The 2024 Lavender Law Conference
CHLP Staff Attorney Jada Hicks will present on a panel entitled, Ending the Epidemic of Harm: How HIV Criminalization Harms Individual and Public Health at Lavender Law in Washington, DC on Thursday, August 8, 2024.
Speakers:
- Nathan Cisneros (Moderator) (Williams Institute UCLA School of Law)
- Jada Hicks (The Center for HIV Law and Policy)
- George Kerr III (GII Associates)
- Dori Molozanov (NASTAD)
- Kate Mozynski (Equality Ohio)
Despite decades of advances in the science and medicine of HIV treatment and prevention, laws criminalizing People Living with HIV (PLWH) remain on the books across the United States. This panel explores the ways HIV criminalization entangles public health and medicine in the criminal legal system: the complicated and sometimes combative ways that medicine, public health, and their practitioners are mobilized in the enforcement of HIV-related criminal law, and how advocates and practitioners have pushed back.
Panelists will review (1) the HIV criminalization legal landscape, (2) the ways in which HIV-related criminal laws are enforced (including by relying on outdated medical and public health findings), and (3) winning arguments and strategies reformers have used to modernize HIV criminal laws with the support of public health, medicine, and the community of PLWH. Each panel member will bring to the discussion a unique perspective on HIV criminalization, including that of the legal aid practitioner, policy researcher, public health practitioner, and reform advocate.
Together, the panel will also discuss the importance of cultivating a multidisciplinary advocacy team to address systemic misconceptions about HIV and HIV criminalization, with a focus on developing portable skills and action items for participants fighting against HIV criminalization and the criminalization of other forms of identity and health status.
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