Posted on 11/05/2004 6:14:56 AM PST by ValerieUSA
OLYMPIA, Wash. -- A verdict will be announced Monday in the trial of a man charged with intentionally exposing 17 women to HIV, a Thurston County Superior Court judge says.
"Sex machine," "Russian roulette" and "sex addiction" were among the phrases lawyers used Thursday in 2 1/2 hours of closing arguments in the case of Anthony E. Whitfield, 32, of Lacey.
Whitfield, formerly of Oklahoma City, is charged with 17 counts of first-degree assault with sexual motivation, witness tampering and violating a court protection order. He could be sentenced to 137 to 182 years in prison if convicted on all counts.
Five of the women cited in the case have been infected with the virus that causes AIDS.
Judge William Thomas McPhee, who heard the case without a jury, said he expected to give a Monday.
The case has spawned at least two episodes of racist leafletting in the state capital city, each involving 100 or more homes - once shortly after Whitfield pleaded innocent to four counts of assault in April and again as the trial was starting late last month.
The fliers, some of which proclaimed, "Don't Have Sex With Blacks; Avoid AIDS!" were wrapped in plastic bags weighted down with cat box filler or sand and hurled into onto homeowners' yards overnight. No arrests have been reported. Whitfield is black.
During the trial an Oklahoma prison official testified that Whitfield was diagnosed with HIV while incarcerated in 1992 and two women testified that Whitfield once said, seemingly in jest, that if he had HIV, he would give it to as many people as he could.
"Most rational people would not take that seriously, but this court should take that seriously because they were spoken by this defendant," deputy prosecutor David H. Bruneau said.
Defense lawyer Charles Lane said Whitfield was a methamphetamine-addicted "sex machine" who bounced between women for shelter, money and sex but never meant to inflict "great bodily harm" as required for him to be convicted of first-degree assault.
Information from: The Olympian, http://www.theolympian.com
This is a carbon copy of the Dica case in the UK, and the evidence in this case is just as ramshackle.
The Elisa/Western Blot HIV tests (the serological tests for HIV) have never calibrated against the HIV virus. Thsi means that we just don't known what the false-positive rates for these tests are. Moreover there are some 50 known factors known to cause false-positive flags for the tests: one of them is "being black".
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