There are 25,000 untested rape kits sitting in storage, around the United States, that are purposely not being tested by law enforcement, even though they contain DNA evidence that can easily help solve rapes. Law enforcement is deliberately not testing evidence that can solve violent sex crimes committed almost exclusively against girls and women. The two sentences you just read are not hyperbole.
Since billions of dollars of federal grants and exposé after exposé about the rape kit backlog have not ended the backlog, rape victims have tried to take matters into their own hands through constitutional litigation in federal courts. This paper will discuss those Equal Protection cases and how they failed. It will also propose solutions for how rape victims can get judicial relief in state courts using a combination of state constitutional law and international human rights law. Judicial relief is necessary because the rape kit backlog still exists. Efforts by the Justice Department to end the backlog, while well-meaning, have been limited, ostensibly because of a lack of resources to investigate all gender and other forms of bias in policing. Moreover, the federal government continues to fund law enforcement without making future grants contingent on ending the rape kit backlog.
To read this Article, please click here: Using State Constitutions and International Human Rights Law to Compel Law Enforcement to Test Rape Kits.
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