A nationwide inventory of untested rape kits from more than 1,000 police agencies revealed that there are at least 70,000 rape kits that have gone untested, with many of them sitting on the shelves for decades.
The inventory covered a mere fraction of the 18,000 police departments in the U.S., which means there may be hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits that have not been sent to crime laboratories for testing, USA Today reported.
The rape kit, also known as the sexual assault evidence collection kit, is what forensic investigators use to collect evidence from a rape victim. The examination, which may last four to six hours, includes a physical exam and a collection of evidence like fiber, hair strands, saliva, urine, semen, blood and skin cells, EndTheBacklog explained.
In a country where sexual assault happens every two minutes, rape kits serve to identify the suspects and help solve rape cases. They can also be used to confirm or deny a victim's testimony, identify other possible crimes of the suspect, and give justice to the wrongly accused, according to EndTheBacklog.
Thus, the present backlog on rape kit testing indicates that many rape cases have been left unsolved, with victims still waiting for justice and their attackers roaming around freely, sometimes for decades.
Rape victim Michelle Kuiper from Louisville, Ky. waited 17 years before she learned her attacker's identity. Kuiper was raped in an alley near her home in 1994, when she was still a college student.
"I was living in fear all the time of not knowing who he was, where was he and was he going to find me again," she told WHAS.
Kuiper's attacker Curtis Boyd was convicted of robbery in 2009, and testing of biological evidence from Kuiper's rape kit revealed in 2011 that the evidence collected in 1994 matched Boyd's DNA.
Carolyn Nunn from Louisville Metro Police Special Victims Unit is now checking the cases one by one.
"Part of my job now is to pull every single case file," she said. She discovered 1,073 questionable cases, some of which were from the 1970s. Nunn is also checking if all the victims are still alive, WHAS reported.
Fourteen-year-old Amanda Ramos was attacked and sexually assaulted in 1994 while waiting for a bus in Cleveland, Ohio. After the attack, she was brought to Fairview Hospital, where physical and biological evidence were collected for a rape kit. Unfortunately, her rape kit remained untested for almost two decades.
"I was very, very angry at the system for a very long time. I didn't feel of value, I felt dirty, I felt ashamed, and I felt a piece of me was missing," she said. She went into depression for many years. More than a year ago, she received news that her rape kit had been tested and her attacker identified through a DNA match, WKYC reported.
A $41 million grant was added in funds in March for the testing of rape kits.
"If we're able to test these rape kits, more crimes would be solved, more rapes would be avoided," said Vice President Biden at the time. The additional funds was given as a White House initiative to address the backlog in rape kit testing. However, only about half of the total $1.2 billion funding intended to expedite rape kit testing has gone to the work.
"There's ample money there," said Scott Berkowitz, president of Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, USA Today reported in another article. "But to date, only about 51% of that has gone towards casework and making sure labs have the capacity to do the testing."
The funding, which was supposed to go to DNA testing for rape kits and inventory, was instead channelled to "general DNA testing improvements." Some of it has even gone to unrelated expenses, according to USA Today.
"It's really sad to think there are all of these kits that aren't tested because it took a lot of courage to go through that exam," said Kuiper, whose attacker was later found to have committed two more sexual assaults, one in 1997 and another in 1999.