The National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD) and the HIV Law Project on June 28 filed a joint friend-of-the-court brief requesting post-conviction relief for Nick Rhoades, an HIV-positive Iowa man sentenced to lifetime sex offender registration and 25 years in prison for having protected consensual sex that did not transmit the virus, the Center for HIV Law and Policy blog reports. As the topmost administrators of HIV/AIDS and viral hepatitis care in the United States, NASTAD expressed that it was bad law and bad policy to harshly punish consensual, safe sex in which HIV is not transmitted, and that such punishment sent the wrong message to the public. The court later suspended Rhoades’s 25-year sentence, but he still faces fives years of probation and is on the sex offender registry, which has strict mandatory reporting and monitoring requirements.

To read the Center for HIV Law and Policy blog, click here.

To read more about Rhoades’s story, click here.