Area Man Is Accused of Passing AIDS Virus : Indictment: Santa Barbara resident is named in 15 assault counts for allegedly infecting a woman and the child she gave birth to.

In a case described by prosecutors as the first of its kind in California, Ventura police arrested a 45-year-old unemployed carpenter Friday for allegedly infecting a woman and the child she gave birth to with the AIDS virus.

David Scott Crother of Santa Barbara turned himself in to police to answer a county grand jury indictment for 15 counts of assault with a deadly weapon, one for each of the sexual liaisons he allegedly had with an unidentified Ventura County woman between September, 1988, and August, 1989.

Prosecutors said Crother knew he had the AIDS virus as early as 1988, yet had sex with the woman repeatedly without telling her about it or using a condom.

The woman and the baby he allegedly fathered have tested positive for the AIDS virus, Deputy Dist. Atty. Vincent J. O’Neill Jr. said.

Crother appeared briefly in Ventura County Superior Court to have his arraignment scheduled for Jan. 30. He was then released on $1,000 bail. Judge Charles R. McGrath also ordered Crother not to have any contact with the alleged victim.

If convicted on all counts, Crother faces up to eight years in state prison and $150,000 in fines, O’Neill said.

Crother declined to comment on his arrest. His lawyer, Robert Sanger of Santa Barbara, said Crother is not admitting any of the charges.

The Crother case is the first prosecution of a Californian on assault charges for passing the AIDS virus to an unsuspecting person through sexual intercourse, said prosecutors in the counties of Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Alameda, Sacramento and San Jose.

Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said he knows of no similar case. Bradbury said he will ask for the support Monday of state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita) on a proposed bill that would make such conduct a felony.

The proposed bill would make the conduct punishable by life in prison without parole if the defendant intended to infect the victim. It also would make transmission of AIDS through the sharing of needles by intravenous drug users a felony.

O’Neill said the woman, whom prosecutors would not identify, complained to Ventura police in August that she believed Crother had infected her with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which can lead to acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

The two met in Santa Barbara in January, 1988, and began a sexual relationship, O’Neill said. At some point before September of that year, Crother tested positive for HIV antibodies and was informed that he had been infected with HIV, O’Neill said.

O’Neill would not say how Crother had learned of his infection. But he said Crother was told that HIV causes AIDS and was warned he could infect others through unprotected sex.

Despite the warnings, Crother had repeated intercourse with the woman without a condom, even after becoming aware in August, 1989, that she was pregnant, the indictment said.

The woman learned from another undisclosed source that Crother had tested positive for HIV, and learned after her baby’s birth that the infant also was HIV-positive, O’Neill said.

O’Neill said his office became involved at the request of Ventura police, and began presenting witnesses in November to the Ventura County grand jury, which handed down its indictment late Thursday.

Gay rights activists and experts in AIDS law Friday applauded the prosecution of Crother, saying that anyone who knowingly infects an unsuspecting person should be punished.

But they warned that the law Bradbury proposes could fuel hysteria over AIDS and could present difficulties for prosecutors in obtaining convictions. One difficulty could be proving which sex partner infected a victim and the potential for malicious prosecution, they said.

“It’s a new animal,” O’Neill said of the Crother case. “It is stretching the existing law to fit this situation, but we feel it’s stretching it within appropriate bounds.”

Bradbury said: “There is no precise section of the law that makes this a crime, and I think that’s a failure of the Legislature to deal with the issue because of the political atmosphere involving the gay issue.”

O’Neill drafted the proposed bill, which Bradbury plans to discuss with Davis. In addition to forbidding HIV carriers from having unprotected sexual activity without informing their partners, the proposed bill would impose a maximum one-year jail sentence for having sex under similar circumstances “whether protected or unprotected.”

Another section of the proposed bill would allow prosecutors to seek court-ordered AIDS tests or disclosure of defendants’ and victims’ medical records if they can show sufficient “good cause” to secure a court order or search warrant from a judge.

Bradbury’s proposal gained immediate support from the Rev. Lou Sheldon, chairman and lobbyist for the Traditional Values Coalition, an Orange County-based affiliation of churches.

“What you have here is a very reasonable approach to law enforcement,” Sheldon said. “Sexual activity is not a passive activity in America or California, it’s a very normal flow of activity. Therefore, we’ve got to have laws in light of this epidemic, and this is very reasonable.”

The proposed bill, however, has several flaws that could surface in litigation, said Mary Newcombe, staff attorney for the Los Angeles office of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a national gay rights legal group.

“If a person is engaging in safer sex tactics, they would not have the requisite intent to commit a crime,” Newcombe said of the clause criminalizing protected or unprotected sex by an HIV-positive person with an unknowing partner.

And safe sex discussions do not always go as planned, she said.

“The unfortunate thing is that frequently these kinds of negotiations take place among only two people where their judgment may be impaired” either by sexual desire or intoxication, she said.

Jon Davidson, an expert in AIDS-related legal issues for the American Civil Liberties Union in Los Angeles, said Friday: “The concern is that sometimes when these laws get proposed they create a false sense of security for individuals, which is, ‘Somebody won’t infect me because it’s illegal.’ ”

“I worry about the law being overbroad and over-applied,” Andrea Palash, staff attorney for National Gay Rights Advocates, said. “I feel it will become the next plague mentality. It is very easy to abridge people’s rights in the stampede to protect everyone from HIV infection.”

Legal experts also said that those who try to infect other people with AIDS can be prosecuted under a variety of existing laws.

One section of the Health and Safety Code makes it a misdemeanor to knowingly infect another person with a sexually transmitted disease.

A Shasta County jury failed to reach a verdict several years ago in the case of an HIV-positive man, who was tried under that law for allegedly putting his bloodied hand into his wife’s mouth during a fight, O’Neill said.

Another law makes it a felony for a convicted prostitute who tests HIV-positive in a court-ordered examination to solicit another act of prostitution. Sacramento County Deputy Dist. Atty. John Pezone said he is building a case against a Sacramento prostitute on those charges.

One of the more famous cases in Southern California was that of Joseph Edward Markowski, a homeless male prostitute who sold AIDS-contaminated blood to Plasma Production Associates in Los Angeles in June, 1987. He was acquitted of attempted murder charges.