Officials: Untested rape kits not always a problem

Matt Mencarini | Lansing State Journal

LANSING - About 63 untested rape-evidence kits from the greater Lansing area could be sent to state-contracted laboratories, although the backlog isn't indicative of a problem, law enforcement officials said.

The tally of kits that had gone untested for more than a year was collected by the prosecuting attorney's offices at the direction of the Attorney General's Office, which will use $1.7 million of unanticipated settlement proceeds to pay for the testing. The plan was detailed in a Sept. 25 letter from Attorney General Bill Schuette to county prosecutors.

Untested rape kits became an issue in Michigan after thousands were discovered in Detroit in 2009. Officials have worked to address the backlog since then. In October 2014, Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law a bill that created the Sexual Assault Kit Tracking and Reporting Commission to oversee rape kit submission to the state crime lab and to implement an audit system.

The roughly 63 untested rape kits are from Ingham County law enforcement agencies, according to prosecutors, with 40 at the Lansing Police Department and 14 at the Meridian Township Police Department. Clinton County Prosecuting Attorney Chuck Sherman said there might be a few in his county but he was waiting on additional details.

"Just because there are kits that haven't been sent in doesn’t mean that something is wrong," said Ingham County Prosecuting Attorney Stuart Dunnings III.

Some rape kits go untested because law enforcement officials say there isn't an investigative reason to test them, such as the victim did not want to pursue charges, the suspect's identity wasn't disputed or the defendant pleaded guilty before analysis was done, officials said.

Not submitting the kits for those reasons is common among police agencies around the country, but is narrow-minded, said Rebecca Campbell, a professor in Michigan State University's Research Consortium on Gender-Based Violence. She specializes in sexual assault and how the legal and medical systems respond to the needs of rape survivors.

Testing all the kits and uploading the DNA evidence to shared law enforcement databases, even when the suspect's identity is known, can solve other unsolved cases, she said.

"One person's friend is another person’s stranger," she said. "The data indicate that sexual offenders rape both people they know and people they don't know."

She added that, historically, DNA evidence has been used by prosecutors in court instead of by law enforcement during an investigation, where it can be valuable to rule out suspects or link cases.

While in the past Lansing police have left some kits untested because they didn't see reasons to have them tested, Police Chief Mike Yankowski said the department will comply with any new legislation and has already determined which of its untested kits will be given priority over the others for testing as part of the new initiative.

"What we did not find in our audit were stock piles of sexual assault kits that were not assigned to investigators or otherwise unattended," Yankowski said in a statement. "... We are committed to compliance with statute, conducting thorough and professional investigations, and most importantly, identifying sex offenders and seeking justice for our crime victims."

Meridian police have about one untested rape kit for each year going back to 2000, said Lt. Greg Frenger, but much like Lansing police, there was no reason for them to be tested.

"I am confident that we don't have any that we should have sent," he said.

In 2009, 11,341 abandoned rape kits were discovered in Detroit, making its backlog one of the largest in the country. As of early September, most of those untested kits had been tested, Gov. Rick Snyder said at a press conference that month.

Detroit's kit-testing initiative identified 2,616 suspects — including 477 serial rapists — and secured 21 convictions, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy told the Detroit Free Press in September.

In addition to Lansing and Meridian Township, Michigan State University police reported five untested rape kits and Lansing Township police reported four untested rape kits to Ingham County prosecutors.

Officials at those departments didn't return messages seeking information about whether their untested kits should have been tested.