South Carolina § 24-13-470 - Throwing of body fluids on correctional facility employees and others; penalty; blood borne disease testing.

§ 24-13-470. Throwing of body fluids on correctional facility employees and others; penalty; blood borne disease testing.

(A) An inmate, a detainee, a person taken into custody, or a person under arrest, who attempts to throw or throws body fluids including, but not limited to, urine, blood, feces, vomit, saliva, or semen on an employee of a state correctional facility or local detention facility, a state or local law enforcement officer, a visitor of a state correctional facility or local detention facility, or any other person authorized to be present in a state correctional facility or local detention facility in an official capacity is guilty of a felony and, upon conviction, must be imprisoned not more than fifteen years. A sentence under this provision must be served consecutively to any other sentence the inmate is serving. This section shall not prohibit the prosecution of an inmate for a more serious offense if the inmate is determined to be HIV-positive or has another disease that may be transmitted through body fluids.

(B) A person accused of a crime contained in this section may be tested for a blood borne disease within seventy-two hours of the crime if a health care professional believes that exposure to the accused person's body fluid may pose a significant health risk to a victim of the crime.

(C) This section does not apply to a person who is a "patient" as defined in Section 44-23-10.

HISTORY: 1997 Act No. 136, SECTION 6; 2002 Act No. 238, SECTION 1; 2003 Act No. 18, SECTION 1; 2010 Act No. 237, SECTION 82, eff June 11, 2010.

Code Commissioner's Note

At the direction of the Code Commissioner, in (C), the incorrect item reference in Section 44-23-10 was removed.

Effect of Amendment

The 2010 amendment rewrote subsection (A) and deleted subsection (D) relating to the definition of "local correctional facility".