On May 15, a jury in St. Charles County recommended that a young black former Lindenwood University college student serve a 60-plus-year sentence for having consensual sex, while HIV-positive, with mostly young white sex partners he met on “hook-up” smartphone applications.
On July 13, Judge Jon Cunningham sentenced Michael Johnson to a 30.5 year sentence, allowing him to serve the recommended sentence concurrently.
The courtroom drama I witnessed suggested a harsh sentence was forthcoming.
First, because the rhetoric used by the prosecution framed Johnson’s HIV-positive status and his behavior as that of a rapist. Second, because the prosecution’s assumption of Johnson’s accusers’ innocence promoted his image as an HIV-infested monster who coerced sex from young victims, rather than engaging in consensual sex.
Nevertheless, the sentence – the equivalent of a homicide conviction— was unimaginable.
As a researcher and scholar, I can assure community members of any race that all parties involved in this case were at-risk subjects. They likely engaged in consensual sex in a familiar hook-up youth culture, while navigating an anti-LGBT, anti-black, anti- HIV-AIDS climate.
In this St. Charles County courtroom, however, there was only one sexual criminal: Johnson) The four male accusers were deemed innocent. The prosecution constantly spoke of “Tiger Mandingo” throughout the trial, so his social media name was exaggerated beyond persona to stand for a racialized, deviant predator.
Without mention of Johnson’s own physical and psychological struggle with his HIV diagnosis, the prosecution was allowed to paint him as an animal terrorizing the bodies of his young, white, docile “victims” who performed “the traditional female role,” as one accuser stated. The prosecution posed Johnson as the only agent in sex, the “Tiger Mandingo” who took advantage of these young, innocent men. Loud and clear came the echoes of the centuries-old horror story of innocent white women endangered by black men.
During the trial, it was clear that Prosecuting Attorney Philip Groenweghe’s simple suggestion that Johnson “carried a deadly weapon” (HIV) framed him as rapist while recalling criminalizing images of black men caught carrying illegal weapons. Groenweghe’s rhetorical move erased any mitigating realities of race and class that Michael Johnson lived, as well as how Johnson’s major allure was many of his accuser’s fascination with his large endowment and race. While some might call his accusers “casualties of sex,” they may also be called young agents of risk who were casualties of their own black fetishism.
Within this prosecutor’s framework, however, the jury was primed to imagine “Tiger Mandingo” the wrestler as a criminal, rather than as a victim of America’s HIV/AIDS crisis. Johnson was challenged with getting adequate healthcare and dealing with the mental and emotional impacts of his diagnosis.
There was no physical, written or oral evidence to suggest that Johnson set out to harm any of his partners, or that he had any truthful verification of any of their own HIV statuses. Could he have assumed that in 2015, anyone willing to have unprotected sex in the first meeting was either HIV-positive or unconcerned about HIV transmission?
Judge Cunningham adjudicates 1987 laws that must be changed. Missouri could take note of Iowa’s recent changes in their HIV Laws which urge others to “consider reviewing HIV-specific criminal statutes to ensure that they are consistent with current knowledge of HIV transmission and support public health approaches to preventing and treating HIV.”
The state, rather than criminalizing HIV, may be better to advance new treatment protocols, such as providing immediate HIV therapy and counseling for all diagnoses. The real question is: Why are the courts processing and criminalizing consensual sex between adults in the first place?
Johnson’s sentence forecasts dark days ahead in Missouri’s criminalizing approach to HIV/AIDS. Another young man will be arrested and, under the guise of state justice, communities will hear this refrain: blackness is a criminal offense, even felonious when the white accusers are presumed innocent.
Michael Johnson meets Michael Brown at the crossroad of black demonization lane and Jim Crow road, each case an example of the state’s persistent controlling, condemning and demonizing its black citizens by any means necessary. Indeed, the “Show Me State” has repeatedly collaborated in America’s drive toward black spiritual and physical death. Show me that Missouri will stop.
Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr. is associate professor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Performing Arts at Washington University.
