The announcement this week that the massive backlog of rape kits submitted for testing in West Virginia has finally been cleared is good news in itself, but it also comes with the hope that such a situation will never occur again.
The undertaking to process more than 2,600 kits taken after alleged sexual assaults that had piled up began almost 10 years ago, when the West Virginia State Police Forensics Laboratory teamed up with the Marshall University Forensic Science Center and BODE Technologies to make it happen. The effort was made possible through the federally funded Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.
The number of unprocessed kits had been trimmed down to about 130 in 2020, when the effort to evaluate the kits faster to make sure another backlog didn’t occur received a boost from the West Virginia Legislature. Lawmakers passed a bill during the 2020 session requiring kits to be submitted to the State Police lab within 30 days of collection, established a system to track the kits and made it illegal to discard rape kits without a court order.
The kits are vital to sexual assault cases, as the genetic evidence collected can help locate or prove the guilt of a suspect. Kits also can exonerate those wrongfully convicted of a sex crime.
Some of the untested kits in the state inventory dated back to the 1980s. Although there is no statute of limitations on felony sexual assault in West Virginia, victims should not have to wait decades for justice.
Unfortunately, clearing the backlog did not present usable results in each case. As the Gazette-Mail’s Ashley Perham reported, less than half of the kits processed contained DNA that could be entered into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). Dave Miller, a forensic scientist with the State Police lab, said some assaults might’ve been conducted in a way that didn’t leave any DNA evidence. In other cases, the kit might’ve been collected improperly or too long after the assault had occurred. For some of the older cases, it would’ve been nice for the victims to have known that much sooner.
Of those kits that did produce DNA, 438 matched the genetic profile of someone within the CODIS system. Hopefully, that will lead to closure in some of these cases.
There are about 200 kits from active cases being processed in West Virginia right now, and Miller said each kit takes three to four months to fully analyze. He said he wants to see that time cut significantly.
“If you’re the victim waiting that three to four months, it’s not where we want to be,†Miller said.
We agree, although three to four months is a vast improvement over a kit sitting in a lab going unanalyzed for three to four decades.
