Will HIV lover who knew he infected women get life?

A MAN found guilty by a unanimous verdict of causing serious harm to two former partners by infecting them with HIV could face life imprisonment.

In the first case of its kind here, the State argued that the 28-year-old knew of his diagnosis when he infected the women and that this amounted to serious harm.

The African national living in Dublin cannot be named so his victims can remain anonymous.

He had pleaded not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to intentionally or recklessly causing serious harm to the two women on dates between November 2009 and June 2010.

After an 11-day trial and just under four-and-a-half hours of deliberations, a jury of nine women and three men returned unanimous guilty verdicts on both charges.

The maximum penalty for the offence is life in prison and Judge Martin Nolan refused an application for bail, saying there was some risk of the man fleeing, while a custodial sentence was quite likely in this case.

The judge remanded the man in custody to appear again in court on July 26 for a sentence hearing.

Judge Nolan then thanked the jurors and said it had been a pretty difficult case with some unusual types of evidence.

The man’s former wife had told the trial he ‘didn’t like’ condoms.

She told Dominic McGinn SC, prosecuting, that he had agreed to use a condom the first time they had sex in early 2010, but after intercourse, she noticed he wasn’t wearing one.

She said he ‘wasn’t shocked’ by her diagnosis, which she received following routine hospital tests after discovering that she was pregnant.

Under cross-examination, she told defence counsel Paul Greene SC that she had gone out with two men prior to the defendant.

She said she had used condoms with the man she had been seeing directly before her former husband and did not have oral sex with him. This woman’s mother said she had tried to get the man to admit he had given her daughter the virus but ‘he kept denying it’. She said the man told her that her daughter had given him HIV. The second woman gave evidence that she started a relationship with the man in 2009 and that he told her he had removed a condom the first time they had sex. ‘Contraception wasn’t used, he wouldn’t use any,’ the woman told the court. She said she went to a doctor in 2010 with abdominal pains and as a result got tested for infectious diseases. She said when she found out she had HIV she was ‘in shock’.

This woman agreed under crossexamination that she had had casual sexual relationships with other men before she began going out with the defendant.

She said that she had used protection during sex in those relationships.

In his closing speech to the jury on Tuesday, prosecution counsel Dominic McGinn SC submitted that expert witnesses had said all three parties had the same subtype and mutations of the virus.

Mr McGinn suggested the complainants had ‘remarkably similar’ accounts and said they used condoms with previous partners. He said there was no evidence that any of the complainants’ previous partners were HIV positive.

He told the jury that the man lied to the complainants’ doctor about his positive diagnosis and ‘went through the charade’ of being tested again in 2010.

‘He knew full well he was HIV positive. He was advised about having safe sex. ‘He admitted that to gardaí and he was given antiviral medication and didn’t take it,’ Mr McGinn said.

He suggested the accused was guilty on both charges against him because he acted recklessly and caused serious harm.

In his closing speech, defence counsel Paul Greene SC told the jury that both of the complainants told lies in court about their previous sexual history. He suggested this meant their overall evidence was unreliable.

He reminded them that defence expert witness Professor Andrew Leigh Brown’s evidence was that this was the first criminal trial at which he had given expert advice where phylogenetic analysis was not carried out, and that this analysis was effective at excluding potential sources of infection.

Prof. Leigh Brown agreed, under cross examination, that this analysis ‘can never actually establish that one person gave it to another’.

Told wife he didn’t like condoms