Twins center fielder Byron Buxton left the clubhouse early today to get a magnetic resonance imaging exam.

On pace for a possible career high in games this season — he played 140 in 2017 — Buxton left Saturday night’s 9-3 loss to Washington after the sixth inning at Target Field with left-side soreness. An all-star for the second time, he hit two doubles in the American League’s 7-6 loss, decided with a home run contest, this month.

Buxton, 31, was on the seven-day concussion IL in mid-May after colliding with teammate Carlos Correa while chasing a fly ball. He has otherwise been healthy and leads the team in WAR (3.9), home runs (23), RBIs (59), doubles (14) and triples (4).

The Twins are expecting an update sometime during Sunday afternoon’s rubber game against the Nationals.

Hometown clinician

Nationals outfielder Alex Call, who went 2 for 4 in Washington’s victory on Saturday, was born in Burnsville but grew up in River Falls, Wis., where he attended high school.

Asked which he considers his home, Call said, “I take the best of Minnesota and the best of Wisconsin. It’s a really special area. I’m a Midwest kid. The River Falls community, that’s where I’m from. It shaped me into who I am.”

Saturday marked his second game at Target Field.

“It’s fun to come back and play,” said Call, who entered Saturday’s game as a pinch-hitter after center fielder Jacob Young hurt a finger trying to bunt. It was the second inning, and he inherited an 0-2 count, but singled to drive in the game’s first run. In the seventh, he hit a solo home run to give his team a 6-2 lead.

“It’s still really special because it’s every other year,” he said. “A lot of fun this weekend.”

Before Friday night’s game, Call — with the help of his high school coach Ryan Bishop and the MLB Players Trust — held a baseball clinic in River Falls.

“It all lined up perfectly with the off day the day before,” Call said. “I was able to show up and had an amazing time with the kids, (and) got in some good instruction. It was just really special; I was in all those kids’ shoes, going to camps like that. Just really important to give back and have fun and encourage the next generation.”

Briefly

Catcher Ryan Jeffers and his wife, Lexi, welcomed a healthy baby boy on Saturday.

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Edward Lotterman

One beauty of economics — the study of how human beings use scarce resources — is that its basic principles apply to life even if money is not involved. Opportunity cost, externalities, sunk costs, marginal changes, imperfect information all pop up in non-monetary human relations.

These may be within the household: Whom do we marry and why or what careers we follow.

But economic principles also show up in apparently non-monetary actions of our nation: Whom do we wage war against and why? Which of us is put in harm’s way and how? Which of us escapes combat? When U.S. forces are firing live ordnance against our enemies on a monthly, if not weekly, basis, these are not abstract questions. They cut deeply to who we are as a nation and a people.

This obviously is a personal essay. It springs from two chance reminders from my past as I was reading about current issues.

One reminder is a snapshot of a USAF F-105 Thunder Chief nosing over to drop a second napalm bomb on a hillside in Vietnam in 1970. The second one is the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s daily casualty report for July 22, 1970, detailing all the brigade’s killed-in-action and wounded in the 24 hours ending at 4:00 p.m. that day. Fifty-five years later, I still re-read it every July.

It lists two men killed and 12 wounded. Five years into the 173rd’s seven-year stay in Vietnam, these were high numbers. Except for the first KIA listed, the other 13 casualties all were from one unit: Company A, 4th Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment was one of 16 rifle companies in the four infantry battalions of the oversized brigade.

One first lieutenant had been wounded the day before. The “WIA-MFW B/Legs” notation told us that he had been wounded in action with multiple fragment wounds in both legs. His comrade, 1Lt. Kenneth Slaughter, had been killed only hours before the report was issued. It also listed 12 of his men wounded at the same time.

Two only had sprained backs, thrown through the air by the blast of the 15 pounds of TNT as the bursting charge in a 94-pound dud 155mm U.S. howitzer shell. Some enterprising Viet Cong had defused this and turned into a booby trap detonatable by wires from brush a few hundred feet away. Ten men had suffered FW or MFW (fragment wound / multiple fragment wounds) to legs, arms, hips and elsewhere. Three who had been hit in the head or face were all marked (NED) for “no eye damage.”

However, their lieutenant’s death was macabre, listed as “KIA-T/A. B/Legs, R/Arm.” “TA” meant “traumatic amputation” — blown off — rather than “S/A” for “surgical amputation.” Putting their leader’s scattered body parts in a “Pouch – Human Remains” had to have been terrible for the unhurt men in his platoon, but almost certainly something they had done before.

