Virginia has tested thousands of previously untested rape kits, eliminating a years-long backlog and making the commonwealth among the first states to do so, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring announced Wednesday.
At a press conference, Herring said over the past several years Virginia has tested more than 2,600 rape kits, which are assembled with the cooperation of survivors in the immediate aftermath of sexual assaults and can contain physical evidence of those assaults.
That testing has allowed officials to enter more than 850 DNA profiles into a national database law enforcement uses to help identify suspects and solve crimes. Herring said the results led to more than 350 “hits,” or DNA profile matches, that local police may use in their investigations.
A Spotsylvania County man is facing charges because of evidence revealed through a rape-kit test, and charges in other cases could yet be filed, the attorney general added. Virginia officials believe the commonwealth is the seventh state to have cleared its backlog of untested rape kits.
Herring pledged that a backlog would “never” return, partly thanks to recent investments Virginia has made in handling sexual assault cases, including a new statewide system for tracking rape kits and training law enforcement in trauma-informed practices. He said the increase in testing is built into an “overall transformation of how Virginia is responding to sexual violence and making sure the survivor and the survivor’s wellbeing is at the center.”
There were nearly 3,000 untested rape kits in the commonwealth when Herring took office in 2014. The attorney general said his office partnered with the Virginia Department of Forensic Sciences and local law enforcement to eliminate the backlog, “moving as quickly as we could while keeping in mind that each kit could contain evidence in a criminal case.”
In 2016, Virginia lawmakers tightened the rules around rape kits, also known as PERK kits, to better ensure they would be collected, stored, and analyzed without delay.
