| | HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 monthsPage 1 of 3 (1, 2, 3) | Searched but did not see this posted on here yet.
Transcript of news article below.
HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
By The Canadian Press
Jan 20, 2007, 00:05
TORONTO — A Toronto man who knowingly exposed two unsuspecting lovers to HIV through repeated acts of unprotected sex was sentenced Friday to 56 months in prison.
“He has no excuse for his wanton, selfish and self-indulgent behaviour ... his deception was deliberate, calculated and continuing (to conceal his condition),” Justice Arthur Gans said of Vincent Walkem, 30.
“He showed blatant disregard to medical advice he was legally and morally obliged to adhere (disclosing his condition to sex partners).”
One of Walkems victims, now 23, contracted HIV from him.
Gans called her situation “a life sentence of indescribable and monumental proportions, merely to be exacerbated by the callous, selfish and wilful publication of her name” on his blog-site only weeks before his guilty plea.
The second victim, now 30, who had sex with him in 2004, hasnt contracted the disease.
Gans recommended Walkem go to a prison where university courses are available and his costly medication readily available.
Walkems youngest victim is struggling to pay for her own university tuition and expensive life-saving drugs, court heard.
Gans praised the two women for having the “the strength of courage each has demonstrated through this most difficult of ordeals.”
The HIV-infected victims father said “Walkem will always be a threat to society. He has no morality. How could he possibly?”
Walkem pleaded guilty last September to two counts of aggravated sexual assault for having unprotected sex with the two women without revealing he was HIV-positive.
The womens identities are protected by a publication ban.
“These are difficult cases because no sentence imposed will ever give the victim her health back,” said Crown attorney Mary Humphrey, who called for a six- to eight-year sentence.
Defence lawyer Graham Clark, who initially asked for a conditional sentence, asked for a reformatory sentence of under two years plus probation for his client, a first offender.
Gans said the now 23-year-old woman, who met Walkem in July 2002 and dated him for several months, was lied to when she asked if he was “clean” during their first encounter. The second victim was similarly misled, court heard.
According to an agreed statement of facts, Walkem tested positive in December 2001. In February 2002 he was warned by public health nurses to disclose his condition to any sex partners.
The 23-year-old testified she discovered Walkem was HIV positive from one of his co-workers in October 2002.
The woman learned she was HIV positive Dec. 4, 2002, and notified the police in 2003 and 2004 to prevent other women from contracting HIV from Walkem.
He was arrested Aug. 30, 2004, but only spent two months in custody and has been on bail since.
IMPO I think its about time that we had some legal recourse in this jurisdiction. IMO this constitutes assualt with a deadly weapon.
What are your views?
Support the conviction?
Do not support the conviction?
But remember this could happen to you.
Is the sentence enough?
Looking forward to your thoughts.
| |
|
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/21/2007 4:39:10 PM | of course i support this conviction. the guy is scum, and it's too bad he didn't get worse.
"But remember this could happen to you."
only if i were to get HIV, then lie to women about it, and then have unprotected sex with them.....and if i did all those things, then i would deserve punishment as much as he does | |
|
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/21/2007 4:58:05 PM |
According to an agreed statement of facts, Walkem tested positive in December 2001. In February 2002 he was warned by public health nurses to disclose his condition to any sex partners.
Something wrong with that statement. As soon as you have a sex partner, then you tell him/her that you have HIV? Shouldn't you disclose this info BEFORE having sex with a partner? I think that's what they meant. | |
|
| |
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/21/2007 6:28:32 PM | This is far from an isolated case as a result many countries, have added laws to their books to cover this scenario,....there are court cases going back to the 1980's and this is not isolated to males infecting women,....
In Canada for eg.
On 1 December 2005, Jian Ghomeshi filed a report on this issue for the CBC. He asked whether there is a legal obligation to disclose HIV status. He held up the case of Johnson Aziga, who was diagnosed in 1996 but then allegedly had unprotected sex with at least 13 women. Aziga is now charged with two counts of murder and 11 counts of aggravated sexual assault; the prosecution claims that he did not disclose his status.
