NEW YORK — An HIV-positive ex-convict who said he tried to kill four Manhattan police officers and a psychiatric hospital employee by biting them or spitting blood in their faces was sentenced Wednesday to 13 years in prison.
Robert Murray, 33, was not in court when state Supreme Court Justice William A. Wetzel imposed the sentence. He had sent a message saying the Hannibal Lecter-type restraints the judge ordered were “humiliating” and he refused to wear them to court.
While court officers stood by wearing green rubber gloves, the judge said that he ordered the restraints for Murray because of his prior behavior. Murray, a former mental patient, had threatened in past court appearances to attack people around him.
Murray pleaded guilty on Aug. 8, just before his trial was to start, to five counts of attempted murder in exchange for the 13-year sentence. He could have been sentenced to up to 25 years in prison on each count if he had been convicted after trial. Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bassiur told the court on Wednesday that Murray, “knowing he had HIV or AIDS, deliberately attempted to infect others in the hope that it would eventually kill them.”
“The defendant did this through deplorable and disgusting criminal actions that included not only spitting bloody sputum into his victims’ eyes and mouths but also by biting into one victim’s flesh,” Bassiur said. “His intentions were not a secret. He would constantly tell his victims that he was trying to give them AIDS so they would die.”
Murray, arrested on April 8, 2003, on a charge of promoting prostitution, was being processed at the 25th Precinct station house when he spat saliva and blood into the faces of several police officers.
One of the 25th Precinct officers, Sgt. Margaret Timlim, said outside court that she was not infected by Murray’s spew but had undergone a debilitating year of therapy with anti-AIDS drugs to make sure. She said she was satisfied with Murray’s sentence.
“He’s already got AIDS, and 13 years is a long time,” she said. “At least he’s out of harm’s way for that long.”
Murray also had been accused of assaulting a correction officer by trying to bite him on March 4, 2004, and chewing a chunk of flesh out of the arm of a mental health worker at the maximum-security Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on June 7, 2004, prosecutors said.