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Knowingly infecting others with HIV is no longer a felony in California. Login/Join 
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I don’t even know where to start. Liberalism really is a disease.


Knowingly infecting others with HIV is no longer a felony in California. Advocates say the law targeted sex workers.

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a bill into law that makes knowingly exposing a person to HIV without their knowledge a misdemeanor instead of a felony.
(Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

California lawmakers have passed legislation to reduce the penalty for those who knowingly or intentionally expose others to HIV without their knowledge, rolling back a law that mostly affected sex workers.

The bill, SB 239, which was approved by the Democrat-controlled state legislature in September and signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown (D) on Friday, will lower the charges for these acts from a felony to a misdemeanor when the law goes into effect in 2018. The act of knowingly donating HIV-infected blood, also a felony now, will be decriminalized.

The statutes that the new laws revise date back to the late 1980s, when AIDS had emerged as a public health crisis in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Fear and misinformation about the disease’s potential to spread ran high as the authorities struggled to get a handle on the new epidemic and a spate of legislation about HIV exposure cropped up across the country.

Supporters of the reform push in California, which included a broad coalition of public health, LGBT, civil liberties and HIV groups in the state, described the laws as outdated and ineffective, pointing to statistics that showed that the vast majority of convictions were related to sex workers, who are required to undergo testing for HIV after being convicted of crimes such as solicitation.

In the case of the laws around blood donation, research has shown that the law was probably never enforced and probably did little to enhance the screening measures that already exist to identify sources of infected blood.

“If you are a sex worker and you solicit someone and you’re HIV positive, you’re guilty of a felony before any contact occurs,” said California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D), a co-sponsor of the bill. “These laws are so draconian that you can be convicted of a felony and sent to state prison even if you engage in behavior that creates zero risk of HIV infection.”


Many Republican lawmakers in the state disagreed.

“I’m of the mind that if you purposefully inflict another with a disease that alters their lifestyle the rest of their life, puts them on a regimen of medications to maintain any kind of normalcy, it should be a felony,” said Sen. Joel Anderson (R-Calif.) during debate over the bill, according to the Los Angeles Times. “It’s absolutely crazy to me that we should go light on this.”

The bill has since drawn wide media attention, including particularly critical coverage from conservative media sites.

“Good grief,” wrote the National Review’s Wesley J. Smith. “Leave it to California to make a declining and decadent culture even more declining and decadent.”

Breitbart’s story about the bill, which drew more than 4,500 comments, focused on three cases, in Michigan, California and Scotland, where in each case a man had allegedly attempted to intentionally infect others.

But these types of cases are rare.

Of the 379 HIV-related convictions in California between 1988 and 2014, only seven — less than 2 percent — included the intent to transmit HIV, according to a recent series of studies from the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute.

Instead, the law mostly affected sex workers or those suspected of sex work. The vast majority of the convictions — 90 percent — were for solicitation cases where it was unknown whether any physical contact had occurred. When expanded to include the 800 or so people arrested or charged for the laws through 2014, more than 95 percent were related to sex work, the researchers found.

Statistics showed that the charge was disproportionately levied against women and minorities: 67 percent of the people who came into contact with law enforcement because of HIV-related laws were black or Latino, the Williams Institute studies showed. Women made up 43 percent, though they represent only 13 percent of the HIV-positive population in the state.

That requirement that sex workers get HIV tested after convictions will be abolished when the provisions in the bill take effect.

“At the very beginning, people expected to see most of the weight playing out in those intentional exposure laws,” said Amira Hasenbush, a fellow at the Williams Institute and the co-author of the reports. “I think everyone was surprised to see that wasn’t where the law was being enforced. It was in this felony solicitation.”

The bill was also prompted, its sponsors say, by a 2015 report on combating HIV from the Obama White House, which cited studies showing that HIV exposure laws do little to influence behavior, and said that many “run counter to scientific evidence about routes of HIV transmission and effective measures of HIV prevention.”


Wiener said he believed that California’s felony HIV laws created a disincentive for some people to get tested, potentially doing more to increase rather than mitigate the public health risk of HIV.

Others in the group of more than 150 to support the bill included the California Medical Association, the district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the California Women’s Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of California.

Supporters pointed out that the knowing or intentional transmission of any other communicable disease in California, including some potentially deadly ones like SARS, Ebola and tuberculosis, is a misdemeanor crime.

“There’s no reason that HIV should be treated differently,” said Rick Zbur, executive director of Equality California, a LGBT civil rights nonprofit which was a co-sponsor of the bill. “A lot of what was behind this was basically looking at the laws to see how we could improve public health and modernizing these laws, so HIV is treated the same.”
 
Posts: 958 | Registered: October 07, 2013Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Charlie Sheen will be thrilled.
 
Posts: 958 | Registered: October 07, 2013Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Get Off My Lawn
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I was going to post this story yesterday, but it's like "what's the point?". CA is so fucked up, stuff like this just rolls right off, nothing in this state is shocking anymore.