Hamish Stewart, a University of Toronto law professor, says
Non-disclosure is a form of deception if it is the kind of thing that a reasonable person would expect to be disclosed.... If the Crown can show that the accused knew that he was imposing this kind of risk of death on them, and was indifferent to the risk, then that would probably be sufficient to satisfy the element of intent for murder.
Several Canadian courts have ruled that people who are not informed that a sexual partner is HIV-positive cannot truly give consent to sex. As a result, the death of Aziga's partners is automatically considered to be murder (instead of the lesser charge of manslaughter).
Yet this legal opinion is not held equally by the gay community, says the editor of a prominent Canadian gay and lesbian magazine: "I think the majority [of readers]... would feel that there was recklessness on both parties' part and it should not be turned into a murder charge." He continued later with some advice:
You should always assume that the other person is HIV positive.... You have to assume that they lie.... That's the reality of living in society for the past 25 years.
For the complete details, see Jian's feature report from CBC News: The Hour.
In many countries, the intentional or reckless infection of a person with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is considered to be illegal. People who do so can be charged with Criminal Transmission of HIV, murder, manslaughter attempted murder, or assault. Some states have enacted laws expressly to criminalize HIV transmission, as in the United States, while others charge under the existing laws, as in the United Kingdom. Several other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) have been known to medical science for centuries, but there was little incentive to criminalize their transmission for two practical reasons:
many societies were reluctant to discuss matters of sex, let alone enact legislation to control sexual activity; and unlike HIV (and subsequent AIDS), these other STDs are not fatal
Example Statute
This is the Criminal Transmission of HIV from the Iowa Code.
CODE OF IOWA 2002
TITLE XVI. CRIMINAL LAW AND PROCEDURE
SUBTITLE 1. CRIME CONTROL AND CRIMINAL ACTS
CHAPTER 709C. CRIMINAL TRANSMISSION OF HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:nLFyadXuKgIJ:ari.ucsf.edu/programs/policy/crime_and_punishment.pdf+w5,man+intentionally+infected+women+with+hiv&hl=en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_transmission_of_HIV
and this is not only criminal of passing the disease via sexual contact,...
=======================================================
HIV-Positive Spitter Sentenced to 13 Years
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/09/07/D8CFRC5G6.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- An HIV-positive ex-convict who said he tried to kill several police officers and a psychiatric hospital employee by biting them or spitting blood in their faces was sentenced Wednesday to 13 years in prison.
Robert Murray, 33, was not in court when state Supreme Court Justice William A. Wetzel imposed the sentence. He had sent a message saying the Hannibal Lecter-type restraints the judge ordered were "humiliating" and he refused to wear them to court.
The judge said that he ordered the restraints for Murray because of his prior behavior. Murray, a former mental patient, had threatened in past court appearances to attack people around him.
Murray pleaded guilty Aug. 8 to five counts of attempted murder in exchange for the 13-year sentence. He could have been sentenced to up to 25 years in prison on each count if he had been convicted after a trial
======================================================================
HIV-positive man to stand trial on murder charges
Updated Tue. Nov. 15 2005 8:00 AM ET
CTV.ca News Staff
An HIV-positive man from Hamilton, Ont. will stand trial on first degree murder charges in connection with the deaths of two women who were allegedly his sexual partners.
Johnson Aziga, 49, is accused of having unprotected sex with at least 13 women without disclosing his health status
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20051114/hivpositive_trial_051114/20051115?hub=Canada
=====================================================================================
It's about time this sort of thing got widespread attention,....
and still there are people who go with the flow,..or mood,..or whatever and practice unprotected, sex with partners before they know them,....every single day all over the world,....
