A man convicted of infecting his baby son with HIV-tainted blood to avoid child support payments is expected to appeal.
The jury which deliberated for eight hours in St Charles, Missouri, has recommended life imprisonment.
Brian Stewart (32), a laboratory technician, was accused of secretly injecting his 11-month-old son in 1992 with blood infected with HIV, expecting the boy to die. Four years later, the boy started losing weight and running fevers. Shortly afterwards he was diagnosed as having AIDS.
Now aged seven, the boy is suffering from increasing deafness and is being kept alive only by a combination of potent drugs administered around-the-clock. He is fed through a stomach tube, has lost most of his hearing and has been near death several times, his mother testified during the trial.
Stewart's lawyer, Mr Joseph Murphy, said the case was a "tragedy" but not a crime. He said the prosecution case was largely circumstantial and that the boy had contracted the disease some other way, such as from intravenous drug users who lived in the same house.
The prosecutors said health officials had tested everyone who may have had contact with the boy, including drug users and sex offenders, and none tested positive for HIV.
All 23 adults with whom the boy had come into contact tested negative for HIV, and there was no evidence the boy had been sexually abused.
A county sheriff's detective testified during the trial that Stewart, who worked in St Louis-area hospitals as a blood-drawing technician, had a history of drawing more blood from patients than necessary, had sometimes "lost" samples and had extensive contact with AIDS patients in his work.
The prosecution told the court that Stewart went to the hospital room where his son was being treated for asthma and pneumonia on the morning of February 6th, 1992. Stewart, who was then working at another hospital laboratory where he had access to HIV-infected blood, injected his son, the prosecution said.
His mother, who was only identified as Jennifer, told the jury that Stewart had told her to leave the room to go to the cafeteria and when she came back, he was holding the baby who was "crying and screaming". Jennifer said that when her relationship with Stewart broke up six month later she told him he was financially responsible for their son but he denied paternity. He also said: "You won't need to look me up for child support anyway because your son's not going to live that long."
When she asked him what he meant, he told her not to worry about it, saying: "I just know he's not going to live to see the age of five."
A later girlfriend of Stewart told a preliminary hearing that he told her he did not want the child, that he wanted the mother to have an abortion, and that the child would be dead soon anyway.
Judge Ellsworth Cundiff of the St Charles County Circuit Court said he would sentence Stewart on January 8th. The jury of six men and six women recommended a sentence of life, with the possibility of parole, for the first degree assault conviction.
But the judge is not bound by that recommendation and could impose a lighter sentence. If Stewart receives a life sentence he could be paroled in 15 years, prosecutors said.
"My son has been robbed of a normal childhood and given an unjust sentence of his own," his mother said after the verdict. She sobbed as the sentence was read in court while Stewart said nothing.