RALEIGH, N.C. (CN) — North Carolina finished testing its backlog of sexual assault kits, Attorney General Josh Stein announced Tuesday, calling the development "a milestone more than six years in the making to deliver justice for victims and survivors."
The process led to at least 114 arrests in unsolved sexual assault cases and spurred legislation that requires law enforcement to send evidence to a lab for DNA testing in an effort to prevent a backlog from occurring again in the future.
“I am so grateful that we are working together on a bipartisan basis to pursue justice by reviewing and testing these older kits,” Stein said. “Each kit belongs to a person who experienced a brutal trauma. They deserve our best efforts to seek justice and get their rapists off the streets.”
In 2019, law enforcement offices had an inventory of more than 16,000 untested kits. Of those, 11,841 kits have been tested or are in the process of being tested, the attorney general’s office said.
The remaining cases have already resulted in convictions, were determined to be unfounded or were reported anonymously and the survivor chose not to report the examination to the police.
Law enforcement made 114 arrests after uploading the DNA test results from more than 5,000 kits to the Combined DNA Index System, a national system that law enforcement uses to compare DNA evidence to unsolved cases. Nearly half of the kits matched the DNA of an offender in the system.
One cold case solved by DNA testing was a 1990 sexual assault in which two men broke into a woman's hotel room and assaulted and robbed her. The evidence collected was finally tested in 2020, and the men involved have been arrested and charged.
In Buncombe County, a teacher who was assaulted in 1996 called the Wilmington police department and asked that her kit be tested in 2018. The kit hadn’t been tested at the time of the crime because police were unable to identify a suspect, and had remained untested until funding became available. DNA evidence matched an offender in the Combined DNA Index System, and he was sentenced to 24 to 30 years in prison for the assault.
The case of 16-year-old girl in Charlotte who was assaulted while trying to use a payphone in 1995 went cold after the kit was initially tested in 1996. After it was retested in 2019, a suspect has been charged with second-degree rape, first-degree kidnapping and common law robbery because of the evidence.
The North Carolina Legislature in 2017 began requiring law enforcement to report the number of untested kits to the state crime lab, leading to an audit of sexual assault evidence kits. Roughly 15,000 kits were identified, and in October 2018, a tracking system was launched to prevent future backlogs and to allow survivors to track the status and history of their evidence kits.
“For far too long, the majority of sexual assault survivors were not getting the justice they deserved in North Carolina,” said Monika Johnson-Hostler, the executive director of the North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault. “Thanks to this effort, cold cases are moving forward and survivors can be assured that the justice system in this state cares about what happened to them and is fighting for them.”
North Carolina had one of the biggest backlogs the program has seen, said Ilse Knecht, the director of policy and advocacy at the Joyful Heart Foundation, and testing the backlog of kits has helped survivors trying to get justice.
“Every untested rape kit represents a survivor waiting for justice, some for decades,” Knecht said. The foundation advocates for mandated testing of kits and establishing evidence tracking systems.
In January 2019, the Standing Up for Rape Victims Act, known as the Survivor Act, passed unanimously through the House and Senate. It created a process for law enforcement agencies to submit evidence kits to a lab for testing, requiring police departments to submit sexual assault kits to be tested within 45 days of receiving it. It also provided a prioritization process for handling the backlog, and allocated $6 million for two years of funding.
“We hope that more states will follow North Carolina’s lead and take meaningful steps to ensure that every survivor has the chance to seek justice — whatever form that may take,” Knecht said.
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