Brett Kelman

The Desert Sun

California lawmakers have introduced new legislation this year hoping to illuminate the state's invisible backlog of untested rape kits, which hold the potential to bolster prosecutions and exonerate the wrongfully accused.

The bills are part of a slew of legislation responding to an investigation by The Desert Sun and the USA Today Network spotlighted the backlog on a local and national scale. At the time, Coachella Valley police agencies had stockpiled more than 500 untested kits, and a nationwide tally of about 800 police departments amounted to more than 70,000.

After USA TODAY NETWORK investigation, rape-kit reforms flood state legislatures

Since then, lawmakers from coast to coast have introduced plans to whittle down the backlog, introducing at least 50 different bills in more than 20 states. In California, bills would standardize the rape kits used by all counties, require law enforcement agencies to track the progression of rape kits – and the reasons for not testing them – and then report that data to the Department of Justice.

“To get at the crux of the backlog problem, we need to know how many kits are collected each year, and if they’re not analyzed, we need to know why,” said Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, the bill’s author. “This data will help shed a light on what areas of law enforcement need to change and whether or not they need more resources to get the job done.”

In a news release, Chiu noted that the legislation was proposed amidst a “national uproar” over the rape kit backlog, but his plan to increase reporting is not new.

Hundreds of Coachella Valley rape kits left untested

A similar bill was proposed last year by Assemblyman Bill Quirk, a Democrat from Hayward, and Quick’s bill was a rehash of two prior bills that would have done the same thing. The prior bills were vetoed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said California couldn’t afford another annual report.

Chiu’s new bill is co-authored by Quirk and backed by Attorney General Kamala Harris, who said the bill will offer a “deeper understanding of how many kids remains untested.”

“Solving sexual assault cases requires law enforcement to collect and test evidence in a timely manner. Sexual assault kits should not sit untested for months while victims await justice,” Harris said in a news release.

Rape kits, officially known as “sexually assault kits,” contain genetic evidence collected from men, women and children who have reported sexual assaults to local police. At a lab, this evidence can be compared to a national database of DNA profiles, collected from victims and sex offenders throughout the country.

If the DNA matches a known sex offender, the database will spit out his name. If the DNA matches evidence from another sexual assault, the database will link the two cases so detectives can compare notes. And if there's no match, the genetic signature will sit in a database indefinitely, ready to help in another case.

Victims’ advocates say the potential of this database shows that every rape kit should be tested, but police departments around the country often keep a backlog of kits for which they say testing is unnecessary. Law enforcement officials have said most untested kits come from cases where the accusations have been dismissed as unfounded, or where the District Attorney's Office won't prosecute because it believes the case isn't winnable, or where a victim refuses to cooperate with investigators. However, in some extreme cases, kits that should have been tested have been uncovered in large, unjustifiable backlogs, forgotten in the bowels of large metropolitan police departments.

Reporter Brett Kelman can be reached by phone at (760) 778-4642, by email at brett.kelman@desertsun.com, or on Twitter @TDSbrettkelman.

In USA TODAY

State legislatures nationwide are pursuing reforms to the inconsistent ways rape kits are handled by law enforcement agencies, aiming to address longstanding concerns about inconsistent processing of valuable evidence from sex crimes.