While rifle companies had a nominal strength of some 220 men, it was rare for any to have much over 135-150. Including the lieutenant from the day before, Company A had suffered literal “decimation.” One-tenth of them had been struck down even if not killed. Lt. Slaughter was a high school graduate rushed through Officer Candidate School who died two days after his 21st birthday. As the next-senior officer, he was slated to take over as company commander in September had he lived. I knew him only as a name tape on the uniform of someone I had sold a money order to or perhaps stood with in the developed photo pickup line at the tiny PX. Other info about him I learned only after his death.

A somber tale. But 55 years later, how does it really matter? And what economics can possibly lie in any of this?

It matters a lot. And economic principles aid our understanding.

In 1970, questions of justice permeated who we sent to Vietnam and what tasks they were given. Over 15 years of war, 64 graduates of Edison High School in a poor neighborhood of Philadelphia would be KIA. So would nearly 50 from Detroit’s Central H.S. Only 22 Harvard University grads perished. Over 300 West Point grads would die, but the number of lieutenants with 12 years of school and six months of OCS (such as Lt. Slaughter) killed was far higher.

In a rifle company in the 82nd Airborne two years earlier, none of us enlisted men in my platoon of 50-plus had a college degree. But at Landing Zone English in Vietnam, the 25-man military intelligence detachment just down slope from us had only two or three without bachelor’s degrees.

Many in the army had sneered that the “AA” in the 82nd’s shoulder patch meant “Almost African” rather than “All-American” because we had the highest proportion of Blacks of any division. Getting the extra $55 in jump pay on top of PFC base pay of $137.70 helped keep families alive in South Chicago or on the Mississippi Delta. The bunkmate below me kept $10 a month for haircuts, shoe polish and sodas. The rest went to his mama on their sharecropper 40 acres.

Yes, details now differ. There is no draft and no exemptions therefrom that favored middle- and upper-class white boys. Pay is higher now and attracts nearly enough enlistees. War is higher tech. Shot-down unmanned remote control drones supplant human military casualties — but not so for civilians. Seal Team and Delta Force members are true volunteers.

Nevertheless, questions of justice over who our society chooses to send to war remain sharp. Moreover, issues of how efficiently or inefficiently we expend resources matter to society. And the opportunity cost of what we do not fund because we spend $950 billion in taxes on “defense” involves justice as well as efficiency.

The broadest issue affecting society as a whole is why and when we unleash our military power against other nations or groups within them. In what ways and for which reasons do we do this? Do we consider the negative spillovers, often in the future, of attacks we find convenient now?

Thus my photo of the F-105 dropping napalm on a jungled hillside as far from my camera in 1970 as our condo near the Bell Museum on Larpenteur is from the deli at Como and Snelling.

I first must emphasize that I was never in combat in Vietnam. By then I was a postal clerk and was never in significant danger, never out in the rice paddies or mountain jungle in a rifle company. I had been trained as an 11B, light weapons infantry, and had served briefly as such in the 82nd. But then karma detoured me through the U.S. military mission to Brazil before Vietnam. By then I was more valuable as a postal clerk than a rifleman. I saw very unpleasant things and had passing scares, but my life was never really in peril.

Yet violent war was all around us. There was not a day or night that you did not hear artillery fire. You knew what was outgoing somewhere and incoming somewhere else. You heard small arms fire, especially at night. When a medevac chopper or gunship had to go up at night, exhaust from its turbine spooling up fluttered the screen above my ammunition crate bunk. We clerks spent long hours on perimeter guard because infantry units were dead exhausted when back in from the bush. And inevitably, perhaps driving down to the Phu Cat AFB 60 miles south, you might come across an enemy grotesquely dismembered or incinerated in a firefight before dawn.

Excessive empathy is a curse. Napalm flame flashing above trees made me think of the poor guys on the receiving end. So did ground vibrations from three B-52s dropping 324 500-pound bombs in the central highlands just to our west. Sound travels 13 times as fast through bedrock as air, and so the audible rumble came later and then sight of the bombers turning back to Guam.

But I learned that distance from violence makes it less disturbing. I still have occasional dreams of the pass after pass that a helicopter gunship made to save a patrol in a desperate situation a third of a mile off our perimeter. Yet my unease must be a tiny fraction of that of men from either side on the ground that night.

