California lawmakers have passed a bill that will make it legal for a person to intentionally infect somebody with the HIV virus.
The state Senate voted on Wednesday to send SB239 to Assembly. The bill will make the punishment for someone deliberately infecting another person with HIV a misdemeanor instead of a felony.
KXTV reports:
Under current law, if a person who knows they have HIV has unprotected sex without telling their partner about the disease they can be convicted of a felony and face years in jail.
Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco who authored the bill says the current law is a relic of the decades-old AIDS scare and unfairly punishes HIV-positive people based on outdated science.
It is a misdemeanor to intentionally transmit any other communicable disease including potentially deadly diseases like hepatitis.