Rape-kit bills try to end backlog
SACRAMENTO — San Francisco police collected 178 rape kits during the first six months of this year — an average of one a day — and sent all of them to be tested for DNA evidence. It’s a high standard that lawmakers want to replicate statewide.
The push stems from public outrage over the thousands of untested rape kits found in police storage rooms across the country in recent years, many having languished for more than a decade as victims remained in the dark about the status of the physical evidence taken from their bodies. After years of unsuccessful or watered-down legislative efforts in California, advocates say the state has failed to make rape-kit testing a priority.
Now lawmakers are again pushing bills to make it happen — starting with a proposal to require law enforcement to track and report the number of rape kits they collect and test, similar to what the San Francisco Police Commission forced the city’s Police Department to begin doing last year.
“There are a lot of states that have been far more progressive than California on this,” said Ilse Knecht, director of advocacy and policy at the Joyful Heart Foundation, a national victims-rights group and proponent of clearing the national rape-kit backlog. “We think it’s time for California to step up and join the states that are doing something to address this issue.”
The U.S. Department of Justice estimated in 2014 that as many as 400,000 rape kits sat untested in police evidence rooms. Some law enforcement agencies argue there are valid reasons for not testing kits — such as when the victim declines to pursue charges or the suspect’s identity is known. But departments that test their backlog of rape kits increasingly discover DNA from a known suspect that links to multiple cases.
Kentucky is an example of one state pushing reforms. In 2015, lawmakers there ordered an audit of untested rape kits sitting in evidence rooms. The audit showed the state had more than 3,000 untested rape kits, and helped Kentucky apply for grant funding to test the evidence. This month, the state brought new charges against a convicted rapist after police discovered his DNA in an old rape kit. That was Kentucky’s first indictment from backlogged sexual assault evidence. Similar charges have been brought against suspects in states across the country, including California.
The Chronicle broke the story of a case last year in which Alameda County prosecutors filed charges against a career criminal accused of sexually assaulting two teens in Berkeley. In that case, a 15- and 19-year-old reported that a stranger abducted them at gunpoint in 2008 near Berkeley High School, raped one and sexually assaulted the other.
The Berkeley Police Department could not explain why it took six years to send the evidence to a laboratory to see if DNA in it could help identify the unknown assailant. The department tested the kit only after District Attorney Nancy O’Malley began a county-wide audit of untested rape kits.
Once tested, DNA evidence from the rape of the 19-year-old linked to Keith Kenard Asberry Jr., an Antioch man with a lengthy crime record. Asberry’s DNA had been in the national and state databases of known and unknown suspects since a 2005 felony firearm conviction. Before his arrest in 2015, Asberry was accused of assaulting another woman in Berkeley, also discovered through DNA.
He has pleaded not guilty. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for September.
O’Malley said her office has eight pending