EX-GREENACRES COP WITH HIV FOUND GUILTY
Women testified man never admitted he had the disease.
WEST PALM BEACH — Nearly five months after one jury could not decide whether Ervans Saintclair was guilty of exposing a sex partner to HIV without her knowledge, it took another jury less than an hour Wednesday to reject the former Greenacres police officer’s claims that he didn’t know he was infected when he repeatedly had unprotected sex with the former neighbor.
Jurors convicted Saintclair of a single charge of uninformed HIV-infected sexual intercourse, a first-degree felony for which the 41-yearold potentially faces up to 30 years in prison when Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Samantha Schosberg Feuer sentences him on May 31.
Feuer ordered Saintclair taken to the Palm Beach County Jail immediately after the verdict Wednesday, over objections from defense attorney Ade Griffin. Saintclair had been free on $30,000 bond since his arrest in January 2014.
“He has maintained his innocence from the beginning and he continues to do so. Now we’ll just have to go through the appellate process,” Griffin said after the verdict.
Saintclair’s appeal will likely center on Griffin’s arguments, echoed from his first trial in November, that prosecutors did not present all the elements necessary for a conviction under the Florida statute that makes it a crime for someone who knows he or she is infected with the virus that causes AIDS to have sex without informing partners of the diagnosis.
Griffin tried unsuccessfully this week to convince jurors that prosecutors failed to prove that Saintclair knew he was infected when he had sex with a woman with whom he was in an on-and off-relationship from 2009 to 2013. The woman, a now 40-year-old postal service worker, testified at Saintclair’s first trial last year and again this week that the two of them had unprotected sex throughout their relationship and at one point were trying to conceive a child together.
Assistant State Attorney Brianna Coakley presented medical records and testimony from doctors who examined Saintclair that the former officer was informed he was infected as early as 2007.
Saintclair also faces three similar charges in another case where a woman who said she had sex with him between March 2012 and November 2013 without him ever telling her that he was HIV positive. That woman, who contacted police after media coverage of Saintclair’s arrest in the other case, said she and Saintclair initially had protected sex but stopped using condoms after their relationship grew more serious.
She said the two of them discussed sexually transmitted diseases before they stopped using condoms and “Saintclair assured her that he was ‘good’ and she did not have to worry about him,” according to arrest reports.