Shared from the 10/4/2019 Houston Chronicle eEdition

Cornyn, advocates urge action on rape kit act

House Dems blamed after funding expires for program that gives resources to crime labs

Picture
Marie D. De Jesus / Staff file photo

The federal funding could help provide resources for crime labs to test the estimated 2,138 untested rape kits in Texas.

Picture
Marie D. De Jesus / Staff file photo

If the federal funding isn’t reauthorized soon, forensic experts fear Houston could accumulate the first backlog of untested rape kits in the city since 2014.

Every five years, Debbie Smith watches as Congress comes to the brink of letting the federal program bearing her name expire.

But lawmakers always found a way to pass the Debbie Smith Act, which sends resources to crime laboratories across the country to test rape kits and DNA evidence from other unsolved crimes.

In an odd way, it helped keep Smith’s faith in government — until now.

Funding for the program expired Sept. 30 as lawmakers left for a two-week recess without renewing it for the first time in its 15-year history. She and other advocates are blaming Democrats for rolling it into their rewrite of the Violence Against Women Act — a much more complicated bill with a long history of getting caught up in partisan fights.

Smith says the funding is urgently needed. A report from the federal Government Accountability Office earlier this year found that the number of backlogged requests for crime scene DNA analysis at state and local government labs increased by 85 percent —from about 91,000 to about 169,000 — from 2011 through 2017.

There are currently an estimated 2,138 untested rape kits in Texas, according to the Joyful Heart Foundation, a national nonprofit that supports victims of sexual violence.

“People don’t think Congress works together at all. I would always tell them yes they do,” said Smith, a rape survivor from Williamsburg, Va., who saw DNA evidence in her case go untested for five years before those tests finally helped police find a suspect.

“But now I’m starting to be as cynical as they are,” she said. “This is the one thing they could always agree on.”

Nobody is doubting the need for the legislation, which authorizes the Department of Justice to send $151 million in grants to state and local law enforcement agencies to complete forensic analyses of crime scenes and untested rape kits. More than 641,000 DNA cases have been processed since it became law.

How the bill should be passed, however, is another matter.

Bipartisan effort?

The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the bill as part of the Violence Against Women Act in April. That legislation drew just 33 Republican votes in the House and includes aprovision closing the so-called boyfriend loophole by prohibiting those convicted of abusing or stalking a dating partner from owning guns.

The National Rifle Association opposes the Violence Against Women Act, which hasn’t moved in the Republican-controlled

Senate.

The Senate did, however, pass a standalone version of the Debbie Smith Act in May. It was as bipartisan as it gets: Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, led a group senators from both parties in pushing the bill, which passed unanimously.

Cornyn, who came to Houston on Thursday to talk to city officials about the importance of the funding, blasted Democrats for failing to act on the Senate bill.

“We passed this bill in the Senate and then it came to a screeching halt in the House of Representatives,” Cornyn said at a news conference at the site of the soon-to-be new Houston Forensic Science Center. “I’m hoping because of the attention that we’re focusing on this issue today, that the members of the House will urge the speaker to take a vote on this matter without further delay. They can do it rather quickly.”

House Democrats argue the Debbie Smith Act fits well with the broader legislation, which is meant to protect women. They say both pieces of legislation are urgently needed.

The Violence Against Women Act, which also expired earlier this month, established the National Domestic Violence Hotline and the Office of Violence Against Women in the Justice Department.

In addition, it funds shelters and has sent billions in grants to programs aimed at preventing domestic violence, sexual assault and more.

U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Houston Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, which passed the Violence Against Women Act, said they were put together because “there was a sense of trying to get it all done.”

“This is not the time to have a disagreement of who’s on first,” Garcia said. “We need to move them both along.”

Advocates, including Smith and organizations such as the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, however, are frustrated with the Democrats’ tactics.

“All of this is for, to me, political games,” Smith said. “The right thing to do here is let Debbie Smith go through on its own, because everybody agrees with that, and then fight the rest out later. Don’t punish victims. This is what so frustrates me.”

Cornyn was joined in Houston by Mayor Sylvester Turner and other city officials at the forensic center, which gets $1.6 million from the federal government through the Debbie Smith Act. That money won’t start flowing again until the legislation is reauthorized.

In Texas alone, Cornyn says, the Debbie Smith Act has helped reduce the backlog of untested rape kits by approximately 90 percent. He says the state has gone from roughly 20,000 untested rape kits in 2001 to 2,000.

Though the federal funding expired, lawmakers in Texas earlier this year agreed to spend $54 million to hire more people to work in crime labs and expand access to specially trained sexual assault nurse examiners, part of the Lavinia Masters Act, which also requires future evidence to be tested promptly.

Local impact

If the federal funding isn’t reauthorized soon, forensic experts fear Houston could accumulate the first backlog of untested rape kits in the city since 2014.

“We’re really worried about this,” said Peter Stout, CEO and president of the Houston Forensic Science Center. “This is equipment, this is personnel, this is training.”

The financial blow comes at atime when forensic labs across the country are already struggling to fund basic needs, Stout said. It’s also a period when many labs are shifting to new technology.

“We risk not only backlogs, but we also risk slowing down the improvements in technology and the capacity of our entire system,” he said.

Up until 2014, there were more than 6,600 rape kits that went untested by the Houston Police Department from cases dating back to the 1980s.

In 2002, DNA testing at HPD’s crime lab was temporarily suspended after an independent audit revealed shoddy forensic work. The lab reopened about adecade later.

The city spent millions to outsource DNA testing to reduce the number of untested kits.

Part of the funding was dedicated to studying why the rape kits were not tested. Lack of police resources and the way officers interacted with victims were cited in a 2016 report from the National Institute of Justice. The report shaped new policies in police department training on how to respond to reports of assault.

After the backlogged rape kits were tested, 29 suspects were charged. Of those, at least seven committed other sexual assaults while rape kits containing their DNA sat untested. A Houston Chronicle review of cases found at least three of the suspects were previously convicted felons, indicating they could have been identified had the rape kits been tested.

Lavinia Masters, advocate and namesake of the recent Texas act that aims to eliminate the state’s rape kit backlog, was raped at knifepoint when she was 13 by a man who broke into her Dallas home in the middle of the night. Her rape kit went untested for more than 20 years, well after the statute of limitations ran out on her criminal case. Masters’ rapist was identified in 2005, she said, and he was already imprisoned for another sexual assault.

On Thursday in Houston, Masters said she suffered two traumas, the first her rape and the second the way she was treated by officers.

“They said, ‘Are you sure it wasn’t your boyfriend? Are you sure you didn’t let him in the window?’ They had no sympathy or compassion whatsoever for the victim that was standing before them,” she said.

Better training for law enforcement on the effects of trauma on victims is essential, Masters said.

“It was a horrific experience,” she said of her treatment by police. “In my mind, I’m thinking, ‘You stopped looking because you stopped believing me.’ ”

Masters said she lived in fear for decades, not knowing where her rapist was or if he was ever brought to justice. And as an adult, she said, she moved every year or whenever she felt anxiety about where he might be.

The failure to reauthorize the Smith Act will hurt victims both in the long and short term, Masters said.

“This type of funding is not just for now,” she said. “It’s for the future.” ben.wermund@chron.com hannah.dellinger@chron.com

See this article in the e-Edition Here
Edit Privacy