The Justice Division has filed a lawsuit in opposition to the state of Tennessee over its aggravated prostitution legislation, claiming that it violates the Individuals with Disabilities Act.
The legislation, handed in 1991, imposes harsher prison penalties on prostitutes who interact of their line of labor whereas knowingly contaminated with HIV.
The aggravated prostitution legislation raises the aforementioned act from a misdemeanor to a felony “when, realizing that such particular person is contaminated with HIV, the particular person engages in sexual exercise as a enterprise or is an inmate in a home of prostitution or loiters in a public place for the aim of being employed to have interaction in sexual exercise.”
It additionally requires the responsible social gathering to register for all times as a “violent intercourse offender,” and so they might withstand 15 years in jail and a wonderful of as much as $10,000.
The DOJ’s lawsuit contends that the legislation violates the Individuals with Disabilities Act.
DOJ Suing Over Tennessee Aggravated Prostitution Regulation
Going after the Tennessee aggravated prostitution legislation from a incapacity angle is actually attention-grabbing.
“The enforcement of state prison legal guidelines that deal with individuals in a different way based mostly on HIV standing alone and that aren’t based mostly on precise dangers of hurt, discriminate in opposition to individuals residing with HIV,” mentioned Assistant Lawyer Basic Kristen Clarke of the Justice Division’s Civil Rights Division.
“Individuals residing with HIV shouldn’t be subjected to a unique system of justice based mostly on outdated science and misguided assumptions,” Clarke added. “This lawsuit displays the Justice Division’s dedication to making sure that individuals residing with HIV should not focused due to their incapacity.”
They’re not being focused due to their incapacity: they’re being focused for an already prison act that occurs to be heinous in that it has the potential to vary the lifetime of the opposite social gathering engaged in such prison acts.
The Distinction With This ‘Incapacity’
In the US, HIV is thought-about a incapacity below the Individuals with Disabilities Act (ADA). That mentioned, not all disabilities are the identical. You’ll be able to’t transmit being blind to a co-worker. Nor are you able to transmit listening to loss or autism.
What you possibly can transmit is HIV, which, whereas nice strides have been made within the medical subject on this illness, would nonetheless be a life-altering analysis.
The DOJ lawsuit in opposition to the Tennessee aggravated prostitution legislation comes after the division discovered that the legislation was discriminatory in December, however the state declined to enter into negotiations.
This isn’t the primary time that the legislation has been challenged, as a number of organizations filed a federal lawsuit in Memphis final yr on behalf of 4 “Jane Doe” plaintiffs and OutMemphis, an area nonprofit that serves the LGBT group.
The ACLU argued that the legislation disproportionately impacts black and transgender prostitutes who knowingly interact in sexual acts for pay whereas being HIV+.
The DOJ lawsuit cites one specific “sufferer” of the Tennessee prostitution legislation, a “black transgender girl” who was engaged in prostitution in 2010 regardless of knowingly being HIV optimistic in 2008.
The complainant additionally occurred to be arrested, the Daily Wire studies, for “prostitution close to a church or college.”
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