The Rape Kit Backlog and What's Being Done about It

In 1985, Anthony Wyrick sexually assaulted two teenage girls in Charlotte. The police collected semen and other biological evidence but DNA testing was not available at that time and the crime went unsolved. Almost 30 years later, the case came to the attention of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s sexual assault cold case unit. Officers submitted the biological evidence for DNA testing. The results pointed to Wyrick, who lived near the scene of the crime in 1985 and who had since been convicted of an unrelated second-degree rape. Wyrick was eventually arrested, charged, and convicted. His conviction was affirmed last month in State v. Wyrick, which I how I learned of the case. Reading it got me wondering about the status of what is popularly known as the rape kit backlog. What’s a rape kit? It’s a set of biological evidence collected from a sexual assault victim during an extensive, invasive, multi-hour examination. More details are available here. What’s the rape kit backlog? The backlog is comprised of the rape kits that are sitting untested at law enforcement agencies around the country. How big is the backlog? We don’t know. In 2015, the White House estimated that it includes 400,000 kits. Several states have conducted inventories and have found backlogs like 20,000 in Texas, 4,000 in Illinois, and 10,000 in Ohio. A number of major cities have found substantial backlogs as described here. Where backlogs have been documented, efforts have been made to reduce them, so it is not possible to say [...]