In the final hours of the last Congress, the Senate approved action against an intolerable failure of criminal justice — the backlog of scores of thousands of rape test kits allowed to sit untested for years in police custody. Victims are denied justice while the perpetrators remain free to rape again.

“We have these monsters allowed to walk the streets,” said Lavinia Masters, a rape victim at the age of 13 who had to wait two decades before the kit of physical evidence from the assault in Texas was tested and led to a serial predator who had been free for years. The Senate bill would reduce the rape-kit backlog by redirecting financing toward this problem. It authorizes a national audit for DNA matching that could involve as many as 400,000 untested kits, according to Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who sponsored the measure.

Congress enacted a law to deal with the problem in 2004, but the $151 million in annual financing became diverted to other purposes even as police and laboratory officials complained that they lacked sufficient resources to deal with the kits, which can cost $1,000 each to process. The level of justice denied was shockingly documented in recent years when the Fort Worth, Tex., police submitted 960 kits for testing to the Center for Human Identification, a DNA science project at the University of North Texas. The kits turned up 102 suspects, leading to 47 arrests and 36 felony convictions, according to the police. These numbers suggest that many rapists still roam free and show the need for Congress to revive and enact the rape-kit bill.

This is a law-and-order measure requiring no ideological fight over additional financing. The Senate vote in December was unanimous. The House should be no less emphatic in repairing this scandalous injustice to rape victims.