An HIV-positive man has become the first individual to be convicted for recklessly infecting a sexual partner with HIV since the Crown Prosecution Service produced guidance on the offence for police and prosecutors earlier this year. The conviction comes days after the imprisonment of an individual for recklessly infecting his sexual partner with hepatitis B.
The 41-year-old individual pleaded guilty to the offence and was sentenced to one year in prison at Preston Crown Court.
Details of the case are sketchy, but the court was told the individual, who has haemophilia and acquired his HIV infection from infected blood products in his late teens, and is thought to have infected his long-term female partner between 1994 and 1996. The couple first met in 1993, subsequently separating for a time before the relationship finally ended in 2000. The convicted individual never disclosed his HIV infection to his partner because of the stigma attached to HIV. Condoms were used at the start of the relationship, but as the relationship developed the couple had unprotected sex.
Shortly after the final separation, the man's female partner was diagnosed with HIV as was a subsequent male partner she is said to have transmitted the virus to.
The first conviction for HIV transmission in the UK for over a year, the case will be of concern to campaigners. Worryingly, the case appears to have strong similarities with early convictions for reckless HIV transmission, relying on a guilty plea and vague “scientific evidence”. There will be concerns about the nature and quality of the legal advice the accused received.
The Crown Prosecution Service’s own guidance for bringing cases of reckless HIV transmission acknowledge how difficult it is for scientific evidence to prove transmission. Charges of reckless HIV transmission have been successfully defended after well-briefed defence teams used expert virological evidence to show that the tests used by the prosecution are not able to prove transmission between two individuals.
It is of note that the one year sentence in this latest case is much shorter than those handed down in any of the previous cases ending in a conviction of reckless HIV transmission.
This may have been because the accused acquired his HIV infection from infected blood products. In his sentencing comments, Judge Andrew Woolman said: “You were the victim of both haemophilia and from the misfortune of being given infected blood”, adding “it is a tragedy that I have to be sentencing you at all.”