State crime lab takes a year to test rape kits, Alvarez says

Despite huge advances in processing rape evidence in Illinois, Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez said Tuesday that prosecutors are still waiting about a year for the state crime lab to provide test results.

Alvarez, a panelist at a national forum on rape kit testing, said police and prosecutors ask the lab to expedite tests in emergency situations such as a child living in a home with a suspect. But “a year is probably the average we see,” she said.

Eugene Roy, chief of detectives for the Chicago Police Department, agreed.

Test400K, a group dedicated to eliminating a national testing backlog of an estimated 400,000 rape kits, hosted the forum at Mesirow Financial in Chicago.

Kristen Field of Test400K said she knows a woman who was raped in April 2015. A year later, Chicago Police detectives have told her they still don’t have the results from her rape kit, which the state police is testing, Field said.

“She knows this perpetrator is on the street,” Field said. “We need to do better for these survivors.”

Sheri Mecklenburg, a federal prosecutor in Chicago, acknowledged that the state’s processing of rape kits has improved greatly since the early 2000s.

Mecklenburg, who was the legal adviser to former Chicago Police Supt. Phil Cline, spearheaded an effort to have the Illinois State Police crime lab test almost 2,700 of Chicago’s pre-2000 rape kits.

Those tests were completed in 2007, yielding more than 100 DNA profiles and a link to a serial rapist.

The project also led to reforms in the state’s processing of DNA, making Illinois a leader in testing rape kits, Mecklenburg said.

But serious problems remain.

Cindy Hora of the Illinois Attorney General’s office said proposed legislation would “tweak” the system to allow women to take up to five years to decide whether to consent to having their rape kits tested. Police would have to store untested rape kits until that period expires. At the request of a victim, police would also have to tell them about the status of the testing on their kits.

Another pending bill would require the state police to track what happens after its crime lab obtains a “hit” linking DNA to a potential suspect.

That bill, sponsored by State Sen. Bill Cunningham, D-Chicago, passed the Illinois Senate on Tuesday.

The bill would require state police to notify the investigating law enforcement agency and state’s attorney’s office in writing if a DNA match has been identified for a sexual assault evidence kit. It also requires police departments to conduct an inventory of their kits and submit that information to the state’s attorney’s office.

Cunningham told legislators the bill will help “provide an added set of eyes on the problem” and will help ensure evidence is followed up on.

Meanwhile, a backlog continues to plague the state crime lab, said Arlene Hall, commander of the state police crime lab.

Over the past decade, the state police had whittled down a testing backlog. But the number of new rape kit tests skyrocketed in 2011 when a state law required police to submit all DNA evidence from sex crimes within 10 days of collecting it. Police were also required to give the state lab an inventory of all untested rape kits in their storage facilities.

By the end of March 2016, the state crime lab was dealing with a backlog of 2,179 criminal sexual assault cases in which tests have been pending for more than a month, Hall said. She said 80 scientists had been processing such cases in 2009, but only 62 are today.

Four scientists are in training, six more are being hired, and there’s a new contract allowing the lab to outsource some of the testing, Hall said. Other internal changes in the lab are being made to speed up the testing, she said.

“It takes a long time to chip away at it,” she said.

Natasha Alexenko, founder of Natasha’s Project, a national rape advocacy group, said her own rape demonstrates the need for faster testing.

She was sexually assaulted at gunpoint in 1993 in New York, but her rape kit took more than nine years to test — just months before the state’s 10-year statute of limitations was to expire.

In 2007 “we found the monster who raped me,” Alexenko said of her attacker, who was convicted and is eligible for parole in 2057. “I no longer have to look over my shoulder.”

But she added: “We have hundreds of thousands of rape kits across the country collecting dust.”

Contributing: Tina Sfondeles