By Victoria Law, Photo: Erik McGregor/Lightrocket/Getty Images, Truthout, January 25, 2023
In 2008, Robert Suttle’s life was upended. The 30-year-old had been working as an assistant law clerk at the Second Circuit Court of Appeal in Shreveport, Louisiana, when police arrested him in front of his colleagues. A former partner had accused him of not disclosing his HIV status and, in Louisiana, that constituted a felony charge of intentional exposure to the AIDS virus.
It didn’t matter that Suttle, who had learned about his HIV status several years earlier, had HIV, not AIDS. It didn’t matter that he had been receiving medical care since he first learned his diagnosis and that he said he had disclosed his status. No one asked about whether his viral load was undetectable, which would prevent HIV transmission. It did not matter that, by 2008, HIV and AIDS were no longer considered the death sentence that they had been during the 1980s.
What did matter was that, in 1987, Louisiana had been one of the first states to pass a law making it a felony for a person who knows that they are HIV-positive to not disclose their status before engaging in any type of contact. Between 2011 and 2022, Louisiana state law enforcement received at least 137 reports alleging an HIV-related crime. Black Louisianans, particularly Black men like Suttle, were the majority of people arrested under HIV criminalization laws.
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