I had the pleasure to sit down and talk with former LAPD officer & licensed private investigator Clark Baker recently about “HIV,” the laws surrounding it, his work with the Office of Medical & Scientific Justice (OMSJ), the myriad problems with diagnostic tests, and much more. We covered a lot of ground, and I think you’ll find his perspective fascinating.
Directly below are the link to Clark’s substack and his biography (which I shamelessly copied from said substack.)
Enjoy!
Clark Warren Baker served six years with the United States Marine Corps (1975–1981) and twenty years with the Los Angeles Police Department (1980–2000) in patrol, vice, narcotics, and motorcycle enforcement. He was court-qualified as a narcotics expert. After retirement from LAPD he worked nearly two decades as a licensed private investigator (1997–2019).
In 2009 he founded the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice (OMSJ), a non-profit that defended people charged under HIV-exposure statutes. OMSJ assembled pro bono teams of physicians, scientists, and attorneys whose work produced dismissals and acquittals in cases the prosecution had treated as automatic convictions. In United States v. Gutierrez (74 M.J. 61, C.A.A.F. 2015), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces unanimously vacated an HIV-related conviction on grounds OMSJ’s defence work helped develop; it remains the controlling precedent in military HIV prosecutions.
In every defence OMSJ mounted, the underlying medical records — when read by physicians who were not deferring to the diagnostic label — failed to establish that the defendant had ever been infected. The Center for HIV Law and Policy has documented roughly 17,000 HIV-criminalization prosecutions in the United States. If OMSJ’s sample reflects the broader pool, an unknown but substantial number of those defendants — some serving life sentences — were prosecuted for transmitting a disease they did not have.
Two forthcoming books extend this work:
• POSITIVE: When Signal Became Authority — a 147-page investigation of how laboratory classifications replaced evidence-based medicine in courtrooms, hospitals, and family courts.
• Applications of Force: The Institutional Capture of American Policing — a forensic history of how consent decrees, federal oversight, and bureaucratic capture replaced public accountability in patrol, command, and discipline.
He writes at rkoch.substack.com under the heading Koch’s Postulates: institutional claims must meet classical evidentiary standards before they become law, policy, or punishment.
He has been the target of an eighteen-year civil litigation campaign (lawfare) and has been suspended from every major social media platform. He lives in Vero Beach, Florida with his wife Jeanne.