How is this relevant to current national policies? Because more than any other industrialized nation in the world, we are quick to use bombs and missiles against people or nations that have angered or even just frustrated us. No enemy bomb has ever fallen on the lower 48 states.

Only a fraction of 1% of voters have ever been within even a mile of a bomb or howitzer shell exploding. EMTs and ER workers see grotesque mutilations of human bodies, but the rest of us don’t. We never worry that some 20-year-old in a trailer at Minot AFB joy-sticking a Predator drone will mistake our backyard bash for an insurgent conclave and blow us and our toddlers away with the 18 pounds of plastic explosive in a Hellfire missile.

The upshot of the very socially and economically skewed way we staff our military and the complete isolation of our citizenry from the horrific realities of modern weapons means that we are quick to call for and use military force against others. The negative primary, secondary and tertiary results of that radiate out in ripples that eventually rebound to our collective harm.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

School starts up again soon, and parents will trade fighting over video games and cell phones to fighting over schoolwork, video games and cell phones. It’s not an ideal world we have created for ourselves, but it does not have to be this way.

Finding a way to cut down on screen time is arguably a health intervention for young brains. The U.S. surgeon general last year called for social media platforms to include health warnings for children, and smartphone use has been found to intrude on sleep.

With three teenage boys in my home — well, one is 11, but he is furiously trying to keep up with his brothers — there are lessons I’ve learned in keeping their screen time down to a minimum. These tactics are not always successful, and it takes constant vigilance. But when I see one kid doing origami while waiting, or the other working on his art projects, and the other competing in not one, not two, but three different sports, it feels worth it. Exhausting, but also worth it.

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Get to know your router

It’s not uncommon for people to get a router, set up the Wi-Fi and never look at it again. But parents should see the router as an untapped resource when it comes to limiting screen time. Newer routers have built-in features that allow the identification and labeling of individual devices that are logged in — even the ones that come from your internet provider. For example, Spectrum, which I have used in the past, offers the ability to examine each device, match it in the router settings to the device’s IP address, and turn the wireless connection off and on at will.

If your internet provider doesn’t offer this feature, you can go the extra step and set up a wireless mesh network. These devices expand your Wi-Fi’s reach with a second network using your router as the source, creating a chokepoint for every connected device. The $100 Deco mesh network I use has a parental feature on its accompanying app that allows me to group multiple devices under each child’s name and turn off internet access to multiple devices at once.

And while you are in your router’s settings, take a minute to change the password. It’s a step a lot of people don’t take and is a small thing to additionally secure your home, especially if you have multiple smart devices tapping into your Wi-Fi.

Stick to old phones

There is a movement toward “dumb phones” or feature phones, but some of these can cost hundreds of dollars — and I would blow a gasket if I lost a phone that cost that much. I cannot imagine what my reaction would be if one of my kids lost one.

So, when it came time to give the oldest kid, now 15, a smartphone, he got my hand-me-down, first-generation iPhone SE, also known as an OGSE. It’s tiny in his big hands and it can’t download the latest apps. But it can make phone calls, text and access the internet via its browser.

That wasn’t his first phone, though — his first phone was a 4G Nokia 225, a bar phone with the mobile game “Snake” on it, and that’s pretty much it. We serviced it with Mint Mobile and later with RedPocket’s $10 1 GB per month plan. This route took more effort and possibly was less cost efficient than simply adding him to our family cell phone plan. Sometimes the texts took forever to transmit, and the calls didn’t go through. But the goal was to teach him to use the phone only as a tool to call and text us, and if it was absolutely necessary, bring up the internet on his very slow browser. Even though it was only $50, we still haven’t let him live it down that he lost it after just one year of use.

The Nokia 3410 mobile phone of painter August Lamm, a former social media influencer with over 100K followers, on a table at her art studio in east London, on February 18, 2025. Once boasting a social media following of more than 170,000, writer and artist August Lamm has ditched her smartphone and is urging others to downgrade to “dumb” phones to counter social media addiction. “When your whole social life is online, you can feel popular,” she says, adding that she “would never go back” to using a smart device. (Photo by BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images)

And yes, his younger brother, who received an identical pre-owned Nokia, also lost his phone about a year later. He is entering freshman year of high school, so all of our children’s phones will soon make their way into different hands — the middle kid will get the OGSE and the oldest will get my husband’s older, but later model phone, an iPhone XR, plus a slightly bigger phone plan to accommodate the increased demands of his academic and athletic pursuits. He’s a conscientious student, a voracious reader, and is responsible in most things, so expanding the data plan is an appropriate step for him.

