by Nancy Ritter
Readers of Sexual Assault Report are no doubt aware of the existence of thousands of untested, sexual assault kits that are stored in police evidence rooms around the country. Making decisions about how best to handle all of this older, unanalyzed evidence is anything but straightforward-and these decisions are affecting every stakeholder in the nation's criminal justice system: law enforcement and crime laboratories, courts, victim service agencies, policy makers, the federal, state and local levels, and, most significantly, victims.
Untested sexual as sault kits (SAKs) can be stored in a number of places; police department evidence rooms, crime labs , hospitals, clinics, rape crisis centers. We do not know how many unanalyzed SAKs there are, nationwide. There are many reasons for this, but one of the primary ones is that tracking and counting SAKs is an antiquated process in many U.S. jurisdictions. A survey sponsored by the National Institute of Justice (NlJ) found that, as of 2007, 43% of the nation 's law enforcement agencies did not have a computerized system for tracking forensic evidence, either in their property room or after it was sent to the crime lab.
Read the Full Article, Untested Evidence in Sexual Assault Cases, here.
