Hawaii police departments have agreed to test about 1,400 rape kits that have languished in storage facilities for years, prioritizing cases that could involve a serial rapist, sexual assault by a stranger and cases where the victim was a minor or where there are multiple suspects, according to a report submitted to the Legislature on Thursday.
The report is the result of months of work by a group composed of officials from the four county police departments, prosecutors’ offices and victim treatment centers, and led by the state Attorney General’s Office. The report was mandated under a law passed by the Legislature this year.
Attorney General Doug Chin said in a statement that the report was the result of “a great deal of hard work and coordination.”
“I want to thank everyone involved and I also want to thank the Legislature for working with us to make sure this information is also available to the public,” he said.
The sexual assault kits contain DNA evidence, such as hair samples and swabs of bodily fluid, collected by medical staff from the bodies and clothes of victims following a sexual assault.
For victims the process is often painstaking and can take several hours. It’s not clear whether the hundreds of victims who had kits submitted to law enforcement over the years know that the evidence was never tested.
Members of the group have been working on protocols to inform victims if results from their kits produce a development in their case, mindful that contacting victims years after an assault could trigger trauma. A website is also expected to be available this month that includes information about reform efforts, testing policies and resources for victims, including how a survivor of sexual assault can reinstate a complaint if it has been withdrawn.
The move to test hundreds of kits follows years of pressure from lawmakers and victims’ advocates. A growing national movement, supported by the Obama administration, to test sexual assault kits and upload the results into a national DNA database, known as CODIS, has helped identify serial rapists and solve cold cases, and led to hundreds of convictions in other states.
Most kits went untested
Statewide, county police departments tested only 13 percent of the rape kits that were submitted to them, according to the report. Most of the kits were collected within the past 16 years.
The Honolulu and Maui police departments had the lowest testing rates, at 9 percent.
Statewide there are 1,951 untested evidence kits — about three-quarters of which the departments now say they plan to test with the help of more than $2.5 million in federal grants and state funds.
The kits are expected to be sent to private labs on the mainland, where they will be tested in batches because of limited lab capacity. All of the kits are expected to be tested by May 2019.
The departments will not test kits in which a victim chose not to file a complaint or the complaint was later withdrawn, though the police and prosecutors will maintain discretion to test kits if they believe a minor was harmed. The police also won’t test kits in cases in which they don’t believe a crime occurred or where the perpetrator already has a DNA profile in the federal database as a convicted felon.
On the neighbor islands the vast majority of victims who had a sexual assault kit completed chose to report the crime to police, according to the report. Information for Oahu was not included.
Honolulu Crime Lab backlogged
The police departments have also agreed to use the same criteria as they move forward in testing new kits at an estimated cost of $174,000 annually. In the long term, the report says Honolulu’s crime lab, which is the only forensic lab in the state, needs more resources in order ensure backlogs of rape kits don’t continue to accrue.
On average it takes eight to 10 months for a sexual assault kit to be tested because the Honolulu lab is so overwhelmed, according to the report, though an inventory completed by the Hawaii Police Department suggests that wait times can be much longer.
The Hawaii island police department was waiting for Honolulu’s lab to accept 15 sexual assault kits for testing, according to its Nov. 16 inventory report. Eight of these date back to 2015, and three of them date back to 2014.
Honolulu Police Department spokeswoman Michelle Yu told the Honolulu- Star Advertiser in October that the lab receives about 450 requests annually for DNA testing for all cases, including homicides or property crimes, and is able to complete about half the requests it receives. There were about 770 cases awaiting analysis.
The report notes that a new forensic lab may be needed.
Linking DNA
The report notes that “it is fair” to expect “hits” in the CODIS database once departments begin testing the hundreds of kits that have been kept in storage, noting that in other jurisdictions matches have ranged between 12 and 39 percent. However, the report says it is hard to predict the overall effect on sexual assault cases.
In other jurisdictions, testing thousands of kits that had been left in storage has resulted in numerous hits within the federal database, as well as convictions, the report notes.
In Detroit, for example, processing a sampling of 1,600 untested kits resulted in 455 CODIS hits and the identification of 127 serial sexual assaults. In Cleveland the testing of 4,347 kits is expected to result in more than 900 convictions.
Kata Issari, executive director of the Joyful Heart Foundation in Hawaii, which is part of a national organization that has been at the forefront of pushing for testing all sexual assault kits submitted for investigation, said that she still needed to review the report. Issari as well as the Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women had hoped to be included in the working group but were not invited to participate.
We “remain committed to providing our national and local expertise in any way that is welcomed,” she said by email. “We believe true change only comes from collaboration and partnership, and we stand ready to serve to help bring justice to survivors in our state and across the country.”
The full report can be found at 808ne.ws/rape_kits Opens in a new tab.
