More than half of North Carolina’s sexual assault kit backlog has now been tested

Once one of the states with the highest number of untested sexual assault kits, North Carolina has now cleared over half of its backlog of more than 16,000 cases, resulting in at least 40 arrests related to at least 58 assaults.

Attorney General Josh Stein said the cost of outsourcing sexual assault kits is increasing drastically and is asking the state legislature for $9 million to fund the outsourcing of all the remaining kits. An initial $6 million was allocated over two years to clear the backlog

The price for the lab to test a kit has increased from roughly $700 to $1,245.

“The state is making good progress on testing these kits and we are solving old cases and locking up dangerous people, but we have to keep going,” Stein said. “We know for sure that when we test these old kits we can solve cases — and we cannot let up until we fully eliminate the backlog.”

Stein said there were several reasons the backlog developed. Law enforcement didn’t send the kits to the lab, the lab didn’t have the technology it does today, the legislature didn’t fund the testing of the rape kits, the state didn’t know how many kits were untested, and local district attorneys didn’t reach out to law enforcement to move the backlog.

In North Carolina, 268 law enforcement agencies have all of their kits in the pipeline for testing, or have completely eliminated their backlogs, Stein said in a press conference Tuesday. The Fayetteville Police Department has completely eliminated its backlog, Stein said. It secured its own grants and has made 62 arrests as a result of its work on cold cases.

The Durham Police Department, responsible for a city with a population size comparable to Fayetteville’s, had tested 270 of its backlog of more than 1,700 sexual assault kits as of February 2021, resulting in 13 people being charged in 17 cases. Durham also secured its own grants, which total more than $1.5 million.

The Raleigh Police Department has outsourced 332 sexual assault kits out of its backlog of 912. According to a presentation shown during a Wake County Public Safety Committee meeting, 580 kits still have to be outsourced.

Preparing sexual assault kits can take hours and involve a thorough, invasive physical examination and an interview.

“We owe it to them (survivors) to test their kits,” Stein said.

In late 2017, the NC Department of Justice conducted an inventory of sexual assault kits with all the state’s law enforcement agencies. The audit found a backlog of more than 15,000 untested kits at the time.

To ensure backlogs do not build up in the future, the state legislature enacted the Survivor Act in 2019.

The law requires law enforcement agencies to submit sexual assault kits to a lab within 45 days. It also requires law enforcement agencies to review cases and prioritize them based on the potential to investigate them and the likelihood of getting a hit in the national database.

As part of the Survivor Act, law enforcement agencies are sending in more sexual assault kits. From 2018-19 to 2019-20, the number of kits sent in has increased from 821 to 1,853, a news release from Stein’s office said.

“To the victims, we want them to know we care about what happened to them and that we will do everything in our power to develop justice for them,” he said. “To the rapists and criminals, no matter how long ago you committed your crime, we will not stop coming for you.”

DNA to prove innocence

Christine Mumma is the director of the NC Center on Actual Innocence, which works to investigate claims of wrongful convictions. She said Tuesday that even though improvements in DNA collection and testing are now being framed as something Stein and state lawmakers have pushed for to help victims of sexual assault, the changes to evidence rules actually started because of her efforts a decade ago to exonerate wrongfully convicted people.

Her group and others like it have since been able to use DNA to prove the innocence of a number of North Carolinians who were wrongfully convicted of serious crimes like rape and murder.

”This is exactly what happened in Henry Brown and Leon McCollum’s case,” Mumma said. “(The state) said the evidence wasn’t there. But it was.”

Brown and McCollum are two intellectually disabled Black men from Robeson County who local law enforcement coerced into falsely confessing to the rape and murder of a young girl there in 1983, when they were teenagers.

DNA evidence would eventually prove — once it was tested decades later — that a different man actually committed the crime. They were set free in 2014 and last week won a $75 million verdict in court in a lawsuit against two investigators from the State Bureau of Investigation.

A jury awarded them $13 million in damages plus $1 million for every year they wrongfully spent in prison, The N&O reported, on top of another $9 million that the Robeson County Sheriff’s Office agreed to pay in a settlement.

This story was originally published May 19, 2021 at 3:56 PM.