Johnson Aziga - Arrest and Trial

Arrest and Trial

Aziga was arrested in August 2003. On November 16, 2005, Justice Norman Bennett of Hamilton ruled there is sufficient evidence for Aziga to stand trial. His trial date was initially set for May 2007 but was moved back several times. As of May, 2008, the trial was set to begin October 6, 2008.

The decision to try Aziga was criticized by Richard Elliott, deputy director of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, who described the decision as "not particularly helpful" and argued that it may lead to a "dominant impression out there of people living with HIV as potential criminals, which is not an accurate or fair representation.”

Aziga was not the first Canadian ever to face criminal charges for knowingly exposing others to HIV. In an earlier case, Charles Ssenyonga of London, Ontario was prosecuted on the lesser charges of aggravated assault and criminal negligence causing bodily harm, although he died of meningitis before a verdict was rendered in his case.

In the 1999 decision R. v. Cuerrier, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that people who knowingly exposed others to HIV through unprotected sex could be charged with a crime on the grounds that failure to disclose one's HIV status to a sex partner constitutes fraud.

Aziga's trial began in October 2008. Among the first revelations made in trial proceedings are claims by Aziga's former girlfriends that he lied about his HIV status and continued having unprotected sex until the morning of his arrest in 2003. Aziga's lawyers claim that no conclusive link can be shown to indicate that the deaths of his former girlfriends can be attributed to HIV/AIDS.

On April 4, 2009, Aziga was found guilty of two counts of murder in the first degree, 10 counts of aggravated sexual assault, and one count of attempted aggravated sexual assault by nine men and three women on Hamilton Superior Court jury. Aziga was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 25 years, the mandatory sentence in Canada for a conviction of first-degree murder. Aziga has expressed his intention to appeal his conviction.

On August 2, 2011, a court in Hamilton, Ont. granted a request by Crown Prosecutors to have Johnson Aziga jailed indefinitely under the Dangerous Offender act, because he is believed to be at a high risk to re-offend.