SPD will examine close to 1,300 untested 'rape kits'. It will help survivors - and may unearth valuable evidence. Victim advocacy groups say it's just one piece of bringing justice to survivors of sexual assault
In a warehouse that sits inconspicuously on South Stacy Street in the industrial district, there are hundreds of white cardboard containers, roughly the size of small shoeboxes. Their tops are marked with orange biohazard stickers, and their sides brandish the words “Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit,” in uppercase blue letters.
Inside each one is evidence collected from the bodies of those who have reported being raped in Seattle. The evidence — from blood, saliva and semen to debris found on skin — might contain the DNA of their rapists. Most people know these boxes as rape kits. Until now, their contents have never been tested.
On Jan. 22, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) announced it would test all rape kits, including 1,276 untested kits that sat in storage for up to 10 years. The decision came in the thick of a national discussion about the country’s backlog of hundreds of thousands of unproccessed rape kits.
“This is obviously an issue at the national level,” said Capt. Deanna Nollette, supervisor of SPD’s Special Victims Unit. “As [law enforcement officials] are questioned about these protocols, if you’re smart, it’s a chance to look at what you’re doing and say, ‘Hey, we could be doing something better.’”
She said she expects the first batch of 25 kits to head to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, less than a block away from the warehouse, for testing this week.
When kits are tested at the crime lab and a suspect’s DNA is found, its profile is entered into an FBI database called the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). If investigators find a match, it can help them identify serial rapists and serial criminals.
Cities across the country that have opted to test their rape kits have seen some promising results. Victim advocacy groups applaud the decision, but are quick to say that testing kits is a small part of addressing systemic problems in the way rape cases are handled.
“DNA testing sounds very straightforward and easy,” said Emily Cordo, legal director for Sexual Violence Legal Services at the YWCA. “It’s easy to think that it’s a panacea and that if we test rape kits, we don’t have to deal with the rest of it.”
Opinions differ on kits’ value
Nollette said the SPD does not refer to Seattle’s untested kits as a backlog, because unlike kits in some jurisdictions, they are not the result of inadequate resources.
“It wasn’t an inability,” she said. “It was a choice.”
She explained that SPD protocol has been to test rape kits when investigators felt it might lead to valuable evidence — a minority of cases.
King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg said that for prosecutors, rape kits rarely come into play. Most rape cases involve “acquaintance rape:” The victim knows the rapist, and the issue becomes determining consent rather than identity, so DNA evidence is moot. Rape kits are mostly valuable when someone is raped by a stranger, Satterberg said.
Initially, SPD officials had also said they didn’t test all kits because they didn’t want to enter the DNA profiles of those not charged with crimes into CODIS, which is sometimes thought of as a database of convicts and arrestees.
Nollette attributed that to a lack of understanding, since SPD officials later learned DNA is stored as an anonymous profile. Cordo echoed there is no consequence of having one’s DNA in the system beyond giving law enforcement the chance to connect it to other reported crimes.
“Being in the database won’t show up on an employment background check, and it doesn’t deprive the suspect of liberties,” she said.
Finally, SPD officials said, they didn’t test kits if a victim recanted or if the department, for some reason, lost contact with a victim. In the end, of 1,641 rape kits collected over 10 years, 365 — 22 percent — had been tested. Nollette said she thought that number was too low.
When SPD Chief Kathleen O’Toole began in June and Nollette took over the Special Victims Unit, they consulted with the county prosecutor’s office, the state crime lab, Harborview Medical Center and victim advocacy groups before making their decision.
“The consensus seemed to be that further testing could lead to some investigative leads and more victims feeling like we had done something important with their evidence,” Nollette said.
Testing advocates say processing all kits, even when they don’t have immediate evidentiary value, helps build a resource that can link past, present and future rapes, allowing law enforcement to identify more rapists.
Research by forensic psychologist David Lisak suggests that most rapists are serial offenders, even those who are “acquaintance rapists.” In some cases, testing kits can connect identified suspects to unidentified suspects in unsolved stranger rapes.
“That would be the best-case scenario,” Satterberg said. “There’s a 10-year-old rape complaint that was never tested but the suspect was identified, then all of a sudden you get this new profile that matches an unsolved, unknown case and that gives the investigator a place to start.”
Testing the kits
If DNA from an old Seattle kit gets a hit, Nollette said detectives will absolutely take another look at the case and decide whether to move forward with a new investigation.
“We’re kind of thinking of this as a kind of cold-case investigation,” she said. “We’re looking to see if anything new comes out of this and to see if there’s anything to move forward on.”
The statute of limitations for rape cases in Washington is generally 10 years, about how far Seattle’s kits stretch back.
At the state level, Rep. Tina Orwall, D-Des Moines, has sponsored House Bill (HB) 1068, which would require law enforcement officials to submit a request for testing within 30 days of receiving a kit.
It would also create a committee to address the statewide backlog, estimated to be around 6,000.
George Johnston, public information officer for Washington’s crime lab, said staffing and resources would need to keep up if the bill passes. Otherwise, kits would transfer from a shelf in the warehouse to a shelf in the lab.
“We know there’s a tremendous amount of pressure nationwide to have all rape kits examined, and we understand that and we know it’s coming,” Johnston said. “It has the potential to overwhelm us.”
Nollette said the first batch of untested Seattle kits is a sort of trial to see how things go and determine what will be a sustainable workload.
The lab has 35 to 40 scientists, Johnston said, who currently have their own manageable backlog of about 12 kits per person.
Testing a kit costs an estimated $250 to $500, which is less than in locations that do not have their own state-funded labs.
“If they are done a little at a time, it’s easy enough to handle,” Johnston said. “It will be up to supervisors to find a way to juggle this. If they get a bunch of these old cases, they will have to be prioritized in there somewhere.”
