On July 27, Governor J.B. Pritzker repealed the state’s 32-year-old HIV criminalization statute—a law that overwhelmingly impacted Black people in Cook County—making Illinois just the second state in the nation to make such a sweeping change.
Illinois’s HIV criminalization bill was originally passed in 1989 at the height of the AIDS crisis and has been been harshly criticized since its inception as discriminatory, anti-science, and homophobic. Research shows that laws like Illinois’s— which up until this week made exposing someone to HIV without their knowledge a felony punishable by up to seven years in prison—actually discourage testing for HIV and make people who carry the virus less likely to seek treatment.
The repeal won’t change what happened to him—he lost jobs, had to change careers, and faces harassment from an accuser he and his attorney say was retaliating for a failed relationship. And the articles about the charges against him, which were eventually dropped, live forever on the Internet with scant mention of his exoneration.
