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Audit Shows About 2,500 Sexual Assault Kits Were Not Tested

By Miranda Fulmore, IPB News | Published on in Crime, Government, Law, Statewide News
Major Steve Holland from the State Police Laboratory System says each kit includes 15 to 20 samples that have to be tested. (Photo: Steve Burns)

An audit of more than 5,300 Indiana sexual assault kits reveals that close to half have gone unprocessed for reasons that remain unclear.

Half of those kits fall into certain categories – false-report kits, adjudicated cases, or “Jane Doe” kits, meaning law enforcement can’t test the kits without permission from the victim.

Prosecutor David Powell says he estimates the kits in the audit could date back as far as 20 years. He says the next step is to figure out why the kits were never tested.

“I don’t want to speculate, but our guess is that a lot of these kits were just left in the evidence room,” Powell says. “But they may have been a ‘Jane Doe’ kit that should have been destroyed. They’re supposed to be destroyed after 12 months, but my experience with law enforcement and evidence rooms is they tend to leave everything in there forever.”

But for the other half, the audit didn’t get specific answers.

The audit itself came by an Indiana Senate resolution, authored by Senator Michael Crider this year.  He says each kit is representative of a person’s life and he hopes to process as many kits as possible.

But Major Steve Holland from the State Police Laboratory System says the issue is more complicated.  He says each kit includes 15 to 20 samples that have to be tested, which can get expensive.

“To give you a specific number, that each kit cost X, is difficult because each kit in theory is different,” Holland says. “I can tell you that if we outsource these kits, it’s probably in the range of $1,000 per kit.”

Crider says he will present a bill during the next legislative session that will address the issue of the backlog.  He says it will include recommendations by state police, like using a bar code tracking system.