A 22-year-old woman who had a part in the posting of an AIDS victim’s medical records on the Internet was sentenced to a year in prison this morning.

Rhonda Wong-Fernandez accessed the records while working at Straub Clinic and gave the material to the victim’s sister-in-law, Circuit Judge Randal Lee said in passing sentence.
The defendant’s lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Alan Komogome, asked Lee for a probation sentence and Deputy Prosecutor Christopher Van Marter asked the judge to send Wong-Fernandez to jail for 30 days, followed by probation.
But Lee called the defendant’s conduct “egregious” and said the year of imprisonment should serve as a deterrent and a warning to others “that this kind of conduct will not be tolerated.”
“Young people in this society have to realize that the Internet is not something that can be taken advantage of,” Lee said.
“You can’t use the Internet to do unlawful conduct,” he said.
He also sentenced Wong-Fernandez to five years of probation and ordered her to perform 200 hours of community service.
Komogome protested that Wong-Fernandez is breast-feeding a 5 1/2 month-old baby, asking for a year’s delay in the prison sentence. Wong-Fernandez also has two other children and the family needs time to make arrangements for child care, he said.
But Lee refused the request, saying they should have made those arrangements earlier.
“You have to prepare for the worst,” Lee told the lawyer and his client.
The victim of the crime has since passed away.
Claire Tong, a spokeswoman for Straub, said, “We take patient confidentiality very seriously. Rhonda Wong-Fernandez is a former employee who was dismissed when we confirmed what she had done.”
The medical facility began an investigation of the case after the victim notified officials there that her medical records had been improperly accessed, according to court testimony.
Wong-Fernandez has no other criminal record. She pleaded no contest to a felony charge of unauthorized computer access to confidential records.