Road Ahead: Unanalyzed Evidence in Sexual Assault Cases. NIJ Special Report

摘要

Untested sexual assault evidence is being discovered in police evidence rooms all across the country. In this report, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) offers an overview of the issue. We look at a variety of ramifications for the police and crime laboratories, for the courts and for the victims. It is unknown how many unanalyzed sexual assault kits (SAKs) there are nationwide. There are many reasons for this, but one is that tracking and counting SAKs is an antiquated process in many U.S. jurisdictions. Certainly, there may be legitimate reasons why some of the recently discovered unanalyzed SAKs were not sent to a lab. Not all evidence collected in an allege sexual assault is going to be probative. Fo example, in cases where 'consent' is an issue (the suspect admits sexual contact but maintains it was consensual), detectives may consider that the SAK does not add any important information to the investigation. That said, it is clear that we, as a nation, need to understand more about how law enforcement decides to submit a SAK to the crime lab for analysis (or not) and how cases are triaged for other investigation.