. It would have been interesting to know if the result would have been different, given that for an aggravated assault conviction in this context the accused must have "endangered" the complainant's life.
Interesting link, thanks.
The idea that HIV is easily contracted through sexual intercourse is a triumph of the public-health agenda. If their goal was to convince the public that a single indiscreet act could be a death sentence, they've succeeded admirably.
However, a little like teen drug programs that try to convince youngsters that two weeks after smoking a joint you'll be a crackwhore, it's bound to backfire -- and I think we've been seeing that for some time in gay communities. (As an aside: can you imagine how much sex gay men were having in San Francisco in the early 1980s, to achieve an infection rate as high as it was? the mind, she boggles).
I'm guessing the defence in this case argued the numbers, but the horrible, unlikely thing that could befall you (in this case, HIV, but see also Mad Cow and tobogganning head injuries) proved to have a firmer grip on the imagination.
Incidentally, in case I've confused anyone, the case I've linked is the earlier SCC case that states the law which would have been applied at trial in this case.
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