Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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United Press International - Thursday, 2 August 2001
Alex Cukan
"During your interview, you were devoid of virtually any appropriate insight into your behavior," the two-member New York parole board said in a statement. "Your sexually perverse behavior clearly illustrates your threat to public safety and the impropriety of discretionary release."
Williams, also known as Shyteek Johnson and a long list of other aliases, will next be eligible for parole in two years.
The parole board said that Williams was less than a model prisoner and has been cited 14 times for disciplinary offenses including fighting and assaulting another inmate since his sentence began in 1998. He has a disciplinary hearing scheduled for assaulting an inmate and stabbing himself on July 24.
The New York City native said in a radio interview two years ago that he was a gang member, a drug dealer and a drifter who had unprotected sex with about 300 women in upstate New York and New York City after he knew he was HIV positive.
Williams went to live with a relative in the 1990s in Jamestown, in upstate New York, where about 1,400 people, mainly teens, underwent HIV testing in Chautauqua County after health officials made the unusual move of publicly warning that they could have been infected by having sex with Williams or with females with which he had had unprotected sex.
Prosecutors in Chautauqua County had wanted to try Williams with attempted murder for knowingly passing on the HIV virus to the women and their babies but no current New York statute allowed for that charge. Further hampering the prosecution was the fact that although more than a dozen Jamestown teens were linked by DNA to having caught the HIV virus from Williams, few were willing to testify in open court.
Chautauqua County District Attorney James Subjack said he had to settle for accepting a guilty plea to the reckless endangerment charge.
New York state law was changed in 1998 making HIV cases reportable to state health authorities as a result of the Williams case. The new law required people to provide names of people that might have been exposed to the HIV virus to health officials so that sexual or drug-use partners could be notified of the potential exposure and treated, if necessary, as in other sexually transmitted diseases.
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