WHY? | |
|
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/22/2007 1:35:27 AM | This is iffy. I don't know what the Canadian law is. (I'm from the US.) To give someone aggravated sexual assault for this, it's iffy. He basically lied and lieing isn't illegal. Does it make him amoral? Definetly. Does it make him a criminal? I don't think so. The only way I come close to supporting this is if:
a) They can prove he was the one that gave the victim HIV; not that the victim recently got HIV.
b) They can prove he lied about it.
c) They can prove he knew he had HIV.
If they can prove all this, then it should be a rape charge, shouldn't it? If the reasoning is that you can't consent because you don't know they have HIV (which is such a stretch), then you are being raped.
I'm glad he didn't get more of a sentence. These are new cases and should be treated as such. It's not right to go give someone a huge sentence for something that's as iffy as lieing about having HIV. Once the courts have established that this is the law, then it will be okay to hit people with a longer sentence.
This is going to be a bigger and bigger problem. A lot of it has to do with the societies we live in. People sleep around so much that this is bound to happen more and more. There's other things to consider such as the person with HIV is not always going to be the one initiating and asking for the sex. These cases are going to be iffy and it's important that we treat them as grey and not black and white.
-Drew-
P.S. I think it's a great sentence if the courts want to incorporate this into society. Make a statement without ruining the guini (sp?) pig's life. | |
|
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/22/2007 1:55:14 AM | | I THINK HE SHOULD HAVE GOT A LONGER SENTENCE FOR THIS BEHAVIOUR, DOES HE SUFFER FROM MENTAL ILLNESS BY ACTING LIKE THIS? YES I AGREE PEOPLE MUST BE VERY CAREFUL AND NEVER EVER TRUST ANYONE DO WE EVER REALLY KNOW ANYONE,THAT WELL TO PUT OUR LIVES AT RISK.ALWAYS TRY AND PROTECT YOURSELF AT THE END OF THE DAY YOU CAN ONLY REALLY RELY ON YOU.... I FEEL SORRY FOR THESE WOMAN..I COULD HAPPEN TO ANYONE.... | |
|
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/22/2007 7:47:16 AM |
This is iffy. I don't know what the Canadian law is. (I'm from the US.) To give someone aggravated sexual assault for this, it's iffy. He basically lied and lieing isn't illegal. Does it make him amoral? Definetly. Does it make him a criminal? I don't think so. The only way I come close to supporting this is if:
a) They can prove he was the one that gave the victim HIV; not that the victim recently got HIV.
Time frame and burden of proof. Defense would have to prove that he did not expose the victim the disease and that she contracted it elsewhere and the prosecution would have to prove that he did.
b) They can prove he lied about it.
Medical staff advised him that he was legally and morally obligated to disclose his condition to sex partners upon his diagnosis.
The defendant pleaded guilty. Is that not enough to say he lied about his condition?
c) They can prove he knew he had HIV.
He went for a screening and the tests confirmed that he had contracted HIV, medical staff would have also documented when he was diagnosed.
I am sure all the details of the conviction have not been printed in this news article, but there are enough facts to support his guilt.
Anymore thoughts on this? | |
|
| |
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/22/2007 9:04:25 AM | | I guess this is a perfect example of why we should practice safe sex..... I am surprised he actually was sentenced to any jail time. I mean I have heard of murders who were convicted, serving similar sentences. I think he should have gotton a longer sentence as he has affected this young ladies life forever. I think at least our judicial system is going in the right direction | |
|
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/22/2007 6:12:16 PM | | The only safe sex is "no sex". Or... every man/woman that we date, we must all get screened over and over again, and wait for a year before having sex, and remain faithful. But, if someone cheats and hides it, AIDS will continue to spread through the population like it's happening now. There is no cure for AIDS, and this disease WILL.... kill just about everyone, because of our human addiction to sex with as many people as possible. | |
|
| |
| |
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/22/2007 9:30:30 PM | | Anyone who knows they are carriers of an infectious, communicable disease and spreads it to others is guilty of wrongdoing... but I'd like to see this case appealled for it's assumption that HIV is the cause of a deadly disease, because that's still never been conclusively proven. The scientists who got credit for that "discovery" in Science and Nature magazines were both guilty of falsifying laboratory test results. This has been proven in court; not once, but several times. | |
|
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/22/2007 10:41:16 PM |
The college student who is paying for her drugs to fight HIV. I am American, I thought health care was free in Canada, am I misinformed? p/quote]
Health care is paid for in Canada with the exclusion of elective surgeries, however most of us do pay for our own prescriptions. Some of us have prescription and dental plans paid for from work, some pay private insurance companies, some are eligible for a government funded program, and some of us pay out of own pockets. The only time the government pays for our medication is while we are in hospital.
