Australia: Sydney husband gets 4 1/2 years after pleading guilty to infecting wife

Sentencing

May 11, 2009

A 38 year-old man who previously pleaded guilty to a charge of “maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm” (reckless HIV tranmission) after his ex-wife filed a complaint, has been sentenced to “four years and six months full-time jail with a non-parole period of three years, meaning he will be eligible for release in April 2012 at the earliest” by Judge Jennifer English in Sydney.

The same story from the AAP ran in almost every Australian paper today, but there is no information explaining why sentencing took almost a year, when it was originally scheduled for last August; nor how it is possible that he might have infected her “some time between January 1994 and December 2003” when the child she bore was diagnosed with AIDS in 1998.