“Tiger Mandingo,” a Tardily Regretful Prosecutor, and the “Viral Underclass”

In October 2013, Lindenwood University student Michael Johnson—often known in media by his online and wrestling nickname “Tiger Mandingo”—was arrested in St. Charles, Missouri. Johnson, who is Black, was eventually charged with two counts of “recklessly” transmitting HIV to two men and of exposing four other men to the virus who did not seroconvert. The circumstances of the case were racially charged; four of the six men who pressed charges against “Tiger Mandingo” were white and two of them were Black. St. Charles Prosecuting Attorney Timothy Lohmar mounted an aggressive prosecution against Johnson under the 1988 Missouri AIDS Law, which treats HIV exposure as akin to attempted murder.

In about 30 U.S. states and 70 countries globally,1 governments prosecute people living with HIV for exposing or transmitting the virus to others in a variety of scenarios—including in situations where transmission is unlikely if not impossible (such as in cases of alleged spitting, oral sex, or sex with a condom). These laws persist despite the fact that HIV has been a manageable condition for more than two decades and that an HIV diagnosis needn’t be considered the death sentence it was assumed to be when the laws were first drafted.

In a May 2015 trial in Missouri—despite the fact that no genetic fingerpriting was ever done to link Johnson’s HIV strain to those of his sex partners—Johnson was convicted of transmitting HIV to one of the two men and of exposing HIV to the four other men. He was sentenced to 30.5 years in prison—a sentence longer than the average sentence for second degree murder in Missouri. As one of his sex partners told me, “It would be better for him if he’d killed someone instead.”1

If he had served his entire sentence, Johnson would have been released in the year 2044. However, in part due to my reporting, Johnson was successfully able to connect with grassroots activists (large gay organizations had little interest in him) who helped him to mount a successful legal appeal. In December 2016, a Missouri appeals court overturned Johnson’s conviction due to gross prosecutorial conduct.2 With Johnson’s sentence vacated, Prosecuting Attorney Lohmar could have dropped the charges, especially considering Johnson had been incarcerated for three years already. Instead, Lohmar vowed to go to trial once more and—wanting to avoid the pain of another trial and the possibility of life in prison once again— Johnson took a no contest “Alford” plea deal. He was released from prison on July 9, 2019, after serving nearly 6 years.

In reporting on this case as a journalist and in researching it for my dissertation over five years, I consistently found that Johnson’s prosecution had a great deal to do with race. It was not the whole personhood of Michael Johnson on trial as much as it was the cartoon of “Tiger Mandingo” on trial: a pathologized, hypersexualized, Black predator “top” with a large Black penis (photos of which were shown to the jury) which ejaculated HIV-positive semen into feminized, “innocent,” usually white “bottoms.” This was the dynamic in court. Even though Johnson and his sex partners all had consensual unprotected (or “bareback”) sex, only Johnson was responsible in the eyes of Missouri law—legally because he was HIV-positive and, functionally, because he was Black. In my research in Missouri, I found that as in other U. S. jurisdictions3,4 and in other nations,5 HIV prosecution is closely tied to racism and anti-Blackness. Consistently, in the U.S. and around the world, Black men are prosecuted for HIV at disparate rates and—when convicted—are subjected to harsher and longer sentences.

During the years Michael Johnson has been in prison, the politics surrounding HIV criminalization in the U. S. have shifted significantly. States such as North Carolina and California have downgraded punishment and/or updated their HIV laws so that they are no longer based solely on 1980s science, and they now take into account how antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) transformed HIV into a highly manageable condition.6 There is even significant movement in Missouri to modernize the laws so that people who are on medication and “virally suppressed” cannot be prosecuted in the same way people who are not virally suppressed can be. Yet what these updates have in common is an inherent anti-Blackness: they attempt to decrease the criminalization of people living with HIV who are virally suppressed, while concentrating carceral punitive measures among those who are not virally suppressed. This creates what the activist Sean Strub and others living with HIV call a viral underclass: a class of people whose viral loads have not been reduced and, thus, who could still be prosecuted for exposing HIV to other people under reformed laws.7

But who makes up this viral underclass? People who do not have health insurance, who are homeless, who do not see doctors regularly and—as research has shown—people who are young Black men.8 The viral underclass mirrors the economic underclass of American society. Since research has shown that HIV laws do nothing to decrease rates of transmission9 and exist, then, only to increase stigma (which stymies public health efforts), there is no legal, ethical, or epidemiological justification for continuing to prosecute ableist, racist HIV laws which “only” punish this viral underclass.

Outrageously, one of the proponents for modernizing the HIV laws in Missouri is St. Charles County Prosecuting Attorney Timothy Lomhar. At a February 2019 hearing in the Missouri Assembly,10 Lohmar testified about “a case a few years ago that got a lot of national attention, and it wasn’t in a good way” which he found to be “embarrassing.” Lohmar testified the Missouri AIDS Law was “antiquated, outdated, and based upon something that science would prove is not accurate.” Lohmar argued that he himself had been “hamstrung” and “forced” to prosecute Johnson under this law—and that he had been “ignorant” of the science when he’d prosecuted Johnson. But this was not true. Many people tried to tell him about HIV science prior to the Johnson trial, including in a high profile, public letter to him signed by Director of Community Medicine for the St. Louis County Department of Corrections.11 Lohmar himself wrote an Op-Ed in the St. Louis Democrat defending his prosecution12—something no law mandated. He did not need to seek life in prison nor dedicate such lavish resources to Johnson’s first trial, and—once Johnson’s conviction was overturned due to Lohmar’s office’s prosecutorial misconduct—Lohmar did not have to threaten to take the case to trial again and could have dropped charges for Johnson’s time served.

And despite the contrite tone in his testimony, Lohmar did not name, let alone apologize to, Michael Johnson, who was then still in prison.

As Maxx Boykin of the Black AIDS Institute put it, full decriminalization of HIV is needed, as HIV reform laws can never “modernize our way to liberation.” If Missouri legislators (and others) merely move toward concentrating shame and punishment within the viral underclass—rather than making sure people in that underclass have what they need to avoid risk of HIV, such as medication, shelter, and employment—then the same racist disparate harm done to Michael Johnson will continue to be done to Black Americans living with HIV.