The Legislature is backing away from a proposal to press law enforcement to work through its backlog of hundreds of untested rape kits — which could help close some criminal cold cases — and instead seems poised to kick the can down the road.
It’s not clear that the game plan in the current versions of the bills — to conduct an inventory of the kits and write a report — will produce anything other than another year or more of delay.
House and Senate panels working on House Bill 1907 and Senate Bill 2309 deleted mandates for county police departments to test the evidence kits.
The committees also removed requirements that police departments submit new rape kits for testing to a lab within 10 days of receipt to complete the tests within six months — necessary to keep the backlogs of kits in check.
Instead, the revised bills propose that agencies charged with this responsibility inventory the kits and report on the number of untested kits to the Department of the Attorney General.
In turn, the AG would report to the Legislature about how agencies decided which tests to analyze, what’s been done to cut the backlog and what plans are in place for further improvements.
However, even these stripped-down goals may prove too burdensome for cash-strapped counties; the Legislature should provide at least a modest appropriation to help the counties properly manage their rape-kit inventories.
In Hawaii and all the other states, laws require the collection of DNA samples — in this case, using rape kits — from individuals convicted of sexual assault and some other crimes. Medical staff collect the DNA from the bodies and clothes of victims after an alleged rape. The kits containing the DNA evidence go to law enforcement agencies.
The information from analyzed kits is fed into the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s national DNA database, called CODIS.
DNA from rape suspects are collected and compared with the entries in the database. Law enforcement can look for a match that will connect the suspect with any unresolved cases — revealing, in some instances, a possible serial rapist.
The backlog problem came to light in recent months with reports of 1,500 untested kits, some collected more than a decade ago, languishing in a refrigerated facility at the Honolulu Police Department. A potentially serious consequence of a large backlog is that a perpetrator linked to the DNA in the untested kits may commit more crimes without being caught — something the state and county law enforcement should be working to avoid.
The counties also should be far more aggressive in seeking outside sources of funds. The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) began a decade ago to increase funding to reduce offender data backlogs.
Between 2005 and 2010, according to the institute’s website,
$58 million was made available “to reduce the backlog of samples of convicted offenders and arrestees.”
Federal funds have enabled the analysis of more than 1.8 million convicted offender and arrestee samples in the past 10 years.
This has helped law enforcement use DNA samples to match and identify suspects, with more than 18,000 hits on the CODIS database, according to the NIJ.
The current version of the bills was drafted by the Honolulu prosecutor’s office. In its written testimony, officials indicated support for reducing the backlog.
However, the office also cited a concern that testing all kits would reopen old wounds for some victims and “does not take into consideration the victims who stand to be intimately impacted by these mandates.”
This is certainly a factor to consider; but the overriding concern should be to prevent more people from being victimized. Only by addressing the backlog issue head-on can that be accomplished.
