Bypassing gridlock
Cornyn’s effort leading to funding for rape-kit testing helps assure attackers won’t go free.
When rape kits go untested, rapists go free. It’s a lesson sexual assault victims in Houston and cities across the country had to learn the hard way.
That’s why a recent bipartisan action by lawmakers in Austin and Washington, D.C., is so welcome.
The fitful battle to make sure that crucial DNA evidence is promptly and consistently tested in Texas rape investigations appears to be on firmer footing after President Donald Trump signed into law last Monday legislation that provides $151 million to help states eliminate backlogs in rape kit testing.
The Debbie Smith Reauthorization Act of 2019, named for a Virginia woman whose 1989 rape was not solved until the evidence was finally tested five years later, also pays for DNA training and education programs essential to the proper gathering and processing of the evidence.
The White House action came seven months after Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Lavinia Masters Act that requires law enforcement agencies to conduct an audit to determine the number of untested rape kits in the state and set definitive timelines for their analysis. The measure will provide more than $50 million to eliminate the backlog in untested rape kits, and hire and train people to test them.
The Texas law is named for a Dallas woman who was raped at the age of 13. The evidence gathered by police then sat on a shelf for more than 20 years, meaning her attacker could never be prosecuted for the crime as the statute of limitations had run out. The new law would delay the statute of limitations for sexual assault and aggravated sexual assault cases until a rape kit is tested.
The legislation has been courageously pushed by the women whose stories so clearly point to the need for changes after unconscionable testing backlogs were exposed across the country, including in Texas and Houston.
Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, a co-sponsor of the Debbie Smith Reauthorization Act, said the funding had already helped the state reduce its testing backlog from about 20,000 in 2001 to an estimated 2,000 currently. The measure had been routinely renewed every five years since it was first enacted in 2004 but lapsed in September in a congressional tug-of-war.
The Democratic-controlled House included the funding in its rewrite of the Violence Against Women Act, a more comprehensive bill that includes a provision closing the socalled “boyfriend loophole” by barring anyone convicted of abusing or stalking a dating partner from owning guns. Opposed by the NRA, that legislation was never likely to pass the Republican-controlled Senate.
Cornyn and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, crafted a stand-alone funding bill that passed the Senate unanimously.
Although Congress needs to return to the Violence Against Women Act and especially the issue of guns in the hands of domestic abusers, Cornyn’s move to extract the money for DNA testing and training from political gridlock was the right thing to do.
Peter Stout, CEO and president of the Houston Forensic Science Center, which gets about $1 million to $1.2 million a year from the Debbie Smith grants, had expressed concern that a delay or termination of the funds would hinder the advances the city has made since the Houston Police Department cleared a backlog of more than 6,600 untested rape kits in 2014. Some of those were from cases dating to the 1980s. Testing them led to 850 hits in the FBI’s nationwide database of DNA profiles and dozens of charges in the first year alone.
Stout said last week that the restored funding and new law keep Texas better-positioned than many other states to deal with the testing, “but we can’t become apathetic in getting to something that is sustainable.”
The thousands of women like Debbie Smith and Lavinia Masters should have the assurance that their attackers will not be allowed to remain free to prey on others just because the evidence was never tested.