An HIV-positive man was today found guilty of grievous bodily harm after infecting two women with HIV. This is the first successful prosecution under English law for sexually transmitting a disease.
The convicted man told the court that both the women knew that he was HIV-positive before having sex with him. The court was told, however, that one woman only agreed to have unprotected sex with the man after he said he had had a vasectomy and was unable to father children, and the second woman said that the man had pursued her, telling her of his love and that he wished to have children with her.
The man will be sentenced shortly and has been warned by the judge to expect a lengthy time in prison.
The conviction appears to overturn legal precedent established in 1888, when the House of Lords ruled that the reckless transmission of a sexually transmitted infection did not fall under the Offences against the Person Act. In the current case, however, the prosecution argued that the transmission of HIV amounted to “biological” grievous bodily harm.
In 2001 a man was convicted in Scotland (which has a different legal system to England and Wales) of culpable and reckless behaviour after infecting his girl friend with HIV (often called the Kelly case).
The possibility of making the transmission of HIV a criminal offence in the UK was explored by the UK Law Commission in the late 1990s, which recommended in 1999 that only deliberate transmission of HIV should be an offence and reckless or accidental transmission of HIV would not be punishable. UK HIV organisations such as the Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) supported this decision, arguing that making the reckless or accidental transmission of HIV during sex an offence would hamper HIV prevention work and deter people from seeking HIV testing and care. Reacting to today's verdit a spokesperson for THT called upon the government to act upon this recommendation rather than relying on case law or precedent.
In 1888 the Law Lords were anxious not to open the flood gates to a series of speculative criminal prosecutions after the transmission of a sexually transmitted infection. The court at the time also acknowledged the difficulty of obtaining exact details of negotiations before two people engaged in sex. It will remain to be seen if today's verdict leads to further prosecutions for the sexual transmission not only of HIV, but of other infections as well.