Your Saturday Radical 1: "A 'perfect storm' of homophobia, racism and criminal justice."

HIV is back in the news locally, with a heroin epidemic few of us want to consider. Here is another angle.

The Reckless Prosecution of ‘Tiger Mandingo’, by Rod McCullom (The Nation)

It took just over two hours for a suburban St. Louis, Missouri, jury to recommend Michael L. Johnson serve more than 60 years in prison on May 15.* If Johnson serves that full time, it could become a life sentence for the 23-year-old former student and star wrestler at Lindenwood University in St. Charles. Johnson was convicted of “recklessly infecting” one male sexual partner with HIV and exposing four others to the virus.

Johnson has been HIV positive since at least early 2013 and possibly as early as 2011, according to documentation disclosed at the trial, and prosecutors say he did not reveal his serostatus to sexual partners. That meant Johnson was liable for prosecution under Missouri’s draconian HIV criminalization statute, which essentially categorizes each new infection in the state as attempted murder. “What we have here is a perfect storm of malice,” Assistant Prosecutor Phil Groenweghe told the jurors in closing arguments.

Not exactly. A more nuanced analysis of Johnson’s case reveals instead the “perfect storm” of homophobia, racism and criminal justice that shapes the health of so many black gay men.