So the college student may vary well be paying for her own drugs to fight HIV. | |
|
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/25/2007 4:10:40 AM | The college student who is paying for her drugs to fight HIV. I am American, I thought health care was free in Canada, am I misinformed?
Health care by provider,..is covered,....perscription medication isn't,....neither is dental,...or glasses or hearing aids,...and many times now for certain office visits (family doctor) require an additiional fee,....over and above,...not covered,... for things like drawing blood and giving flue shots,....in the latter the giving of the shot is covered,...the vaccine isn't | |
|
| |
| |
| |
e-wok
| | Joined: 9/25/2006
Msg: 20 | |
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/25/2007 6:41:21 AM |
STD is also now a civil matter.....you WILL be sued now that the courts have
made it easier. AIDS, ghonorea...whatever, you will lose your homes, cars and
salary if you ´didnt know´you had it. The medical professionals have established
a reasonable time a person should have known they have a disease and your med records
are now open to the courts. You are toast for just a few minutes of fun. | |
|
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/25/2007 11:54:24 AM | | This sentence is far too light, and the real problem is that the Judges have nothing else to go after this guy with. Bad enough people can pass it on unknowingly, but to do so with knowing you are doing it. Murder is the term I think best describes this situation. There is no cure for HIV and the victims will likely die an early death, so when they do charge this guy with murder. | |
|
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/25/2007 12:18:34 PM | pilotdreams,.....Cut off his penis, problem solved?????
well no actually,...that would only solve the problem with men who intentionally infect women,....but not to the women who infect men,....
and ewok123,....
STD is also now a civil matter.....you WILL be sued now that the courts have
made it easier. AIDS, ghonorea...whatever, you will lose your homes, cars and
salary if you ´didnt know´you had it.
had you read my earlier (if somewhat lengthy) post msg 5 you would have seen that this is not the case and it has been taken into consideration when drafting laws to cover this behaviour/crime
and in most cases murder isn't the charge that covers this,....but wreckless endangerment does | |
|
| |
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 1/27/2007 11:00:30 AM | STD is also now a civil matter.....you WILL be sued now that the courts have
made it easier. AIDS, ghonorea...whatever, you will lose your homes, cars and
salary if you ´didnt know´you had it. The medical professionals have established
a reasonable time a person should have known they have a disease and your med records
are now open to the courts. You are toast for just a few minutes of fun.
Not.True.
Wish it was, though. | |
|
| HIV infected man who lied to sex partners sent to prison for 56 months
Posted: 2/11/2007 10:29:11 PM | I think that 56 months is not near enough time for this gentleman. If he had actual knowledge of his HIV positive status, then he had a legal and moral obligation to share this with anyone he was sleeping with, whether he was using protection or not.
I personally think he should be serving a life sentance, with no possibility of parole. Although HIV is no longer being termed by health professionals as a "terminal illness" and is associated more with a manageable illness (like diabetes)...the fact of the matter is that you WILL die from HIV at some point. Along with the shortening of life span, HIV also affects your social and sex life forever. He should be jailed indefinately as a result of his irresponsible and reckless behavior.
If this ever happened to me, I would absolutely charge the person and ask that the maximum penalty be sought - life imprisionment (and if there was a death penalty, then I would ask for that!). | |
|
Home
login 
Don't post here if you can't keep your "Cool" 
