Virginia

Virginia to Start Testing Thousands of Untested Rape Kits, Some Going Back as Far as 1988

More than 2,000 untested rape kits will undergo testing

Virginia will begin testing more than 2,000 backlogged sexual assault evidence kits, some dating back decades, Attorney General Mark R. Herring announced Thursday.

Testing will take place at a lab facility in Northern Virginia in the next few weeks, Herring's office said. The commonwealth finalized a contract with Bode Cellmark Forensics to conduct the tests.

"Testing these kits is so important to help identify predators and to make connections between unsolved crimes, but it's also really important to show survivors that the commonwealth stands with them and will help them pursue justice as part of their healing process," Herring said in a statement.

Local law enforcement agencies will begin sending their untested kits to the lab in the next few weeks.

Results for each test take about six to eight weeks and will be logged into a national DNA database. Local authorities will be notified of any matches.

The first kits up for testing are from Virginia Beach and Fairfax County. According to last year’s Department of Forensic Science report, Virginia Beach reported 455 untested kits, while Fairfax County had 347. Some of these kits were used in 1988.

The testing is possible due to a $1.4 million grant given last year through the Manhattan district attorney's office as part of a $38 million national initiative to reduce the number of untested kits. Kits tested through this grant will cost less than $675 each to analyze, compared to the estimated national average of $1,000 to $1,500 per kit.

The two-year program will help analyze more than 50,000 untested kits in 20 states, including West Virginia and Pennsylvania. In Detroit alone, more than 11,000 untested kits were discovered in a police storage facility in 2009.

There could be as many as 100,000 to 400,000 backlogged kits nationally, authorities say.

"Tackling the national rape kit backlog means addressing a women's and human rights issue that has been ignored for far too long," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a statement last year after awarding the grants.

In order for medical professionals to gather evidence of sexual assault, the victim must undergo a long and often invasive examination at a hospital or rape crisis center. According to the DFS report, most of the kits came from physical evidence recovery kits obtained from a living victim at a hospital. A small percentage came from kits collected from deceased victims as part of a death investigation.

The biggest reason kits were not submitted for analysis, according to the report, was because they were "not relevant for evidentiary purposes or not necessary for prosecution." For example, when a suspect acknowledges a sexual act has occurred or a suspect has already confessed. Other reasons included attorneys declining prosecution and the victim choosing not to further pursue the case.

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