Sex offenders no more? Iowa reconsiders tough law on HIV exposure

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share via Email
• Copy Link

  Link Copied

In  2006, a few years after Leslie Flaggs learned she had contracted HIV, she made a new friend at her church in Sioux City, Iowa. As her relationship with the man turned from Bible study to intimacy, Flaggs said, she revealed to him that she had the disease.

But the man went to police in May 2007 and said she hadn’t disclosed her HIV status until after they’d slept together. Flaggs says that because she feared the man – who was convicted of domestic abuse-assault for hitting her two weeks before he filed his complaint, according to court documents – she didn’t challenge his story to police.

Flaggs agreed to a plea bargain rather than face the alternative: up to a quarter century in prison as mandated by a state law targeting criminal exposure to HIV. She received a 25-year suspended sentence, four years of probation and a decade on the sex offender registry. Prosecutors at the time said her accuser did not acquire HIV; the law applies whether or not victims are infected. NBC News could not reach him recently for comment.

For Flaggs, 53, living with the disease and being on the sex offender registry has been so hard that she has contemplated suicide. “This has taken my life,” she said. “I feel like I’m in prison.”

But things may soon change for people living with HIV in Iowa: Lawmakers are debating whether to repeal the state law on criminal exposure and replace it with one that would impose more moderate sentences and would better reflect current medical understanding of how the disease is transmitted. If the legislation is approved, Iowa would be one of the first states to revise its decades-old statute that imposes criminal sentences for HIV exposure. HIV/AIDS advocates have long been fighting for such changes to the more than 30 state laws nationwide, but they’ve often met resistance.

“We’ve got to get this done this year,” said Tami Haught, of an Iowa nonprofit, Community HIV/Hepatitis Advocates of Iowa Network. She last month watched another Iowan receive a sentence similar to Flaggs’, and yet another state resident recently challenged his conviction for not disclosing his status to a partner even though he used a condom. “We can’t open up any other Iowan to this kind of prosecution when it is so unjust.”

Iowa’s current law imposes a maximum 25-year prison term regardless of whether the victim contracts the disease or whether there was intent to transmit it. The new legislation would create a tiered-sentencing system: the 25-year sentence still applies for those who aim to infect and whose victims acquire HIV, but those who did not intend to transmit the disease yet still exposed someone to it can get up to five or ten years in prison depending on whether or not their doctor told them that risk of transmission was high or low. And for the first time, those accused can seek acquittal if their doctor testifies that there was little to no chance of them passing the disease to others.

Like many other states, Iowa passed its HIV criminal transmission law after Congress approved the federal Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act in 1990. A provision of that law, which funds essential medical and support services to people with HIV, required every state to certify that its criminal laws were sufficient to prosecute any HIV-infected individual who knowingly exposed another person to the disease – even if they didn’t transmit it — at the height of the epidemic.

But with more understanding of HIV and improved drugs and care management options, the disease is no longer the death sentence it once was. And often, there is less risk of exposure. An HIV-positive person with undetectable levels of the virus in their blood — common these days thanks to treatment that was in its early stages of use and was unproven when Iowa’s law was passed — isn’t likely to transmit it to anyone else. Criminal exposure statutes should be changed to take the modern realities of living with HIV into account, advocates say.

“These laws reflect a severe misunderstanding about the roots, the risks and the consequences of HIV infection that are stuck in the 1980s despite the fact that treatment of HIV has changed dramatically,” said Catherine Hanssens, executive director of The Center for HIV Law and Policy, an advocacy group.

It’s not just advocates who say the laws are outdated: The U.S. government’s Office of National AIDS Policy said studies show that intentional transmission is “atypical and uncommon” and has called on states to re-consider their statutes. These laws often “run counter to scientific evidence” about how the disease is transmitted and may “undermine” public health efforts to promote HIV screening and treatment, the group said in 2010.

The Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, has weighed in, too, issuing a resolution in 2013 calling for an end to the HIV-specific statutes, noting that among the concerns it shared with the national AIDS office was that such laws can lead to the unjust imprisonment of women and young people who don’t disclose their HIV status because of fear of violence.

Most of the state laws were passed before studies showed that antiretroviral therapy reduces the risk of HIV transmission, according to a recent article by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Justice Department. The laws also don’t consider effective prevention measures, such as condoms.

“Many of these laws criminalize behaviors that pose low or negligible risk for HIV transmission,” the authors said as they called for the state laws to be re-examined. The statutes could have “wide-ranging social implications,” including “the perpetuation of misinformation” regarding how the disease is acquired, said the article published in the AIDS and Behavior journal.

Click here to read more.