As for the youngest, I have already identified a new $50 feature phone to purchase for him. Such phones can be found by scouring eBay or websites like dumbwireless.com, which also offers service plans. If you’re interested in learning more about so-called dumb phones, Jose Brioness has a robust YouTube channel discussing all things dumb phone, and Reddit’s r/dumbphones community has helpful tips for beginners.

Make heavy use of screen usage apps

My husband and I have iPhones, so we use Apple’s Screen Time. Screen Time allows you to set up a family across Apple devices, with parents being able to set up restrictions for child users. You can set it up so any new app download requires permission from an adult and set a time limit for app use outside of restricted times. For my purposes, I do wish Screen Time allowed parents to set specific times an individual app can be used, not just bedtime limits, but this deficiency is why I have my mesh network to fall back on.

Microsoft Family Safety can be used across Android devices, Windows PCs and Xbox consoles in the same way Screen Time can be used across Apple products. Google Family Link is available on both Apple and Android devices, as long as everyone has a Google account.

All three are free of cost on their respective platforms and allow parents to control which apps children can download and set time limits. However with Apple’s Screen Time, categories of apps can be fully blocked for periods of time. A child can get around web browsing restrictions by using a non-Edge browser or a non-Chrome browser restricted by Microsoft Family or Google Family Link, respectively.

And if all else fails, there’s always the option to simply take the device away.

Remember this is an ongoing battle

Unfortunately, limiting screen time is not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise. Kids are ingenious when it comes to circumventing restrictions, and I have much less control over their school-distributed Chromebooks, which are a necessary evil now. Trying to safeguard your children’s online safety and mental health will also require regular monitoring of their behavior and habits. Are they hiding out in their bedrooms, being quiet? Just like when they were toddlers, it probably means they are sneaking, but now with a school laptop or other device.

However, parents alarmed at the growing drumbeat of negative news concerning children’s smartphone and internet usage have options. It takes more work in many respects, but the payoff is healthy, safe children and their freedom to enjoy a childhood without a device in hand.

By Halle Parker, Verite News, KFF Health News

SHREVEPORT, La. — When Robert Smith met his future girlfriend in 2010, he wanted to take things slowly. For Smith, no relationship had been easy in the years since he was diagnosed with the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. People often became afraid when they learned his status, even running away when he coughed.

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The couple waited months to have sex until Smith felt he could share his medical status. To prepare her, Smith said, he took his girlfriend to his job in HIV prevention at the Philadelphia Center, a northwestern Louisiana nonprofit that offers resources to people with HIV, which also provided him housing at the time.

Finally, he revealed the news: Smith was diagnosed with HIV in 1994 and started taking daily antiviral pills in 2006. The virus could no longer be detected in his blood, and he couldn’t transmit it to a sexual partner.

Smith said his girlfriend seemed comfortable knowing his status. When it came to sex, there was no hesitation, he said. But a couple of years later, when Smith wanted to break up, he said, her tone shifted.

“She was like, ‘If you try to leave me, I’m gonna put you in jail,’” recalled Smith, now 68. “At the time, I really didn’t know the sincerity of it.”

After they broke up, she reported him to the police, accusing him of violating a little-known law in Louisiana — a felony called “intentional exposure to HIV.” He disputed the allegations, but in 2013 accepted a plea deal to spend six months in prison on the charge. He had a few months left on parole from a past conviction on different charges, and Smith thought this option would let him move past the relationship faster. He didn’t realize the conviction would also land him on the state’s sex offender registry.

For nearly two decades, Smith had dealt with the stigma associated with having HIV; the registry added another layer of exclusion, severely restricting where he could live and work to avoid minors. Not many people want to hire a sex offender, he said. Smith has been told by the local sheriff’s office he’s not allowed to do simple things, like go to a public park or a high school football game, since the conviction.

“I’ve been undetectable for 15 years, but that law still punishes us,” Smith said.

Louisiana is one of 30 states with criminal penalties related to exposing or transmitting HIV. Most of the laws were passed in the 1980s during the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. Since then, several states have amended their laws to make them less punitive or repealed them outright, including Maryland and North Dakota this year.

