Doctor promotes HIV duplicity
January 19, 2009
SASKATOON
Thus it took a two-member panel only 20 minutes of deliberation at Saskatchewan Penitentiary last week before granting the former Roughrider linebacker full parole. He'll be a free man next month and deported to his native Alabama.
What Smith will leave behind, however, is at least two women recklessly – wilfully – exposed to the HIV virus that he knew he carried but never revealed.
"Deceitful and dishonest,'' in the words of the judge who sentenced him to six years in 2007 for aggravated assault – for unprotected sex – not buying Smith's contention that he never had carnal relations with one of the women and had disclosed his HIV-positive status to the other.
At the parole hearing, yet another ex-girlfriend – not a party to the charges but claiming to have contracted HIV from him – spoke poignantly against Smith's early release: "Will I trust anyone again? Will I love anyone again? Will I see my daughter graduate from high school?''
The entreaty failed to convince the panel that Smith was at undue risk to reoffend. Incarceration, they concluded, had allowed Smith to gain "insight'' into his behaviour. Where he once insisted he'd been wrongfully convicted, Smith says now that he was in denial, "embarrassed'' about his condition.
I've no way of knowing what's in Smith's heart. I'm not sure that a penitentiary term – or all the counselling in the world – can alter a person's way of thinking. But I do know that a jail sentence is not exclusively about rehabilitation and what's good for the offender. It's also about denunciation – expressing society's abhorrence of the crime – and deterrence; even, yes, punishment.
Sex can't possibly be consensual when one person deliberately withholds his or her HIV-positive status. This is now being borne out by the courts, with two high profile trials ongoing in the Toronto area – including a Hamilton civil servant facing two counts of first-degree murder and 11 counts of aggravated assault, resulting from his alleged intimate relationships.
The victimization of sexual partners kept in the dark – so they can't make informed decisions or take protective measures – seems not to concern one Dr. Mark Wainberg, a Montreal HIV/AIDS expert who condemns the "criminalization'' of heedless transmission in an article for medical journal, Retrovirology.
Offering not a shred of supporting evidence, Wainberg argues that the prospect of criminal charges will discourage people from getting tested for HIV/AIDS, and therefore the matter should be addressed only as a health issue.
The logic here is non-existent. Testing is not remotely ostracizing; nor is a positive result. Public health authorities counsel patients who test positive on their responsibilities to inform. Only rarely, as in the face of chronic defiance, would a constraining health order be issued, even more rarely police involvement sought.
Wainberg suggests that a pre-emptive defence for the virus-carrier could be to swear that he/she was unaware of being infected. That speculative legal manoeuvre – Wainberg cites no instances of it occurring – might discourage individuals from getting tested, he maintains: the honest ignorance scenario. If that were in fact happening, Wainberg should be railing against it, given all the known benefits accrued from early diagnosis, not planting the idea.
Instead, he seems to implicitly promote duplicity – the right to withhold information from an intimate partner while exposing them to illness and possibly death, minus any legal means for intervention or retribution.
Like most apostolic activists, Wainberg cannot see beyond the narrow interest of a singular constituency. But for a respected medical authority to spin such dangerous counsel is unforgivable.
Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.