"I’m not going to read Time Magazine, I’m not going to read Newsweek, I’m not going to read any of these magazines; I mean, because they have too much to lose by printing the truth"- Bob Dylan, 1965
 
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Normalizing H.I.V.? Even for California this seems extreme.
 
Posts: 958 | Registered: October 07, 2013Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Nullus Anxietas
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quote:
Originally posted by oddball:
I was going to post this story yesterday, but it's like "what's the point?". CA is so fucked up, stuff like this just rolls right off, nothing in this state is shocking anymore.

Yup. The crazy that comes out of that state, nearly continuously, defies reason.



"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system,,,, but too early to shoot the bastards." -- Claire Wolfe
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living." -- Seneca the Younger, Roman Stoic philosopher
 
Posts: 26032 | Location: S.E. Michigan | Registered: January 06, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Is it too much to call “sex workers” prostitutes now?
 
Posts: 958 | Registered: October 07, 2013Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Staring back
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quote:
Originally posted by Spokane228:
Is it too much to call “sex workers” prostitutes now?

Wouldn't want to offend them.


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You almost have to admire California's commitment to crazy. They are damn good at constantly one upping the last stupid thing they did. It's sad but incredible.


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Posts: 21255 | Location: San Dimas CA, The Old Dominion or the Tar Heel State.  | Registered: April 16, 2007Reply With QuoteReport This Post
delicately calloused
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I simply can't imagine the Alzheimer's logic that went into crafting and ratifying that bill....



You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier
 
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Oriental Redneck
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Kali, I'd rather step into sewer than set foot in that place. Roll Eyes The very thought of that shithole just makes me want to puke. The maggots have just totally destroyed the place. I seriously don't know how our SF friends can put up with shit after shit after shit...


Q






 
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Are the inmates in charge of the asylum?
 
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אַרְיֵה
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quote:
Originally posted by Spokane228:
Is it too much to call “sex workers” prostitutes now?
Rental units?



הרחפת שלי מלאה בצלופחים
 
Posts: 31705 | Location: Central Florida, Orlando area | Registered: January 03, 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Get my pies
outta the oven!

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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
WOW!! Eek I would say the "Grand Experiment" of Commifornia is on full-bore STUPID. I guess I just live a sheltered life here in the Gulf Heartland of America.....thank you JESUS!!!



"If you’re a leader, you lead the way. Not just on the easy ones; you take the tough ones too…” – MAJ Richard D. Winters (1918-2011), E Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne

"Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil... Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw and as dry grass sinks down in the flames, so their roots will decay and their flowers blow away like dust; for they have rejected the law of the Lord Almighty and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel." - Isaiah 5:20,24
 
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Tinker Sailor Soldier Pie
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quote:
Originally posted by PASig:
Yes it’s now fine but don’t you DARE call a transgender by the wrong pronoun or it’s off to the gulag with you!


California Law Allows Jail For Using Wrong Gender Pronoun Violations can be punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 or "by imprisonment in the county jail for a period not to exceed one year."


Pure, unadulterated commie crap.

California is 1984.


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Posts: 31169 | Location: Elv. 7,000 feet, Utah | Registered: October 29, 2012Reply With QuoteReport This Post
אַרְיֵה
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It's A Good Thing that I don't live in California. I would probably be doing hard time right now, both for violating this statute, and for major contempt of court.



הרחפת שלי מלאה בצלופחים
 
Posts: 31705 | Location: Central Florida, Orlando area | Registered: January 03, 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Save an Elephant
Kill a Poacher
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quote:
Originally posted by 12131:
Kali, I'd rather step into sewer than set foot in that place. Roll Eyes The very thought of that shithole just makes me want to puke. The maggots have just totally destroyed the place. I seriously don't know how our SF friends can put up with shit after shit after shit...


I can't put up with it! That's why we will be moving soon. What an embarrassment.


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Posts: 1466 | Location: Escaped from Kalifornia to Arizona February 2022! | Registered: March 02, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Oh stewardess,
I speak jive.
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I just can't being myself to do the pronoun thing. It's too subjective, and too much hassle. If you look like a dude I'm calling you a he, if you look like a chick I'm calling you a she. There are no Zes, nor any other derivatives in my vocabulary, regardless of your wishes. And I don't much care about the rest. I'm not bothered by them, don't care which parts they have versus which ones they want, there are but two groups of gender pronouns...

He and she, her and him, his and hers. Pronouns are my verbal line in the sand, I guess.
 
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Get Off My Lawn
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quote:
Originally posted by msfzoe:
Are the inmates in charge of the asylum?


No, something infinitely worse. Democrats.



"I’m not going to read Time Magazine, I’m not going to read Newsweek, I’m not going to read any of these magazines; I mean, because they have too much to lose by printing the truth"- Bob Dylan, 1965
 
Posts: 17568 | Location: Texas | Registered: May 13, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Comic Relief
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quote:
Originally posted by oddball:
I was going to post this story yesterday, but it's like "what's the point?". CA is so fucked up, stuff like this just rolls right off, nothing in this state is shocking anymore.
I could not have said it better.
 
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