Sen. Julia Salazar, D-Brooklyn, is pictured speaking at a rally in December for the parole of older inmates from state prisons.

Nearly 30 years after a rash of HIV cases made Chautauqua County national news, some state legislators are pushing to decriminalize people living with sexual transmitted infections who engage in consensual sexual activity

It’s a debate that isn’t falling entirely along party lines in the state Senate. And, with the state legislative session ending before S.9822 could be taken up in the state Assembly, it’s a debate that will likely continue next year. The legislation has passed the Senate before in 2023-24 and again in 2025, but has yet to make it to the Assembly floor for a vote. That hadn’t changed through Thursday; the Assembly had yet to take the bill up before the end of the legislation session on Friday.

State Sen. George Borrello, R-Sunset Bay, railed against the legislation during a recent Senate debate while acknowledging Chautauqua County’s experience with criminalization of sexually transmitted diseases during consensual encounters, namely the 1990s controversy of Nushawn Williams. The former Jamestown resident, imprisoned after knowingly infecting at least a dozen women with HIV in the 1990s, is one of hundreds of sex offenders in New York still in custody despite – in Williams’ case – completing a 12-year prison sentence in 2010.

Under civil commitment laws, a judge or jury is able to determine whether a sex offender who meets the definition of a “sexually violent predator” should be released following their imprisonment or be placed in a secure facility for further supervision.

“His sexual conduct was intentional to infect more and more women,” Borrello said. “That’s what he did. He was finally convicted, but he created a public health crisis. One man created a public health crisis in Chautauqua County and went to prison for his actions. But this bill would no longer find him guilty.”

Sen. Julia Salazar, D-Brooklyn, took up sponsorship of S.9822 after the retirement of Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal. She said in her legislative justification that the state’s HIV and STI criminalization law found in state Public Health Law Section 2307, is at odds with modern public health policy. The section was first passed in 1909 to control the spread of venereal disease solely within the armed forces. During the World War II era combatting sexually transmitted infections became a national priority because, at the time, medical treatment took soldiers out of commission for months. In 1946, the legislature made the law applicable for the first time to the entire public. It hasn’t been changed since, and Salazar and other advocates to change the criminalization statute say criminalizing HIV and sexually transmitted infections make people fearful to get tested.

“We’ve heard many times appeals to false hypotheticals in arguments made in this chamber, but I’ve got to say the idea that any person would intentionally, deliberately seek to hurt another person solely by attempting to spread an STI strains credulity,” Salazar said. “It is absurd and cruelty to individuals living with an STI to suggest this. It is not actually possible any more than it would be for me if I were to contract COVID to deliberately direct that virus to attack another person. … Additionally, we know this cruel law harms women, particularly survivors of intimate partner abuse. Abusers frequently weaponize HIV, criminal laws like this existing law, that we’re repealing by threatening false exposure claims to control or punish their partners. This is well documented.”

Williams’ case is often discussed by advocates including by organizations like the Center for HIV Law, which noted on its website that Williams’ case marks the first and only time in New York state, and possibly the country, that a person has been civilly confined based largely on HIV status. That is partially true, though the case law doesn’t mention Williams’ HIV status or the fact that Williams infected so many girls with HIV in the 1990s. The Fourth Department Appellate Division has ruled several times over the past 10 years that the evidence used to convict Williams is legally sufficient to support the verdict that Williams has a mental abnormality that predisposes him to the commission of conduct constituting a sex offense and that results in him having serious difficulty controlling that conduct. That opinion was upheld in 2021 and again in 2023, when the Fourth Department Appellate Division confirmed the state “presented legally sufficient evidence that petitioner has serious difficulty controlling his behavior within the meaning of the Mental Hygiene Law. Respondents’ expert testified that petitioner had not made sufficient progress in treatment; that he failed to address his sexual deviance, which included a desire to have sex with underage girls; and that he failed to recognize how his substance abuse was related to his sexual offenses.”

Salazar counters that there are no research or data supporting the idea that laws criminalizing diseases do anything to lower transmission rates or encourage treatment or disclosure of one’s status. She also argues that Public Health Section 2307 has had a disproportionate effect on communities of color, particularly LGBTQ communities of color.

Senator Stephen Chan, R-Brooklyn, wasn’t convinced. He said during his career as a police officer he and his partner charged a man who had been released from jail after serving 17 years for a manslaughter conviction. The man was charged with first-degree rape, and then told Chan and his partner that the man had AIDS, a diagnosis that was confirmed after a court-ordered test.

“So yes, the notion of somebody that wants to intentionally give something these sexually transmitted diseases are real, and I will be voting down on this bill,” Chan said.