USA TODAY International Edition
INACTION ON RAPE KITS ‘ UNCONSCIONABLE’
New laws, federal money don’t seem to make dent in massive evidence backlog
Over the past decade alone, Congress has approved enough money to reduce the nation’s backlog of DNA evidence testing to have tested more than 1 million sexual assault evidence kits.
So far, though, despite evidence that the number of untested rape kits could number into the hundreds of thousands nationwide, most of the money is not reaching local and state police authorities where the abandoned rape evidence could be tested and the problem reduced.
A USA TODAY Media Network investigation found that the U. S. Department of Justice has failed to comply with laws enacted by Congress aimed at paying for testing and reducing the backlog of untested rape kits — despite the power of the kits to provide evidence that can identify assailants, exonerate wrongly accused suspects, and confirm the accounts of survivors.
The examination across all 50 states identified at least 70,000 sexual assault kits at more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies — likely only a small fraction of the accumulation that likely reaches hundreds of thousands
“There’s ample money there. But to date, only about 51% ... has gone towards casework and testing.”
Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network
across the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies.
“If we’re able to test these rape kits, more crimes would be solved, more rapes would be avoided,” Vice President Biden said in March, announcing an extra $ 41 million in grant funding as part of a White House initiative.
Notwithstanding funding and attention of policymakers, the effort to quantify and reduce the number of untested sexual assault kits is not close to complete.
Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, said the issue is not the amount of the funding, but the fact that it isn’t reaching its intended target.
“There’s ample money there,” he said. “But to date, only about 51% of that has gone towards casework and making sure labs have the capacity to do the testing.”
The $ 1.2 billion allocated over a decade toward addressing the nation’s DNA testing needs, including taking inventory and testing sexual assault kits, has often been spent on more general DNA testing improvements.
Some funding has gone toward administrative expenses or been siphoned off for apparently unrelated purposes. A 2012 congressional report found some of the money went to polling firms and buying cellphone equipment and “entities of uncertain mission that employ heads of influential forensics policy advisory groups.”
In an effort to focus federal funding and address inconsistent kit- testing policies, Congress in 2013 enacted the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Reporting Act.
The SAFER Act set benchmarks requiring that three- quarters of the funding for sexual assault kits be used for testing or taking inventory of untested evidence. It also established a grant program to fund police inventories of untested kits. However, the Department of Justice has so far not awarded any grants under the law. At about $ 1,000 per kit, testing rape kits is a hindrance for some agencies. The USA TODAY count of untested kits indicates many smaller departments — those least able to afford to pay — have piled up hundreds of untested kits.
The SAFER Act also required the Department of Justice, by Sept. 7, 2014, to develop and publish “a description of protocols and practices … for the accurate, timely, and effective collection and processing of DNA evidence, including protocols and practices specific to sexual assault cases.”
Yet the nation’s top law enforcement agency failed to comply. Protocols for processing DNA still have not been developed.
Sen. John Cornyn, R- Texas, who authored the SAFER Act, called it “completely unconscionable.”
“Victims of sexual assault deserve better than to have critical evidence that could help find their attacker left to sit on a shelf because the Obama Administra- tion refuses to fully implement this law,” he said in a statement to USA TODAY.
In a December 2014 letter to Cornyn, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik said developing the protocols “has presented many challenges,” but indicated no plans to comply in the future.
“After thoughtful deliberation, the steering committee came to consensus on the need to identify best practices, protocols, statute and policies currently in existence throughout the country,” Kadzik wrote last year. The committee has not met in more than 16 months.
Gerald LaPorte, director of the Office of Investigative and Forensic Sciences for the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice, said a 42- person “steering committee of stakeholders” was formed to develop the protocols and met once in March 2014.
Decisions about testing should not be based on funding, said Mai Fernandez, executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime. “It can’t just be at the discretion of whoever is at the police station that day,” she said.