Ex-college wrestler gets 30 years in HIV case (infected "unprotected sex" partners)

[mountaineer]

And in gay news ...

Ex-college wrestler gets 30 years in HIV case in St. Charles County
11 hours ago  •  By Mark Schlinkmann
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ST. CHARLES • A former Lindenwood University wrestler was sentenced Monday to 30 years in prison for recklessly infecting one sex partner with HIV and risking the infection of four others.

Jurors in May had found Michael L. Johnson, 23, guilty of five felony charges after testimony that included experts in infectious diseases and the men who had unprotected sex with him. One of the men contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

St. Charles County Circuit Judge Jon Cunningham, who issued the sentence, told Johnson he had committed “very severe” crimes. Prosecutors said he didn’t tell the partners he had HIV.

“The main thing is the profound effect your actions have had on the victims and their families,” the judge said.

Johnson was given 30 years on the most serious allegation and a total of 30.5 years on the four lesser charges. Those were the amounts of prison time recommended by the jury. Cunningham decided to have the terms on the lesser charges run concurrently with the 30-year sentence.

Earlier in the hearing, one victim warned that Johnson would commit similar acts again if he wasn’t sent to prison.

“He will infect people for his own sick purposes,” the man said. “He has lost the privilege to be free.”

Johnson, in a brief statement, didn’t apologize but said “I never want anyone to have to go through the pain” of having HIV.

Johnson’s case attracted national news coverage because some gay rights advocates and legal reform groups say HIV criminalization is outdated, in part because of advances in treatment for the disease.

Johnson’s attorney, Heather Donovan, made a similar argument Monday. She asked the judge for a lighter 10-year prison term, saying that contracting HIV “is not a death sentence anymore” and things have changed since Missouri legislators passed the law in the 1980s.

Assistant prosecutor Philip Groenweghe said Johnson deserves severe punishment, saying he lied to his partners that he was HIV-negative. “This defendant was totally irresponsible and placed countless people at risk,” Groenweghe said.

Groenweghe also said drugs currently used to deal with AIDS might lose their effectiveness. Moreover, he said HIV can be spread to less developed nations where people don’t have access to the drugs available in the United States.

Johnson originally is from Indiana, where he was a state wrestling champion in 2010. Before Lindenwood, he wrestled at Lincoln College in Illinois and was a junior college All-American and national champion there.

He was expelled from Lindenwood after he was charged in the case, which concerned incidents in 2013.

[mountaineer]

Earlier Missouri unprotected gay sex HIV story:

Missouri man who exposed partners to HIV clouds question of laws on disease
April 27, 2014 5:30 am  •  By Doug Moore

DEXTER, Mo. • It was a stunning revelation.

Last August, inside the white brick police department building, the man sitting a few feet from Detective Cory Mills said in a matter-of-fact tone that he had exposed as many as 300 men to the virus that causes AIDS.

The man, David Mangum, had come to the station to address allegations by an ex-boyfriend that Mangum did not disclose his HIV status, and that there had been other sexual partners who were not told as well. A month earlier, the ex-boyfriend had gotten bad news from the county health department — he was HIV-positive.

Mangum did not dispute the account, based on police records. He told Mills he had been HIV-positive since 2003 and had not told his sexual partners, several of them anonymous hookups through websites such as Craigslist. They included truck drivers he would meet in a park near the police station or on a gravel road outside of town.


“Just give me an explanation as to why,” Mills said.

“I just have a fear of rejection,” Mangum, 38, replied.

Legislators and prosecutors nationwide have seized on the case out of this small southeast Missouri town.

They say it shows why tough laws must continue to remain on the books to punish those who are HIV-positive and have sex without disclosing their status to their partner.

Such laws swept across the country at the height of the AIDS crisis 25 years ago, when treatments greatly reducing the chances of transmission were nonexistent.

Aaron Laxton, a St. Louisan who writes for The Body website, devoted to providing information on HIV and AIDS, said the laws were designed to stop the spread of the virus. But they have had the opposite effect, he said.

“If the laws were working, we wouldn’t have 50,000 new cases of HIV nationally a year,” Laxton said. [Or maybe if you guys wouldn't have unprotected anal sex with one another ... ]

Now, a growing national movement wants to rethink those laws, which many argue are outdated.

There is little support for decriminalizing heinous violations in which predatory offenders willfully place others at risk, like in the Dexter case. The problem, critics say, is that laws are not written to draw distinctions between serious offenses and lesser violations. In contrast, a killing can result in various degrees of murder or manslaughter, depending on the circumstances.

With the Missouri HIV law, like many across the country, a person can be convicted of a felony for exposing a sexual partner to the disease, even if the virus is not transmitted. The law does not allow condom use as a defense, and a conviction triggers placement on the state sex offender registry.  ...

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