Virginia has eliminated a backlog of 2,665 untested rape kits that had sat on shelves in local police departments for years, state Attorney General Mark R. Herring announced Wednesday.
Herring said tests on 851 of those kits resulted in DNA profiles that were entered into CODIS, the national combined DNA index system, and 354 of those profiles resulted in “hits”: names sent to local law enforcement for further investigation.
But only one person has been charged so far, in Spotsylvania County, Herring said.
A spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, Charlotte Gomer, said, “The law enforcement agencies who have hits will now begin to reopen their cases and investigate, so we’re anticipating that there could be more charges in the future as those investigations continue.”
Untested rape kits have been a national problem on which prosecutors have focused in recent years, in part because of people such as Debbie Smith. The Williamsburg woman became a national symbol of the problem after her own rape evidence kit was untested for six years. A test ultimately led to an arrest and conviction. A federal law providing funding for such testing is named the Debbie Smith Act.
At a Richmond news conference with Herring on Wednesday, Smith grew tearful as she recalled being led into an evidence room years ago where, she said, “from floor to ceiling, there were nothing but [rape] kits, there were boxes and bags and baskets. That there was no money to test them and that we didn’t have the people to test them.
“That is what got me started in my advocacy,” Smith said, “because I knew what the testing of my kit gave me: It gave me freedom. For the first time after the cold hit was found because my kit was tested, I took a walk in my own neighborhood. I was able to walk around freely without feeling like maybe he was watching me. The fear was gone.”
The state used two grants over the past five years totaling $3.4 million to have a private lab in Northern Virginia, Bode Technology Group of Lorton, open and test the evidence kits, and then pay the overtime to have Department of Forensic Science (DFS) scientists review the tests and enter the data into DNA databases.
Gomer, the spokeswoman for Herring’s office, declined to say why more cases have not led to charges in the five years since the backlog testing launched. Police have said reopening old sexual assault cases can come with complications associated with reluctant or missing witnesses and suspects as well as other evidence problems.
And even with the backlog eliminated, rapid results from testing may not occur. Virginia passed a law in 2016 that required police to submit all rape kits to the state lab within 60 days, but with the volume of testing done in a variety of crimes, the lab is able only to test within about 129 days, DFS Director Linda Jackson said. That means about six months will elapse between a test and a result.
Still, Herring said he was pleased with the elimination of the backlog, which he said made Virginia only the seventh state without a rape kit backlog. “This was a mammoth undertaking to identify the location of every untested kit in the state and develop a plan to get each one tested,” he said.
He noted that the grant money also created a secure electronic tracking system that will allow sexual assault survivors, the DFS, law enforcement and hospitals to know the status and location of each kit. A law that went into effect July 1 requires all agencies handling the kits to update their status and allows survivors to check the location and status at any time.
Kristi VanAudenhove, executive director of the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance, said in a statement, “We are grateful that Attorney General Herring’s work to eliminate the backlog has been swift and coordinated. This work has helped to ensure that our responses are as trauma informed as possible — increasing the likelihood that survivors will report violence and making it easier for survivors to make informed decisions regarding pathways towards their healing and justice.”
