Backlogged rape test kits yield scores of possible leads

A major effort by law enforcement to test more than 1,500 rape kits that for years sat unprocessed in storage facilities statewide has resulted in DNA matches with more than 120 potential suspects in a national offender database.

In 19 cases, DNA from a victim’s kit matched that taken from another crime scene, potentially linking yet unknown assailants to multiple crimes

It’s not clear how many of the cases were unsolved at the time the kits were tested. But the “hits,” as they are referred to by crime experts, can identify unknown perpetrators, confirm the identity of known offenders, connect rapists to previously unsolved crimes and exonerate innocent suspects.

But a lot will depend on how much county police and prosecutors invest in reviewing cases, according to national experts and the examples of other jurisdictions throughout the country that have been clearing out thousands of untested rape kits.

So far, there haven’t been any arrests or charges brought in the cases in Hawaii, but law enforcement officials say they are hopeful that some will lead to convictions.

“The testing will always just be a cost or just a sheet of paper in a file if you are not doing something with the information,” said Rachel Lovell, a senior research associate at Case Western Reserve University who is assisting the Cuya­hoga County Prosecutor’s Office in Ohio with its federal grant for testing sexual assault kits.

“There has to be a willingness and resources put toward the follow-up. You have to see it as a long-term thing. I think a lot of jurisdictions are like, ‘Our problem is we didn’t test, so we will test.’ But that is one symptom of a much larger issue, which is how the criminal justice system has responded to sexual assaults.”

A recent examination by CBS News found that of the thousands of kits tested in Houston and Detroit, fewer than 1 percent of the cases resulted in convictions. By contrast, in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, of the 5,000 kits the county tested, there were 239 convictions. The county hired 25 additional investigators and six prosecutors to sort through their cases.

Hawaii’s statute of limitations for felony sexual assault also limits investigations. Until July 2014 it was six years for felony sexual assault involving an adult victim — much shorter than most other states. The DNA evidence, if it was tested before the statute of limitations expired, could extend that period by a decade.

A push to test

Nationwide, sexual assault victims often never knew police hadn’t tested their rape kits, which can contain DNA evidence such as hair samples and swabs of bodily fluids taken from them. The invasive exam, conducted following an assault, can take several hours.

In Hawaii just getting an accounting of how many untested rape kits existed across the counties took months. A full inventory, which required police to sift through individual files, wasn’t completed until the end of 2016. It showed that only about 13 percent of rape kits dating back to the 1990s had ever been tested by police.

Through that process, police and prosecutors identified about 1,500 kits for testing — including 244 cases in which the victim could not identify their attacker when they reported the crime.

The kits were sent out to labs in batches, with the Honolulu Police Department initially sending out 180 kits in 2016 that involved cases in which the rapist was a stranger, the victim was a minor, a serial offender was suspected or there were multiple suspects involved.

The approximately 1,500 kits that have been tested produced 435 DNA profiles that were uploaded to a national database containing DNA profiles contributed by forensic labs throughout the country, known as CODIS. The City and County of Honolulu has had 116 hits; Kauai County, six hits; Maui County, 13 hits; and Hawaii County, 10 hits.

Different approaches

Police on the neighbor islands said of their cases in which a match produced an investigative lead, either the statute of limitations had expired, the victim could not be located or the victim chose not to move forward with the case.

Still, the Hawaii County Office of the Prosecuting Attorney has decided to go through every single one of the 189 cases in which a rape kit was tested, regardless of whether the statute of limitations has expired in a case or whether the testing resulted in a hit.

“Given the experience of other jurisdictions on the mainland and the training we’ve attended, you don’t just wait for hits when you’re looking at your backlog. You really want to be proactive in looking at those cases,” said Hawaii County’s First Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Dale Ross. “Other jurisdictions have found that these projects may very well identify serial offenders, so you want to be proactive.”

The prosecutor’s office plans to use federal funds to hire an experienced investigator and prosecutor to conduct the review, which will also involve testing any other evidence that was taken from the crime scene for DNA that could be uploaded to CODIS.

“The goal is to have done everything we possibly could do on behalf of the victims for these cases,” said Ross.

The Honolulu Police Department, which had the majority of hits, has assigned one investigator to work exclusively on the cases.

The hits are reviewed by a committee consisting of officials from the Police Department and prosecutor’s office, the crime lab director and victims advocates to determine whether the DNA information might rejuvenate a case and whether the case still falls within the statute of limitations, said Acting Maj. Walter Ozeki with HPD’s Criminal Investigation Division.

“We haven’t had all of the hits reviewed yet; we have only had a small portion of the actual cases reviewed,” said Ozeki. “Realistically speaking, from what we have seen on the national level, the success rate in being able to contact these victims is very low.

“A lot of them are transient, a lot of them were high-risk victims where there was drug use or alcohol involved. There are a lot of factors. As time goes on, it just becomes difficult to locate these individuals.”

Ozeki said that some victims have been contacted and told there was a lead in their case, but wouldn’t say how many. He said he is confident that the testing will ultimately lead to arrests or convictions.

Ilse Knecht, policy and advocacy director for the Joyful Heart Foundation, which has led a national push to test rape kits, said that she was aware that police departments in other cities have reported difficulty finding victims. But she said sometimes it comes down to how hard police are trying or the methods they are using. She said in cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, the majority of victims were able to be located.

“It definitely is challenging and a lot of places face it, but at the same time a lot of places have a lot of success with it,” she said.

Knecht said changes need to be made in how law enforcement agencies treat sex crimes for testing to be meaningful.

“If you have the same sort of system and the same sort of attitudes and prejudices and you don’t have the people in those positions that are working these cases that want to be there and they want to be investigating sex crimes, this problem of the mistreatment of rape cases is just going to persist,” she said.

A new outlook

Testing rape kits is one facet of an effort to improve how Hawaii law enforcement agencies handle sexual assault cases. Going forward, police are testing all kits with few exceptions. The state’s forensic crime lab has more than doubled its staff to handle the increase. Police departments are implementing new software that will allow them to track rape cases and kits. This is expected to include a victim portal that will allow victims to check on the status of their kit. And the state Attorney General’s Office is using federal grant money to train police and prosecutors in how to better approach victims and investigate cold cases.

“I think it is useful in so many ways,” said Gary Yama­shiroya, a former Chicago police officer who is coordinating Hawaii’s state-led effort to improve the handling of sexual assault cases for the Attorney General Department. “Just getting updated training to police officers on how to do trauma-informed investigations and be aware of the neurobiology of trauma, I think that was huge.”