But Louisiana’s law remains among the harshest. The state is one of five that may require people such as Smith to register as a sex offender if convicted, a label that can follow them for over a decade. And state lawmakers considered a bill to expand the law to apply to other sexually transmitted infections, then failed to pass it before the session ended.

Meanwhile, people with HIV also face the threat that federal funding cuts will affect their access to treatment, along with prevention efforts, supportive services, and outreach. Such strategies have proved to slow the HIV/AIDS epidemic, unlike the laws’ punitive approach.

The tax and domestic policy law previously known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” will likely affect HIV-positive people enrolled in Medicaid by reducing federal support for Medicaid and restricting eligibility. About 40% of adults under 65 with HIV rely on Medicaid.

The Trump administration proposed in its fiscal 2026 budget request to eliminate HIV prevention programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and to cancel a grant that helps fund housing for people with HIV. The Ryan White HIV/AIDS program, the largest federal fund dedicated to supporting HIV-positive people, also faces cuts. The program serves more than half of the people in the U.S. diagnosed with HIV, including in Louisiana, according to KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

Public health officials maintain that state laws criminalizing HIV exposure hurt efforts to end the HIV epidemic. Epidemiologists and other experts on AIDS agree that the enforcement of such laws is often shaped by fear, not science. For example, in many states that criminalize HIV exposure, people living with HIV can face heightened criminal penalties for actions that can’t transmit the virus, such as spitting on someone. The laws further stigmatize and deter people from getting tested and treatment, undermining response to the epidemic, experts say.

At least 4,400 people in 14 states have been arrested under these laws, though data is limited and the actual number is likely higher, and the arrests aren’t decreasing, according to analyses by UCLA’s Williams Institute.

“ Some people think it’s an issue that’s gone away, and that simply isn’t the case,” said Nathan Cisneros, a researcher at the Williams Institute.

In Louisiana, a 2022 Williams Institute analysis found at least 147 allegations reported to law enforcement under the state’s HIV law from 2011 to mid-2022. Black people made up nearly three-quarters of the people convicted and placed on the sex offender registry. Most were Black men, like Smith. At the time of the analysis, Black people made up about two-thirds of HIV diagnoses in the state.

“ We see over and over that Black people are disproportionately affected by the HIV epidemic and disproportionately affected by policing and incarceration in the United States,” Cisneros said.

Nationally, other marginalized groups such as women, sex workers, the queer community, or people who overlap across more than one group are also disproportionately arrested and prosecuted under similar criminalization laws, Cisneros said.

Ensnared in the System

Louisiana’s law hinges on the requirement that if a person knows they have HIV, they must disclose their HIV status and receive consent before exposing someone to the virus.

Louisiana District Attorneys Association Executive Director Zach Daniels said these cases don’t come up often and can be difficult to prosecute. Daniels said the intimate nature of the cases can lead to little evidence in support of either side, especially if the accuser doesn’t contract HIV.

When it comes to talking about one’s sex life, Daniels said, “there are often no other witnesses, besides the two participants.”

Louisiana’s law is written so that “intentional exposure” can occur through “any means or contact.” That includes sex and needle-sharing, practices known to transmit the virus. But the language of the law is so broad that actions known not to transmit the virus — like biting or scratching — could be included, said Dietz, the statewide coordinator for the Louisiana Coalition on Criminalization and Health, an advocacy network founded by people living with HIV that has opposed the law.

The broad nature of the law creates opportunities for abuse, as the threat of being reported under the law can be used as a coercive tool in relationships, said Dietz, who goes by one name and uses they/them pronouns. Such threats, Dietz said, have kept people in abusive relationships and loomed over child custody battles. Dietz said they’ ve supported people accused of exposing their children to HIV in ways that are not medically possible.

“ ‘Any means or contact’ could be just merely being around your kids,” they said.

The prosecutors’ organization still supports the law as a recourse for emergency responders who, in rare instances, come into contact with blood or syringes containing the virus. In one recent high-profile case in New Orleans, the law was used against a local DJ accused of knowingly transmitting HIV to several women without informing them of his status or using a condom.

The person accused of violating the law, not the accuser, must prove their case — that they disclosed their HIV status beforehand. Without a signed affidavit or tape recording, courts can end up basing their decisions on conflicting testimonies with little supporting evidence.

