The Department of Justice (DOJ) said last week that Tennessee’s aggravated prostitution law for people with HIV violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and warned that the state could face a lawsuit if it does not stop enforcing it.
In a December 1 release, the DOJ said that Tennessee’s decades-old prostitution law subjects people with HIV to “harsher criminal penalties solely because of their HIV status,” thereby violating the ADA.
“Today’s announcement comes on World AIDS Day, an international day dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic,” the department wrote.
The law in question raises prostitution from a misdemeanor to a felony “when, knowing that such person is infected with HIV, the person engages in sexual activity as a business or is an inmate in a house of prostitution or loiters in a public place for the purpose of being hired to engage in sexual activity.”
Tennessee’s law, passed in 1991, also requires people who are convicted of engaging in prostitution while HIV-positive to register for life as a “violent sex offender.”
This means the convicted person faces up to 15 years in prison for the felony charge rather than just six months for a misdemeanor charge.
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Prosecutors in the Memphis area most frequently enforce the prostitution law, the DOJ said, singling out for particular criticism the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office and Tennessee’s Bureau of Investigation.
Memphis residents have complained in recent months about prostitution and drug use encroaching on their neighborhoods.
“Tennessee’s aggravated prostitution law is outdated, has no basis in science, discourages testing and further marginalizes people living with HIV,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
In October, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Transgender Law Center also filed a federal lawsuit over the law, which they want scrapped.
“That individuals living with HIV are treated so differently can only be understood as a remnant of the profoundly prejudiced early response to the AIDS epidemic, and the continuing marginalization of the Black cisgender and transgender women who have borne the brunt of the Aggravated Prostitution and related registry requirements,” the lawsuit states.
Since 1991, there has been “significant progress” in understanding and treating HIV, Rebecca Bond, chief of the DOJ’s Disability Rights Section, wrote in a letter to Tennessee officials.
“Beliefs and assumptions that individuals with HIV will spread it, or that having HIV is a death sentence, are now outdated and unfounded,” Bond wrote.