Published October, 2018

HIV Criminalization In Florida: Penal Implications for People Living with HIV/AIDS, Amira Hasenbush, The Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law (2018)

Florida criminalizes people living with HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the contexts of sex work, nonconsensual sex offenses, donation of blood and other bodily products, and consensual sex without disclosure.

The purpose of this study is to provide an overall understanding of the enforcement of HIV criminalization laws in Florida and assess any preliminary findings indicating disparities between subpopulations. Given the movement across the United States, including in Florida, to modernize HIV-specific criminal laws to bring them in line with current medical science, analysis of the enforcement of the laws helps to inform policy and legislative decision-making with data and a deeper understanding of how the laws have been used in the real world. This is the third state in which the Williams Institute has provided comprehensive data analysis on the enforcement of HIV criminalization laws.