A year-and-a-half ago, a former student-athlete named Michael L. Johnson was found guilty of, among other crimes, infecting a sexual partner with HIV.
Also known by his nickname Tiger Mandingo, Johnson was a wrestler at Lindenwood University, near St. Louis, from 2012 until his arrest in 2013. Before Tuesday, Johnson, now in his mid-twenties, had been serving the beginning of a 30-year sentence.
But a panel of appeals court judges recently reversed the trial court’s judgment. The prosecution rendered Johnson’s trial fundamentally unfair, the panel wrote in an opinion Tuesday, by using cellphone recordings that “were not disclosed to the defense until the morning of the first day of the trial.”
The wrestler discovered he was HIV positive in early January 2013, after a medical exam at Lindenwood University. A few weeks later, Johnson had unprotected sex with a fellow student, known only by the initials D.K.-L. in court documents. The student would testify in court that Johnson did not disclose his HIV-positive status.
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