Sarah Porter may turn out to be Britain’s most prolific serial killer of recent years. Right now, she is behind bars. Porter contracted HIV from a lover and, when she discovered her predicament, set about passing on the virus to as many men as she could, by ‘encouraging’ them to have unprotected sex with her. When caught by the police she refused to co-operate, naming no names. The police believe that the number of men it is known for a fact that she tried to infect — four — is ‘only the tip of the iceberg’. The life expectancy for someone with HIV/Aids is, mercifully, much improved on what it once was. But to be told that you are infected is nonetheless to be told that your life will be much shorter than would otherwise have been the case. Porter knew she was infected, was angry that she had been infected and almost certainly sought to pass the virus on as a warped means of revenge.
So now she is serving a jail term of two years and eight months — which, interestingly, is almost exactly half the maximum tariff she would have received for the undoubted wickedness of transmitting a computer virus. She may be back on the loose within a year or so. You may wonder about the apparent levity of this sentence. You may suspect that our courts are possessed of a certain sexual prejudice; men who have casual sex with women are asking for it, one way or another, whether it be through the avenging angel of the Child Support Agency or a retrovirus. And Ms Porter was undoubtedly a victim herself, wasn’t she? So instead of a life sentence, which is what serial killers usually get, she will probably be banged up for a year.
Meanwhile, two thugs who murdered a barman because they knew he was a homosexual have been sentenced to much more than the normal tariff of a life sentence (‘middle-starting point’, as the legal profession puts it, is 12 years) because of their motivation for the murder.
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