Judge issues six-month sentence in HIV transmission case

TUESDAY, June 22 — A former Lansing resident will spend the next six months in Ingham County’s jail for allegedly transmitting HIV to his former girlfriend despite apparently weak and questionable evidence within publicly available records to support his criminal prosecution.

Ingham County Circuit Judge Clinton Canady III rendered the sentence this morning in a hearing at the Veteran’s Memorial Courthouse in downtown Lansing. The man was promptly remanded to custody to begin his sentence. His identity has been withheld to protect his privacy.

The case dates back to 2018 when a then 41-year-old man met his then 29-year-old girlfriend, started having sex and moved in together in Lansing. In January 2019, the woman tested positive for HIV and attempted suicide the following month as a result of her diagnosis, court records show. A felony charge of knowingly engaging in sexual penetration “however slight” without disclosing his HIV status was levied late last year. The man pleaded guilty in May. 

Today, the man acknowledged that he is “sorry” for his actions, noting that he is now sober. Jacob Sartz IV, his attorney at the Ingham County County Public Defender’s Office, told the court that the man was in a “very dark place” in 2018 and 2019 during the alleged encounter.

Sartz also asked the court to consider a house release, enabling the man to live with the mother of his children while doing community service including telling his story. Canady killed the idea. 

“Frankly, I don’t think we want him back in the community if I place him on probation,” he said.

Canady said that the man had told presentence investigators that he had lived with the virus for so long that he had “forgotten about it” and said it was a “conscious choice” to infect the woman.

Publicly available information on the case, including court records and the police report, however, did not contain medical evidence that the man was actually living with HIV. Instead, the case rested on second-hand claims that he knew he was living with HIV. The court records also do not show whether or not genetic testing was conducted on the woman’s virus and compared to his virus to determine if he could be excluded as the source of her infection. 

Days before City Pulse first reported on the case, Ingham County Prosecutor Carol Siemon had also labeled the felony charge levied against the man as “discriminatory” and “fear based.” Despite those concerns and the dismissal of two similar cases, Siemon kept the case going. 

The lack of publicly available evidence to support the charges has also since resulted in outrage from several organizations representing people living with HIV, leading to a recent online petition — and 35 signatures — calling on Siemon’s office to withdraw the criminal charges altogether.