Criminal Law Commons^™

Floating Lungs: Forensic Science In Self-Induced Abortion Prosecutions, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

Pregnancy that ends in stillbirth or late miscarriage—particularly where a person gives birth outside of a hospital—raises the specter of criminal behavior. To successfully prosecute a person for the death of a child, however, requires proving that the child was born alive. Prosecutors mobilize forensic science as an objective way to determine life. This Essay focuses on one such forensic method: the hydrostatic lung test (“HLT”), also known as the floating lung test (“FLT”). Although there are debates about the “correct” way to perform the exam, in essence, the test requires that a forensic scientist take pieces of the lung …

Women's Rights, Human Rights And The Criminal Law Or, Feminist Debates And Responses To [De]Criminalization And Sexual And Reproductive Health, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

My comments today seek to highlight how social and economic rights advocates, particularly those concerned with the right to health, engage with ongoing debates about the role of criminal law in human rights. In particular, I emphasize how many “right to health” campaigns fight for the decriminalization of laws that result in the arrest of marginalized communities or health workers. This trend within right to health advocacy complicates what has been called the anti-impunity turn in human rights. In other words, although many scholars have correctly highlighted the rise of a carceral agenda in human rights, there is also ongoing, …

Adjudicating Risk: Aids, Crime, And Culpability, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

The AIDS epidemic continues to pose significant public health challenges, especially given that the spread of the virus outpaces the AIDS response.¹ Importantly, HIV continues to disproportionately impact socially and economically marginalized communities. In countries with concentrated epidemics,² it is racial minorities, sex workers, men who have sex with men, and drug users who face the brunt of the epidemic.³ In the United States, the data is startling⁴ : 44% of new infections were among African-Americans, and among African-Americans contracting HIV, 57% were among gay and bisexual men.⁵ In 2016, the CDC found that one …

Criminal Laws On Sex Work And Hiv Transmission: Mapping The Laws, Considering The Consequence, Aziza Ahmed, Sienna Baskin, Anna Forbes

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmakers historically justify the mobilization of criminal laws on prostitution and HIV as a means of controlling the spread of disease. Over time, however, public health research has conclusively demonstrated that criminal laws on prostitution and HIV significantly impede the ability of sex workers to access services and to live without the stigma and blame associated with being a transmitter of HIV. In turn, mainstream public health approaches to sex work and HIV emphasize decriminalization as a way to improve the lives of sex workers in need of care, treatment, and services. Our current legal system, which criminalizes both prostitution …

Trafficked? Aids, Criminal Law And The Politics Of Measurement, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

Since early in the HIV epidemic, epidemiologists identified individuals who transact sex as a high-risk group for contracting HIV. Where the issue of transacting sex has been framed as sex work, harm-reduction advocates and scholars call for decriminalization as a primary legal solution to address HIV. Where the issue is defined as trafficking, advocates known as abolitionists argue instead for the criminalization of the purchase of sex.

Global health governance institutions are porous to these competing ideas and ideologies. This article first historicizes the contestation between harm-reduction and abolition in global governance on health. The paper then turns to a …

Hiv, Violence Against Women, And Criminal Law Interventions, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

The growing calls for the “securitization of body and property,”[ii] documented by Jonathan Simon in his book Governing Through Crime, illustrates a deep tension in our understanding of the role of criminal law as a tool for societal transformation.[iii] For some, including communities of color, the criminal legal system is a place where inequality flourishes;[iv] for others, including those feminists who have support criminal law interventions, it has become a tool to realize equality.[v] The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, reauthorized in 2013 as an amendment to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA),[vi] relies heavily on the criminal law to obtain …

Feminism, Power, And Sex Work In The Context Of Hiv/Aids: Consequences For Women's Health, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the involvement of feminists in approaches to sex work in the context of HIV/AIDS. The paper focuses on two moments where feminist disagreement produced results in favor of an "anti-trafficking" approach to addressing the vulnerability of sex workers in the context of HIV. The first is the UNAIDS Guidance Note on Sex Work and the second is the "anti-prostitution pledge" found in the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This article also examines the anti-sex work position articulated by abolitionist feminists and demonstrates the unintended consequences of the abolitionist position on women's health. By examining the actual …

Hiv And Women: Incongruent Policies, Criminal Consequences, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

UN Women must take an aggressive role in the standardization of laws and policies at the global and national level where their incongruence has negative and often criminal consequences for the health and lives of women and girls. This article focuses in on three such examples: opt-out testing for HIV, criminalization of vertical transmission, and the new World Health Organization guidelines on breastfeeding.

Protecting Hiv Positive Women’S Human’S Rights: Recommendations For The Obama Administration, Aziza Ahmed, Catherine Hanssens, Brook Kelly

Faculty Scholarship

To bring the United States in line with prevailing human rights standards, its National HIV/AIDS Strategy will need to explicitly commit to a human rights framework when developing programmes and policies that serve the unaddressed needs of women. This paper focuses on two aspects of the institutionalized mistreatment of people with HIV: 1) the criminalization of their consensual sexual conduct; and 2) the elimination of informed and documented consensual participation in their diagnosis through reliance on mandatory and opt-out testing policies. More than half of US states have HIV-specific laws criminalizing the consensual sexual activity of people with HIV, regardless …

Puppy Love: Bioterrorism, Civil Rights, And Public Health, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Florida has been the state humorists most like to make fun of since the 2000 presidential election, especially when it comes to politics. And humorists are almost the only commentators who can be counted on to tell us the truth about the state of American politics today. When Californians decided to recall their Governor, for example, Conan O'Brien observed: "Yesterday Arnold Schwarzenegger announced he would run for governor of California. The announcement was good news for Florida residents, who now live in the second-flakiest state in the country."' And when more than 200 people filed to run for Governor, Jay …