After USA TODAY NETWORK investigation, rape-kit reforms flood state legislatures
At least 20 states are pursuing reforms to the inconsistent ways rape kits are handled by law enforcement agencies after a USA TODAY NETWORK investigation last year revealed tens of thousands of rape evidence kits went untested nationwide.
Legislatures have been flooded with a total of about 50 different bills in recent months — most introduced since the beginning of this year as lawmakers returned to statehouses for 2016 sessions — dealing with various aspects of how rape kits are handled by the criminal justice system. The proposals range including new funding for testing rape kits, audits of long-stored evidence and reducing the discretion police departments or officers have in deciding whether to submit rape evidence for testing by standardizing requirements, including setting time limits for submission to crime labs.
Meanwhile, governors, attorneys general and top state law enforcement officials in several states also have taken actions independent of legislatures to reduce procedural obstacles to local police submitting sexual assault evidence for testing.
Testing rape kits yields valuable DNA evidence that has been proven to help identify suspects, bolster prosecutions and in some cases exonerate the wrongly accused. But, a USA TODAY NETWORK investigation published in July identified more than 70,000 untested sexual assault kits in the custody of more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies in communities large and small, pointing to a national accumulation of untested kits that likely reaches well into the hundreds of thousands across the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies.
Ilse Knecht, Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Joyful Heart Foundation, a New York City-based advocacy group, said state lawmakers are reacting to intensifying attention by journalists, advocates and some federal government leaders, as well as mounting evidence that testing all of the evidence kits helps solve crimes.
“It’s just this moment in time where all these factors are coming together and pushing awareness and creating this movement for reform,” she said.
Tens of thousands of rape kits go untested across USA
While some police departments and sheriff’s offices submit every single kit from a reported sexual assault for lab testing, other agencies test as few as 2 in 10 kits due to inconsistent state and local policies and a lack of national guidance, the USA TODAY NETWORK investigation found. Some police agencies had untested rape evidence from hundreds or even thousands of cases in storage.
Florida state Representative Janet Adkins said she began working on the state’s legislation in July last year after realizing the state had no statutes dictating how the evidence was handled. The bill, which was unanimously passed by the state House last week and awaits Gov. Rick Scott’s signature, requires that rape kits be submitted within 30 days for lab testing.
“I’ve been in the Florida legislature for eight years, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this many co-sponsors on a bill,” Adkins said.
Even if a criminal case is solved without testing a kit, entering DNA from the evidence into state and national databases help link the perpetrator can help link the suspect to other unsolved crimes.
Since the start of a 2011 initiative by Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine to begin processing previously untested rape kits, tests of 10,133 kits have resulted in 3,664 matches in the national DNA database and the indictment of 448 defendants in the Cleveland area alone.
In Detroit, testing of a backlog of close to 10,000 rape kits identified nearly 2,500 suspects including more than 400 suspected serial rapists.
“Communities are seeing that progress, law enforcement is seeing that progress, and the light bulb is going off that this is the right thing to do,” said Knecht of the Joyful Heart Foundation. “And lawmakers are seeing that as well.”
In many states, lawmakers have realized with alarm that there are no guidelines in the state for how rape kits are processed.
Untested Rape Kits - USATODAY.com
Idaho state Representative Melissa Wintrow, speaking on the floor of the legislature last month, explained to colleagues that her bill requiring the submission of rape kits for lab testing within 30 days would fill a void in state law.
“Currently there are no statutes that address sexual assault kit evidence collection in our state,” she said. “This bill would provide a consistent process to better support victims, law enforcement, health care facilities and the forensics laboratory.”
Legislation in Georgia, Oregon, Virginia and South Dakota setting timelines or procedures for the submission of rape kits for testing has moved forward this year in one or both chambers of the legislature.
In other states, legislation dealing with rape kits addresses issues ranging from funding, to extending the statute of limitations, to finding out how many untested rape kits are in the state.
An Iowa bill, supported by both the state’s attorney general and public defender, would require law enforcement agencies to conduct an inventory of the number of untested sexual assault kits in their custody — considered an initial step in accounting for the problem, and potentially pursing grant funding.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in other states — including West Virginia, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina — have been slower to address untested rape kits and are not currently considering major legislative reforms to the handling of sexual assault evidence.
Officials in some states have also taken direct action to address untested sexual assault kits without new state legislation. Statewide inventories of untested sexual assault kits were recently completed at the behest of Kentucky's state auditor and Michigan's attorney general. In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey signed an executive order acknowledging the state’s law enforcement agencies had inconsistent policies for tracking and processing rape kits, and establishing a task force to develop consistent testing and tracking protocols.
"Government’s greatest responsibility is to protect its people," Ducey said in an address last month. "In this instance, we must do better. It is unacceptable that predators roam free, and women await justice while rape kits gather dust."
The state-level reforms fill a void left by the lack of federal standards on how sexual assault kits should be handled by law enforcement agencies.
While a federal law passed in 2013 mandated that the Justice Department develop and publish national protocols for processing forensic evidence from sexual assault cases by no later than September 2014, those protocols still have not been published.
In an inquiry letter last year citing USA TODAY NETWORK investigation, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, asked the Justice Department to explain the lack of national rape kit protocols.
Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik, in an October 2015 letter replying to Johnson, wrote that a steering committee working on the rape kit testing guidance “anticipates releasing these…protocols in 2016.”
With the overdue national protocols still under development, Attorney General Loretta Lynch in December 2015 released new federal guidance aimed at preventing gender bias in police work, including a recommendation that law enforcement agencies develop guidelines for “ensuring that forensic medical exams, including ‘rape kits,’ are completed and analyzed in a timely manner.”
The nation's accumulation of untested rape kits has also been the target of increased federal funding. In September last year, nearly $80 million in grants were awarded to state and local law enforcement agencies for rape kit testing and related activities by the Justice Department and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. Congress also approved $45 million in funding for the Justice Department's sexual assault kit initiative in December.
At a hearing before Congress members in late February on the Justice Department’s 2017 budget request, Lynch discussed the department's efforts to help law enforcement agencies process untested rape kits.
“The numbers across the country are literally staggering — 10,000 in some cities, 11,000 in other cities. And these of course represent victims,” Lynch said at the hearing. “They represent individual women who have suffered one of the most heinous crimes.”