Justice locked inside old rape kits
Sex crimes from long ago, unsolved for far too long, are now getting the leadership they deserve from the Manhattan district attorney. Victims are getting justice. As a proud pioneer in using DNA to prosecute old cases, I’m thrilled to see this happening. But far too many states and jurisdictions are still dragging their heels. Recognizing the tremendous advances in forensic science, everyone must get on board the cold-case caravan.
The arc of my career is a testament to the power of this technology. I remember how, in 1984, as a young prosecutor in Manhattan’s Sex Crimes Unit, I took an 8-year-old child by the hand and walked into the grand jury room.
With enormous courage, she faced the 23 adults and described how she was forced to the rooftop in Harlem and sexually assaulted. She was too young to know the language of the acts performed, but answered my questions with such clarity that there was no doubt about her veracity.
William Dixon, a 25-year-old man, was caught running from the building. He pleaded guilty to the indictment. Sentenced to 10 years, he served only four.
Remember that girl. She reenters the story later.
In 1986, I was one of the first prosecutors in the country asked to use DNA, then a new technique, in the investigation of a murder. It took six months to get a result, and the judge in my case did not allow me to use the findings — linking the killer and his weapon to the dead woman — because he deemed DNA too unreliable.
By 1989, courts began to admit DNA findings, and we used it both to convict and exonerate the accused.
In 1994, an 11-year-old child was assaulted in her building in Hamilton Heights at knifepoint. Her unidentified assailant escaped.
A rape kit was used to collect evidence — including a vaginal swab that yielded the attacker’s DNA. At that time, since there was no suspect against whom the DNA profile could be compared, the kit was stored in the police property clerk’s warehouse with thousands of others.
In 1999, when the first national DNA databank was established, we in Manhattan partnered with the mayor’s office and NYPD to locate untested kits, outsource them to private labs, and become the first city in the country to eliminate the backlog of evidence kits — 16,000 of them.
We solved some crimes decades after they had occurred, offering justice to victims of violence who had long ago given up hope of anyone in law enforcement remembering their cases.
In 2002, the evidence found in the 1993 exam of the 11-year-old girl was submitted to the databank. There was no match.
But we adapted another innovative technique — one used by a Milwaukee prosecutor named Norm Gahn. We indicted unapprehended rapists, calling each John Doe, with his distinctive DNA profile as the identifier.
So in 2003, Assistant DA Martha Bashford questioned the witness who had been assaulted at the age of 11, in the same grand jury room where I took the testimony of the 8-year old girl years earlier.
Her perpetrator was indicted as John Doe.
Fast forward to late 2016. William Dixon — now 56 years old — was convicted of raping a 12-year-old in the Bronx. Dixon’s DNA profile was entered into the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS databank — at last — as a convicted offender.
That profile linked immediately to Bashford’s John Doe suspect, and the long-cold case of the 11-year-old child from Hamilton Heights was solved.
The woman — now 35 — was thrilled to learn that her attacker had been found. My 8-year-old victim — now 42 — was equally pleased and relieved. The memories of the assault have not faded for either.
Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. and his extraordinary team of sex crimes prosecutors are the nation’s leaders in this backlog elimination. They understand that by taking dusty evidence kits off storage shelves, heinous crimes can be stopped.
In 2015, Vance dedicated $38 million from civil forfeiture proceedings — not taxpayer dollars — to offer grants to other jurisdictions, paying for the testing of 57,000 kits across America.
The preliminary results from this project are in, and they are staggering. So far, up to 39,000 kits have been submitted to labs for testing. Of the first 4,000 profiles entered into CODIS, 48% of them yielded hits — and a quarter of them match DNA from other sexual assault cases.
How is it that there are legislators and prosecutors who refuse to fund testing, or to pass legislation to mandate that it be done? Why is it that New Jersey and Massachusetts still cannot provide the number of untested kits within their jurisdictions? What becomes of the 850 shelved boxes in Austin, Tex., that are covered in mold? Why did authorities in Southern California throw away scores of untested kits?
There is a rape victim whose trauma is documented inside every one of those cardboard boxes.