House and Senate Lawmakers Team Up to Put Rapists Behind Bars
By Heidi Taylor
WASHINGTON—Thirteen years ago, Debbie Smith says she was robbed of her ability to enjoy life when a man broke into her home, abducted her and brutally raped her. This week, she said she was glad that some good might come of her ordeal as she stood in the Capitol with a bipartisan group of lawmakers and asked Congress to pass legislation to help women like her, who, after their attacks, felt victimized by the legal system as well.
On Tuesday, several lawmakers introduced the Debbie Smith Act in the House. The bill–identical to one introduced in the Senate in January by Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, Joe Biden, D-DE, Maria Cantwell D-WA, and Arlen Specter, R-PA–would provide more than $600 million to process DNA evidence in rape cases and to train emergency responders and health specialists in proper evidence collection.
“We would love to have this bill passed,” Essex County District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett said in a phone interview, adding that the money would be a great tool for solving and processing cases that, up to now, have gone unsolved and unprocessed.
“We don’t have funding in Massachusetts to process the number of cases we see,” Blodgett said, adding that all Massachusetts crime labs are in a state of crisis because they do not have enough money to meet their staffing and processing demands.
This forces prosecutors to give less attention then they’d like to cases that would require more than funding allows, according to Blodgett. And that adds up to a hard choice, he said, because “every case is an important case.”
Clinton said at a press conference Tuesday that this situation would fall into the category of “shame on us if we don’t finally act.” According to the Department of Justice, there is a sexual assault every 82 seconds in this country. And legislators said too many go unsolved. They released estimates that up to 500,000 rape kits nationwide could contain DNA evidence that could convict a rapist but sit untested for lack of funds.
“Every unprocessed kit represents a predator,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, one of the main House sponsors, said, adding that even one rape kit left unprocessed is too many.
The legislation would authorize $300 million over five years to states and local jurisdictions for DNA analysis of unprocessed rape kits. Legislators said that it costs $500 to $1,500 for each DNA analysis and that they expect the money to make a significant dent in the number of rape kits that, they said, are just gathering dust because there is no money to process them.
The bill also would authorize $75 million in new funding for DNA analysis of convicted felons. That DNA information could then go into state and national databases so that prosecutors could search in jurisdictions other than their own for suspects.
Blodgett said that combined with an increased ability to do testing, this bigger, broader database of DNA information would be “a tremendous advantage.” These improvements to the system would give prosecutors a much better chance of finding a suspect in a cold case in which there is evidence but no immediate match to a suspect, he said.
The legislation also would provide funding for communities to have nurses trained in collecting and handling forensic evidence and treating emotionally fragile patients, as well as grants to train law enforcement and first responders in collecting and handling DNA evidence. Proper collection of DNA evidence is critical, according to prosecutors, because DNA samples improperly collected can mean the end of a case.
At the press conference, Republican and Democratic lawmakers agreed that they were willing to make the issue a priority. The bill was expected to pass quickly in the Senate, as it did last session, and Maloney said that there are already 85 co-sponsors of the legislation on the House side.
“This is not rocket science,” Biden said, adding that there is the possibility that up to 50 percent of all unsolved rape cases could be solved just by marrying the evidence already collected to a beefed-up national database of DNA samples.
“We call them cases, but let’s not make any mistakes-these are human beings,” Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) said. “Money is all that separates thousands of women from having closure on their cases.”
Published in The Newburyport Daily News, The Gloucester Daily News, and The Salem News in Massachusetts.
