Ted Poe: “The Department of Justice is failing rape victims. Across America, an estimated 400,000 untested rape kits sit on…”

“The Department of Justice is failing rape victims. Across America, an estimated 400,000 untested rape kits sit on shelves. Government officials long blamed a lack of resources to test the kits; so Congress fixed this problem in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, VAWA, as it is called. VAWA included the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Reporting Act, or SAFER, which allows and mandates that 75 percent of Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant funds go directly to test the long backlog of rape kits. The bottom line, money has been allocated to fund the backlog of 400,000 rape kits. Funds are required to be made available for audits, so we could find the true number of languishing kits throughout different States and then test them. The goal of SAFER was to ensure that no rape kit went untested, so all victims had answers and all rapists were brought to justice; yet, Mr. Speaker, it has been 2 years. Kits remain in basements on dusty shelves, and nothing has changed. The money is there; the law is written, but the DOJ, the Department of Justice, shamelessly ignores this mandate leaving sexual assault victims waiting for justice. Meanwhile, untested rape kits create an unfair treatment of victims. One thing it does is it allows the guilty outlaws to go free and prevents the innocent from being exonerated. Also, the statute of limitations may expire.…”