That’s what Smith alleged happened to him.

After his relationship ended, he said, he remembered being called into a meeting with his parole officer where a detective waited for him, asking about his former relationship and whether his girlfriend had known about his HIV status.

Smith said yes. But that’s not what she had told police.

Verite News could not find a working phone number for Smith’s former girlfriend but corroborated the story with the incident’s police report. His attorney at the time, a public defender named Carlos Prudhomme, said he didn’t remember much about the case, and court documents are sealed because it was a sex offense.

In court, it was her word against his. So when he was offered six months in prison instead of the 10-year maximum, he switched his plea from not guilty to guilty. But he said he didn’t know his new conviction would require him to register as a sex offender once he got out — worsening the stigma.

“When people see ‘sex offender,’ the first thing that comes to their mind is rape, child molester, predator,” Smith said. “This law puts me in a category that I don’t care to be in.”

He has tried to make the most of it, despite the expense of paying fees each year to reregister. After being rejected from jobs, he started a catering business and built a loyal clientele. But he said he’s still stuck living in a poorly maintained apartment complex primarily inhabited by sex offenders.

“I understand their strategy for creating this law to prevent the spread, but it’s not helping. It’s hurting; it’s hindering. It’s destroying people’s lives instead of helping people’s lives, especially the HIV community,” he said. “They don’t care about us.”

The Case for Reform

Since 2014, there has been a nationwide effort to update or repeal state laws that criminalize HIV nondisclosure, exposure, or transmission. A dozen states have changed their laws to align more closely with modern science, and four have gotten rid of them completely in hopes of reducing stigma and improving public health outcomes, according to the Center for HIV Law and Policy.

Sean McCormick, an attorney with the center, said these changes are influenced partly by a growing body of evidence showing the laws’ negative consequences.

McCormick said the laws offer a “clear disincentive” for people to get tested for HIV. If they don’t know their status, there’s no criminal liability for transmission or exposure.

A 2024 survey by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and DLH Corp. researchers found that after California updated its HIV criminalization law in 2018, respondents were more likely to get tested. Meanwhile, survey respondents in Nevada, which still had a more punitive law on the books, were less likely to get tested.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, McCormick said. His center works with HIV-positive people across the country to determine what legislative changes would work best in their states.

Texas was the first to repeal its HIV law in 1994.

“As a person living with HIV in Texas, I’m deeply appreciative that we don’t have an HIV-specific statute that puts a target on my back,” said Michael Elizabeth, the public health policy director for the Equality Federation.

But Elizabeth points out that Texans living with HIV still face steeper penalties under general felony laws for charges such as aggravated assault or aggravated sexual assault after state courts in Texas equated the bodily fluids of a person with HIV with a “deadly weapon.”

Louisiana activists have pushed lawmakers in the state to amend the law in three ways: removing the sex offender registration requirement, requiring transmission to have occurred, and requiring clear intent to transmit the virus.

“Our strategy, as opposed to repeal, is to create a law that actually addresses the kind of boogeyman that they ostensibly created the law for: the person who successfully, maliciously, intentionally transmits HIV,” said Dietz with the Louisiana Coalition on Criminalization and Health.

In 2018, a bill to narrow the statute was amended in ways that expanded the law. For example, the updated law no longer had any definition of which actions “expose” someone to HIV.

In 2023, state lawmakers created a task force that recommended updating Louisiana’s law to align with the latest public health guidelines, limit the potential for unintended consequences, and give previously convicted people a way to clear their record.

Lawmakers in the state House pushed forward a bill this year to criminalize other sexually transmitted infections, including hepatitis B and the herpes simplex virus. That bill died in the Senate, but it spurred the creation of another legislative task force with a nearly identical mission to that of the first.

“ This state has no idea how closely we just dodged a bullet,” Dietz said.

In the meantime, the Louisiana coalition is helping Smith petition the state to take his name off the sex offender registry. Louisiana law allows people to petition to have their names removed from the registry after 10 years without any new sex crime convictions. Smith expects his case to be approved by the end of the year.

Despite the difficulty of the past 12 years, he said, he’s grateful for the chance to be free from the registry’s restrictions.

“It’s like a breath of fresh air,” Smith said. “I can do stuff that I wanted to do that I couldn’t. Like, go to a football game. Simple stuff like that, I’m going to be ready to do.”

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.