Washington clears rape test kit backlog after years of advocacy
Lutheran Community Services Northwest has sexual assault evidence collection kits at their offices for their work with victims of violence and sexual assault. State legislators are working to increase the number of SANE nurses in rural areas. (Rajah Bose for Crosscut)
Washington’s backlog of about 10,000 sexual-assault test kits has been cleared, eight years after the state began targeted efforts to analyze old evidence that had been collected but never processed, Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office announced this week.
As a result of testing thousands of kits and uploading the data to a national DNA database known as CODIS, defendants have been charged in 21 cases, all dating from 2015 to 2022, Ferguson’s office announced.
Prior to a 2015 law that set clear deadlines for handling and processing rape test kits, some law enforcement agencies didn’t have a consistent system for processing them, in some cases storing untested evidence for more than a decade. According to Ferguson’s office, some kits found during efforts to clear the backlog dated back to the 1980s.
About 1,000 tested kits still need to be processed and uploaded to CODIS, a process that should be completed by the end of the year, according to Ferguson’s office.
Other steps that the state has taken to clear the cases include a tracking system for the test kits, funding for testing in private labs and the completion of a new Washington State Patrol crime lab in Vancouver.
Sexual-assault kits contain tools used by medical professionals to collect and preserve physical evidence for later DNA testing during the investigation. The evidence could be blood, semen, saliva or other biological traces. The kit also includes procedures for packaging the evidence and preserving the chain of custody as it gets processed.