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More than 2,000 rape kits from a dozen San Diego County law enforcement agencies have been tested following their delivery to an independent lab, the latest milestone in a three-year project to clear the county s untested sexual assault kit backlog, the San Diego County District Attorney s Office announced Wednesday.
Of the 2,030 kits submitted, 735 contained DNA other than the victim s, according to the District Attorney s Office, which said the testing has resulted in criminal charges being filed in a new case. Larry Gene Rivers, 57, is charged with sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in 2014, and the DA s Office says DNA evidence from one of the newly tested kits led to the filing of charges.
May 21, 2021
After Madison Campbell was sexually assaulted, she had an overwhelming feeling of not wanting to be touched by anyone, she remembers.
She didn’t want to tell her friends what happened, she didn’t want to talk to the police, she didn’t want to leave her dorm room ever again. In the hours that followed the crime, which occurred while she attended a study abroad program at the University of Edinburgh in 2016, she walked to a nearby pharmacy to buy black dye for her blond hair, and spend the following days and weeks rewatching Westworld.
Years later, it wasn’t just the assault that haunted her it was the fact that she had no evidence it ever happened. “I had no text messages, no photos saved. I didn’t save my clothes. I didn’t save anything. And so it would have been my word against his,” she told Quartz. “It’s really disgusting to me that I didn’t feel like I can get any sort of justice because I had I had nothing to prove that it happened.”
Credit Stephen Jerkins / WPLN
A bill making its way through the Tennessee legislature would give sexual assault survivors the ability to track the location of their rape kits.
If passed, victims would be able to track when their rape kit is picked up from the hospital by police, when it reaches a lab to be tested and the status of those tests.
This comes several years after widespread mishandling of sexual assault evidence was discovered in Memphis. In 2014, more than 12,000 rape kits were left untested in Memphis alone.
This backlog has since been resolved, but there’s still room for reform in rape investigations, said Rep. Bob Freeman, D-Nashville.
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Rape kits are used to collect evidence of a sexual assault. Both prosecution and defense attorneys testified Wednesday that DIY versions of these kits are not typically admissible in court.
Rape kits are used to collect evidence of a sexual assault. Both prosecution and defense attorneys testified that DIY versions of these kits are not typically admissible in court because it’s difficult to prove a chain of custody. That’s required to prove that the evidence presented in court is authentic and hasn’t been tampered with.
Sen. Evan Vickers, R-Cedar City, said a better option could be to regulate these kits, rather than ban them. He suggested lawmakers should gather more information from the industry and come to a compromise with them.
Interior Health says they can still access the three-hour procedure if they just go to Kelowna an hour away, while also being told not to pee or clean themselves.