The lab also tests evidence from crimes such as homicide and robbery. By the time rape kits are prioritized and processed, turnaround time is typically 58 days, Johnston said. He is unsure how long it will take to get through Seattle’s close to 1,300 untested kits.
Nollette said testing kits from open stranger-rape cases will continue to be the priority because of the kits’ imminent value.
As for what happens after kits are tested, Satterberg said he doesn’t necessarily expect a slew of cases to be brought to light. Seattle has relatively few untested kits compared with some jurisdictions, he said, and its kits went untested because law enforcement officials felt they had valid reasons not to test them.
Although Satterberg said he isn’t optimistic that law enforcment will solve many new cases, he added, “But we might, and if we solve one, then it’s worth it. Maybe you get lucky.”
Showing victims it ‘matters’
Jenna Hoffman, who requested her real name not be used, reported being raped in Seattle last year.
She said she spent 10 hours at Harborview Medical Center for treatment and a forensic exam.
SPD then chose not to test her rape kit because the accused man’s identity was clear, Hoffman said.
Hoffman later submitted written testimony to the state legislature on HB 1068.
“I am not quite yet one of the women in Detroit whose rape kits were lost for nearly a decade,” she wrote, “but I am a woman waiting for justice with waning expectations for it every day. If this law passes, at the very least I would know there was some evidence analyzed by the police and prosecuting attorneys. At the very least my experience might someday help convict my rapist when he rapes again by connecting his DNA a to a pattern. … I urge you to grant survivors like me this small reprieve.”
Hoffman said she was surprised when she heard that SPD was testing its kits. She has not heard if or when hers will be one of them and doesn’t expect to hear anytime soon, she said. She holds a small hope that if her kit were tested, her rapist’s DNA would match DNA from an unsolved rape, giving identity to an unknown rapist from the past.
“But we’ll never know if they don’t test my kit,” she said.
Nollette said a case like Hoffman’s would not necessarily be first priority for testing, but under the new protocol, it will still be sent. Victims will only be notified if testing a kit produces a new lead, she said.
While some argue that testing kits 100 percent of the time is a misuse of resources, or that law enforcement officials should decide when it is necessary, testing advocates say there is inherent value in processing all kits: For survivors, it validates that going through an invasive, hours-long exam — directly after the traumatic experience of rape — was worth something.
“I think it sends the right message,” said Mary Ellen Stone, executive director of the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center. “I continue to believe that there is value in how we respond to victims and in how the criminal justice system communicates to them: ‘Your report matters. We are going to take it seriously.’”
Hoffman said it was painful to think her kit would never be opened.
“It was long, and it was humiliating,” she said of the forensic exam. “To know that it just got boxed up — to know that they didn’t test it or do anything with it — is shocking and upsetting.”
A ‘small corner’ of a big picture
Rebecca O’Connor, vice president for public policy at the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), said the past decade has seen a push on the national level to end the backlog of rape kits, estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
Armed with grants from the NIJ and millions in funding at the federal and local level, many jurisdictions have begun testing old kits. States such as Illinois and Texas have passed laws requiring law enforcement officials to send kits to crime labs.
“It’s only in the last decade that we’ve had people opening up evidence rooms and closets and saying, ‘Oops,’ ” O’Connor said.
Some jurisdictions have had encouraging results. On Jan. 14, Rick Bell, a prosecutor from Cuyahoga County in Ohio, testified at a Washington State House hearing on HB 1068. At the time, Ohio was about 6,000 deep into 9,000 backlogged kits that are now being tested.
The kits had yielded 2,224 CODIS matches.
In Cuyahoga County alone, law enforcement officials had completed 723 investigations and indicted 244 people. Of those indicted, 30 percent were potential serial rapists, and of those, a majority were suspected of both stranger and acquaintance rapes.
“This is the one project in all my years of being a prosecutor that I have seen such wild, successful results,” Bell said at the hearing.
While condoning the testing of kits, advocacy groups underscore the reality that testing kits is not synonymous with justice for rape surivors. Very few rapes are reported, and they seldom lead to arrest, prosecution or conviction. In the end, RAINN estimates that three out of 100 rapists get jail time.
SPD data show that last year in Seattle, there were 128 reported rapes. King County Superior Court statistics show that in this county, an average of three sex-crime cases per month go to jury trial.
Cordo of the YWCA said most cases end with a plea deal.
With that in mind, Cordo said, she is concerned that the focus on testing rape kits might come at the expense of addressing larger issues. Some victim advocacy groups haven’t taken an official stance on whether to test all kits, at times referring to the limited resources for bringing justice to victims.
In her years representing rape victims, Cordo said she has seen many poor investigations where officials fail to visit the scene of the crime, interview witnesses or test blood and urine to determine if a victim had been drugged.
“If we can identify more serial predators by [testing], I think that’s great,” she said. “But sadly, we are not seeing the quality of investigation and the courage of prosecution that I think residents have a right to.”
Cordo continued, “As a result, many victims don’t see justice, and many rapists don’t spend a day in jail. While testing rape kits may help, what we really need is a systemic improvement in the way that investigation and prosecutions are conducted.”
Nollette said she doesn’t think testing rape kits and addressing other facets of the justice system are mutually exclusive.
“We’re trying to improve one small corner,” she said. “I don’t think that takes away from any of the bigger issues.”
To Hoffman, SPD’s decision offers meager comfort, but she hopes it’s a first step:
“It made me feel l ike maybe something is starting to happen, but I hope they don’t do this and think this solves the problem. I hope that when they test these kits they find a bunch of serial rapists. And I hope that they are actually tried and convicted.”