An HIV-positive man has confessed to injecting his blood into his sleeping wife and infecting her with the virus that can cause Aids, reports have said.
It is believed the man wanted to give her the disease so she would start having sex with him again, New Zealand's Sunday Star-Times said.

Court documents detailed how the man, 35, twice pricked his 33-year-old wife with a sewing needle laced with his infected blood.

The husband discovered he was HIV-positive - but his partner and children were not - during health checks imposed on them when the family arrived in New Zealand in 2004.

The woman had said she wanted to maintain the relationship for the sake of the children.

But she refused to have sex with her husband for fear of contracting the disease.

In the documents, the wife described how, in May, 2008, she found a sting-like mark on her left thigh and two days later awoke to a stinging feeling in her leg.

She said: "I got up... and I flicked the blankets... I looked at (the husband) and he was wide awake."

The wife asked him if he had pricked her and he said, 'No'. But she later found evidence of "blood sprinkles" on their duvet, which she said her husband tried to hide from her.

During a routine check-up four months later, doctors revealed she was HIV-positive.

The woman confronted her husband, who admitted dipping a needle in his blood and pricking her with it.

"All he said (was) he was sorry. He said, 'I used needles on you because I wanted you to be the same as me so that you can live with me and you won't leave me'," she said.

The husband has admitted wilfully infecting another with a disease and faces up to 14 years in jail when he is sentenced at Auckland High Court next year.

Gosh, yo. Like, what kind of logic is that - 'I'll inject my wife with a fatal disease, and hey, that'll make her want to have sex with me!'

that's the sickest thing i've ever heard

Don't ever watch the film 'Kids' then!

That poor woman.
How did he contract the disease in the first place, did they say?

If he has it and the wife doesn't, kinda seems like he was messing around on her to me.

What a pig.

Er, yeah. Thats what makes her want to stay with him and continue loving him... making her HIV-positive. Wow.

Thats horrible. It's not something you can ever get over.. it's not like he just harmed her, she's stuck with this disease and possibly developing AIDS to die a slow, painful death because of him. He deserves much more than 14 years!

On the other hand, it's highly likely he won't live longer than 14 years anyway, and if he does, he'll probably be too sick to be going round injecting anyone else!

The ethics is interesting though - I mean, I wonder how many people who know they have HIV go round having sex without declaring it. Do they get jailed ever?

There was one guy in the States I think? who was going around with HIV, having sex with many different women without telling them. Something like 14 women got HIV from him and he was charged because of it... doesn't happen often, but it does happen

Yeah, I guess if they get caught. Must be very easy to do it and not get caught though. At parties where people are drunk and sleeping with various people.

I guess that's why they tell people not to sleep around. Haha. Though, it is the responsibility of the person with HIV to be telling their sexual partners... but like you said... if you don't get caught, nothing happens.
It's like any other criminal act, if you don't get caught doing it, you don't get punished for it

If you're on anti virals and HIV never develops into AIDS, I believe you can have close to a normal lifespan, so he should live longer than 14 years if he keeps on top of his drugs.

Yes, it's possible he could not get full blown AIDS, but he could get it, even if taking drugs, surely. Drugs do not always mean someone will necessarily have a normal lifespan with HIV, do they? Isn't it quite unpredictable? Thinking back to the AIDS training I went on a few years ago - it was quite interesting, yo!

I'm not sure but I know that treatment has definitely moved on in the last few years, and it is now regarded more as a chronic disease rather than a death sentence. Of course different people will react to drugs differently but since HIV+ people are expected to have regular checkups I think it is mostly manageable.

There was a case I studied when I did Law at A Level about a British man who was HIV + who never told any of his partners. I believe he was jailed.

That man is extremely selfish. Just because your wife want bone you & expose herself to a deadly disease doesn't mean she doesn't love him. Hell she stayed with him even after she found out & that takes a lot. Why was he not thinking of her health & the effects it will have on their children if both of them die leaving them alone? So in his twisted mind getting a nut is worth more than his wife's life & making his children orphans. Yea, I say he should be charged with attempted murder. Sick bastard.

*won't instead of want in the first line. Whew I need some sleep.

Is it not murder?

I think for something to be murder in a court of law, the victim has to be dead. What he's done is shorten her life - I suppose in a way, it's similar to someone who does grievous bodily harm to someone - the person is not dead, but they are damaged enough that their life expectancy is dramatically shortened and their quality of life drastically diminished.

Hmm. It's a slight legal tangle I suppose. If the woman dies of HIV, which she wouldn't have otherwise contracted, then he killed her. But how can you prove she wouldn't have contracted it from anyone else? Or what if she dies of something else?

You can't die of HIV, or even AIDS; you die of cancer of pneumonia etc - things you are more at risk of thanks to a compromised immune system. As long as you're on anti virals then you can have close to a normal life. It's treated as a chronic disease now as opposed to a death sentence, thankfully. In developed countries it is very manageable. Especially now that they are going to start giving anti virals earlier on in the disease's life; extending people's life spans and quality of life even more.

*cancer OR pneumonia, not of.

It's not because she's not dead

Attempted murder then?
In the UK, the law used to stand that if you grieviously injured someone and they died within a year and a day, it was counted as murder. But they were going to extend the time period.

The issue here is the need for not only the guilty act but the guilty mind. And though he did have the intention to give to her the disease, he did not have the intent to give her the disease with the intent to kill her. It gets messy because common knowledge says that this is a deadly disease that has the potential to kill and is using willful blindness to say that he didn't know that.
They for sure couldn't charge him for murder because she's not dead... the attempted murder thing, the person doesn't even have to die for attempted murder, there just has to be a premeditated act with the intent to cause death... which is the hard part to prove...

Exactly. The premeditated act, sure, but the intent to cause death? Not likely.

Not if he didn't explicitly kill her. HIV/AIDS isn't considered a death sentence anymore what with new advancements in treatment.

But any intentional injection of a disease is punishable with jail time.