Legislation calls for audit of Alaska crime lab's untested rape kits

[Panich52]

Alaska Dispatch
Legislation calls for audit of Alaska crime lab's untested rape kits
  
Sen. Berta Gardner, D-Anchorage, has introduced a bill that would require an audit to determine if the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory has a backlog of untested rape kits, following Outside states that have re-evaluated laws to address untested kits.

Politics | Jerzy Shedlock
Read more
http://www.adn.com/article/20150311/legislation-calls-audit-alaska-crime-labs-untested-rape-kits

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They need legislation to find out if rape kits are untested?!

[niyad]

1. of course, because women are just so unimportant.

[niyad]

2. okay, here is why (and, once again, because women simply don't count)

Gardner’s office has requested a Thursday hearing for Senate Bill 54 after legislative researchers returned unanswered questions about data on rape kits. Rep. Geran Tarr, another Democrat from Anchorage, has presented an identical bill in the Alaska House.

“How many rape kits typically go untested in Alaska each year?” Gardner asked in the research brief.

“Not known,” the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory’s forensic manager, Orin Dym, told legislative researchers.

Gardner also asked if the crime lab kept a percentage or estimate of untested rape kits in the absence of concrete data.

Dym said it did not.

There are monthly meetings with the Alaska Department of Law and law enforcement agencies to discuss testing priorities, the lab manager said. Presently, “priority rape cases” are tested within FORTY DAYS (and these are the PRIORITY cases) while “tests with low scientific value may take up to FOURTEEN MONTHS (emphasis mine),” the research brief says.