about nushawn
In 1999, Nushawn Williams was convicted and sentenced to a 12-year prison term for incidents that occurred in Jamestown, New York, when he was 19 years old.
After serving his entire sentence, and four days before his scheduled release from Wendy Correctional Center in 2010, the New York Attorney General filed a motion to have Nushawn indefinitely civilly committed. He was then moved to the Central New York Psychiatric Center at Marcy Correctional Center and has remained imprisoned there for an additional 10+ years.
Today, Nushawn still has no release date in sight.
The media, white supremacists, and racist behavior on the part of local health department employees played a big part in his civil commitment and in making the case widely known. There were hundreds of news reports and even posters plastered with Nushawn’s mugshot, saying that Nushawn transmitted HIV to hundreds of women—despite a total lack of evidence to support that.
All people knew was that Nushawn is Black, and the young women he had sex with in Jamestown are white. The state has tried to argue that HIV has nothing to do with why Nushawn is still confined even though HIV was mentioned more than 1,000 times at his trial.
Nushawn’s HIV status has been used to portray him as a monster, sway public opinion, and publicly convict him based on fear, miseducation, and lack of science. Years ago, laws targeting people with HIV were thought to protect the public. Today we know there is no data to support that, and we also know those laws cause less people to get tested and further stigmatize people living with HIV. We also know that science has come a long way in providing people with effective treatment and medication to suppress viral loads so that a person can no longer transmit HIV to a sexual partner.
Our coalition is a group of advocates working from several angles to help free Nushawn. We believe that Black Lives Matter and that mass incarceration is real and unjust. We believe that working to free Nushawn helps to combat the stigma that still exists around HIV and AIDS. And finally, we believe that as a human being, Nushawn has paid his debt to society—he did the time he pled guilty for and should be released.
IT IS LONG PAST TIME TO PUT AN END TO THIS INJUSTICE. IT IS TIME TO FREE NUSHAWN.
We ask you to join us in this fight to release a man who has now been away from his family for more than two decades.
Join our the Free NuShawn Coalition and see our Links page for more information on Nushawn’s case.