OLR (my favorite office in State Government aside from LCO) just completed a shocking report on Connecticut’s shameful rape kit backlog.
One of the great difficulties in representing someone who is the victim of a crime is explaining the length of time it takes to get reports back from the State. Despite all of the bluster one reads about State Government being too large, from my experience in dealing with all sorts of State agencies – staffing levels are bare bones which makes quick turnarounds of almost anything impossible.
With that in mind OLR’s Rape Kit Backlog report perhaps isn’t that shocking:
–Two hundred five kits are waiting to be processed; the lab estimates that it will take more than six months to finish testing them. Another 40 have been processed through the first two steps and are awaiting DNA analysis. Given existing staffing levels, it will take the lab about five months to complete those analyses, reports Major Podgorski.
-Based on our comparison with a geographically diverse group of other crime labs, we concluded that the length of time it took Connecticut’s crime lab to complete sexual assault evidence testing, particularly in cases where the rape kit was submitted with other evidence, was significantly longer than that of other labs, except Rhode Island, whose turnaround time for testing rape kits without other evidence was six months, the same as Connecticut’s.
The report does say that “forensic lab staff triages cases daily, giving priority to aggravated sexual assaults and those with elderly or young victims”.
The report also details what legislative efforts other states have taken to reduce backlog. Hopefully the General Assembly takes steps to reduce the rape kit backlog during the 2012 legislative session because our current situation is shameful.