AIDS and the Criminal Law

Author:

Field Martha A.,Sullivan Kathleen M.

Abstract

AIDS is spread by acts, not by casual exposure. As AIDS spreads further, some are urging that those acts, including sexual acts, be treated as crimes. Indeed, two AIDS carriers have already been charged with crimes for risking sexual transmission of AIDS to others. In one case, the United States Army has court-martialed an infected soldier, Pfc. Adrian Morris, Jr., charging that when he had sex with two other soldiers, he committed the crime of “aggravated assault.” Aggravated assault requires use of a “dangerous weapon or other means of force likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm.” What was the “weapon” in his case? The sexually transmittable AIDS virus itself. In the other case, the Los Angeles district attorney has charged an AIDS carrier, Joseph Markowski, with attempted murder for selling his blood and for having sex with another man while infected.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

General Medicine

Reference75 articles.

1. 53. The problem is that the chance of actually contracting AIDS after exposure to the virus increases with increased exposure. American College Health Association, AIDS—What everyone should know, Health Information Series, 1985: 2.

2. 60. The Supreme Court's recent decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, 106 S. Ct. 2841 (1986), may be interpreted by police as legitimating such discrimination. In that case, the Supreme Court held that a statute criminalizing anal and oral sex violated no constitutional right to privacy when applied to same-sex contacts, while leaving open whether it would do so when people of opposite sexes commit precisely the same sex acts.

3. 15. By endangering many people for profit, the prostitute might well satisfy the standard of extreme indifference to the value of human life that separates reckless murder from reckless manslaughter.

4. 56. To the extent this is not the case, the solution is not to broaden the category of persons covered by the criminal law here but, rather, to provide for adequate counseling in conjunction with voluntary tests.

5. 39. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (invalidating state criminal law barring even married couples from using contraceptives); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972) (extending to unmarried persons the right of access to contraceptives); Carey v. Population Services, Inc., 431 U.S. 678 (1977) (same); Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) (invalidating state criminal law barring woman's choice of abortion). Laws burdening the right to privacy are subject to strict scrutiny and can be upheld only upon demonstration that the law is necessary to serve a compelling state interest. To be sure, the Supreme Court has never held in such cases that the constitutional right to privacy protects consensual adult sex acts themselves, as opposed to access to contraception and abortion that may facilitate those sex acts. Indeed, the Court recently held that a law criminalizing oral and anal sexual contacts between consenting adults in private need not serve any compelling interest, but may be upheld simply because it expresses majority morality. Bowers v. Hardwick, 106 S. Ct. 2841 (1986); see id. at 2844 (asserting that the right to engage in oral or anal sex bears no “resemblance” to the right to use contraception). But we believe that any attempt to sever the contraception decisions from sexual activity is absurd; anti-contraception laws were no burden, after all, for the sexually celibate or abstinent.

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