Brandi Grissom posts, "Thousands of Texas Rape Kits Never Tested," for today's Texas Tribune.
In police departments across Texas, tens of thousands of rape kits have been sitting on the shelves of property storage rooms for years, the result of strained budgets, overworked crime labs and a law enforcement philosophy that rape kits are primarily useful as evidence if a stranger committed the assault. Victims’ rights advocates and some lawmakers say they will work to pass legislation this year to take all of that evidence out of storage and create a DNA database that would help track rapists and perhaps even identify those who have been wrongly convicted. State Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, is preparing a bill that would require police departments to test all rape kits in their possession and every one they get in the future. “I think we owe it to every person who has been raped,” Davis said.
Officials at big-city police departments say they are working to reduce the backlog of rape kits in their evidence rooms and to test evidence from unsolved cases. But processing each of the tens of thousands of rape kits from as far back as the 1980s — the total number is not known — is, they say, unrealistic. Also, testing the hundreds of kits that each metropolitan police department receives every year would take much more money, equipment and staff than is currently available. (Davis has not established a price tag for her proposed legislation.) Nor is it clear, some police officials say, that DNA evidence in all cases would be useful to prosecutors. “It’s not reasonable, and it’s not an effective use of their investigators’ time or their labs’ time,” said Sgt. Elizabeth Donegan, who runs the sex crimes unit at the Austin Police Department.
In Houston, about 16,000 rape kits, some dating back decades, sit in the police department’s property room, said Irma Rios, assistant director of the department's crime lab. Rios could not say how many had been tested. “There’s a portion that are never tested,” she said. “We don’t have the resources right now to test every single” rape kit that comes into the department.
And:
Rape victims would not endure the humiliation of a post-assault exam if they understood that the evidence might not be tested and that they did not have the right to decide whether the kit was tested, said Victoria Camp, deputy director of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault. “All of the kits need to be tested,” Camp said. “That costs money, and I know it takes time, but I think we should prioritize the kits and start working on that backlog until they are all tested.”
Testing the DNA from rape kits in all assaults, Camp said, would give the police a better chance of finding serial rapists.The same perpetrator could attack both someone he knew and a stranger. But if the police test only the DNA in the stranger case, they may not be able to determine that the same person has assaulted someone else.
The testing could do more than help sexual assault victims, advocates say. It could exonerate wrongly convicted prisoners. Earlier this month, Cornelius Dupree Jr. became the latest Texan to be released from prison after DNA evidence proved he did not commit the rape he was convicted of in 1980.
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