Renewed push for rape-kit testing
Golden State Killer case underscores bill’s aim to get evidence analyzed faster.
SACRAMENTO — Less than a month after police arrested a man suspected of being the Golden State Killer — one of California’s most prolific serial rapists — state lawmakers in Sacramento on Tuesday said they want to ensure all sexual assault kits are counted and swiftly tested.
Under a bill by Sen. Connie M. Leyva (D-Chino), law enforcement agencies would have to submit rape kits to crime labs within 20 days of their collection, and labs would have no more than 120 days to test them. Another bill by Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco) would require a statewide audit of all untested exams.
Funding has been a major hurdle for similar proposals in the past. At least half a dozen bills that have died or been vetoed over the last decade would have required law enforcement to tackle backlogs and speed up the examination process for survivors.
But at a news conference Tuesday, Leyva and Chiu said they were pleased to find Gov. Jerry Brown had earmarked a one-time allocation of $6 million to help counties process forensic evidence in his newly revised budget. They had initially sought only $2 million.
Crime-victim advocates applauded the measures, pointing to rough estimates that indicate California’s backlog stands at least 13,615 untested kits. A previous bill by Chiu that passed last year required police to track and report all unexamined kits as of January 2018, but they weren’t required to count those still sitting on shelves statewide.
Alameda County Dist. Atty. Nancy O’Malley said the significance of such forensic tests were underscored by the arrest of the Golden State Killer suspect. Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., a former police officer, has been charged with 12 killings, 45 rapes and more than 120 burglaries from 1976 to 1986. Police have said he was connected to the crimes with discarded DNA evidence matched through consumer genealogy websites.
O’Malley said that when she was a volunteer rape crisis counselor, she took calls from several women assaulted by a man then known as the East Area Rapist. It wasn’t until their rape kits were tested years later under new state laws that investigators realized that their attacker also was the Golden State Killer.
She has since undertaken her own countywide audit of untested exams. Officials there counted 1,900 untested sexual-assault exam kits, she said, dating back as 15 years. Now, it has no backlog.
“Get them out of evidence rooms, get them into crime labs, and test those kits,” she said.