‘Safe center’ near DM metro could boost rape reporting, prosecutions
Sexual assault victims in Iowa would have a 24-hour place to go, away from hospital emergency rooms, under plans being finalized for a ‘safe center’
Iowa law enforcement agencies have tested less DNA evidence in sexual assault cases at the state crime lab in recent years than they did five years ago.Iowa police and sheriffs maintain vastly different approaches to DNA testing in sexual assault cases. State guidance that discourages testing for some cases defies national best practices.When more sex assault kits are tested, more serial offenders get caught, research shows.
First of two parts
Editor’s note: The following article describes acts of sexual assault and may not be appropriate for some readers.
Only about 16% of sexual assault kits collected in Iowa last year were tested for DNA evidence, a figure that has declined over time even though felony sexual assaults have risen across the state, a Des Moines Register investigation has found.
Over the last three years, fewer than one in five kits were tested at the state crime laboratory in Ankeny, the probe found, and law enforcement agencies maintain vastly different approaches on whether to send evidence for testing: While some send all sexual assault kits for testing, others don’t bother when two people involved in an alleged assault disagree over whether a sex act was consensual.
Agencies said they’ve been doing that based on guidance from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Criminalistics Laboratory ― guidance that flies in the face of national best practices and research showing more serial offenders get caught when more kits are tested.
Roxanne Conlin, long one of Iowa’s most high-profile advocates for sexual assault survivors, called the state’s reduced testing “massively frustrating.”
“Rape is almost always a serial event,“ said Conlin, a former U.S. attorney for Iowa’s southern district who has represented scores of women in sexual assault cases for decades. “My biggest concern about this ongoing problem is that there are samples that have not been tested from people who are actively committing these crimes.”
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird’s office, which declined repeated requests to interview experts in her office, says that the state crime lab has no testing backlog and that her office has encouraged county attorneys to send their cases to her office.
Part 2: Iowa’s push to clear a backlog of sexual assault kits tested just over a third of them
“In every case given to our office where there is evidence to be gained from testing a sexual assault kit, and the victim chooses to proceed criminally, the kit has been tested,” Alyssa Brouillet, a spokeswoman for the office, wrote in an email.
But with a requirement under state law to store sexual assault kits for at least 15 years, thousands of untested sexual assault kits have piled up anew in police department evidence rooms across the state, the Register found. The buildup comes after a massive federal initiative less than a decade ago sought to reduce a backlog of untested kits in Iowa and across the country.
That years-long effort has resulted in roughly 1,500 convictions so far, by the federal government’s count, including charges against four suspected serial predators. One involved an Iowan sought in a high-profile, decades-old cold case.
Twenty-one years ago, a southeast Iowa man abducted two teenage girls on a summer’s evening in downtown Omaha, hauled them in a black pickup across state lines, and sexually assaulted both at knifepoint not far from his home near Pacific Junction. He burned the 14- and 15-year-olds’ breasts with a cigarette, took their undergarments in a bag, then tried to pour gasoline around his truck with the girls inside ― until they managed to escape to strangers on Interstate Highway 29 near Glenwood.
More: ‘Safe center’ near Des Moines metro could increase sexual assault reporting, prosecutions
The unidentified offender was exactly the kind of predator that law enforcement, members of Congress and advocates for survivors hoped to bring to justice when Iowa and other jurisdictions around the country first secured federal money to test a mountain of untested sexual assault kits back in 2015.
The Iowa Department of Justice’s Crime Victims Assistance Division applied for that federal money after a reporting project found that at least 70,000 untested kits containing forensic evidence had accumulated in roughly 1,000 law enforcement evidence rooms nationally. The project, by USA TODAY, The Des Moines Register, TEGNA television stations and other news organizations in the USA TODAY Network, accounted for only a fraction of the nation’s police departments but was the most comprehensive of several projects identifying untested kit backlogs.
“Our hope is to find perpetrators of sexual abuse,” then-Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said after receiving the grant money. “Perhaps some of them will be serial perpetrators and we’ll be able to apprehend them and charge them and put them in prison.”
Under federal best practices developed in 2017 during the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, law enforcement agencies across the country are supposed to submit for testing all sexual assault kits that a victim has consented to reporting to law enforcement.
By the end of the six-year, $3 million federal initiative, Iowa had created its first statewide tracking system for sexual assault kits and greatly reduced the time it took for law enforcement to get DNA test results from the Iowa DCI’s crime lab. Nationally, uploading of nearly 40,000 DNA profiles into an FBI database during the project identified serial sexual predators across the country ― including Myron Lee Brandon of Pacific Junction in connection with the brutal assaults of the two teens in rural Mills County.
The National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, or SAKI, sought to help law enforcement agencies bring justice to more survivors by fixing the problems that prevented sexual assault kits from being tested. Issues included a lack of lab funding and personnel, lack of a coordinated system for testing and tracking kits, outdated approaches to investigations and prosecution, disparate law priorities across the states and skyrocketing demand for DNA testing. The result in Iowa: At least 4,264 sexual assault kits sat untouched as cold case evidence by 2016, a state inventory of kits found.
DNA taken from one of Brandon’s victims was eventually tested in 2020. The match was a rare whodunnit grand slam: It sent Brandon to federal prison for 33 years.
As fewer sexual assault kits are tested, chances to identify serial offenders drop
The chances of Iowa law enforcement connecting DNA to more serial sexual offenders have lessened since the state took part in the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.
Over the last three calendar years, kits submitted to the state crime lab for testing fell from 470 in 2021 to 392 in 2023, according to figures provided by Tawny Kruse, communications bureau chief of the Iowa Department of Public Safety. The 2023 figure for kits submitted represents only about one in six kits collected by hospitals across the state.
Iowa advocates and prosecutors told the Register that sexual assaults reported to Iowa hospitals decreased during the COVID-19 epidemic. But lower kit submissions continued after the pandemic waned. At the same time, the number of people showing up for sexual assault exams at hospitals increased again to almost pre-pandemic levels, and felony-level sexual assault offenses in Iowa increased, data from the state court system and Bird’s office show.
The Department of Public Safety declined to answer several questions submitted to Kruse by the Register. Kruse also declined repeated requests to interview Paul Hermsen, administrator of the DCI crime lab in Ankeny.
The attorney general’s office also declined requests to interview Michael McDonald, its expert on Iowa’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, or his boss, John Gish, director of the Crime Victim Assistance Division.
Iowa crime lab’s controversial testing guidelines defy best practices
But Iowa law enforcement agencies told the Register that the state crime lab’s guidelines, updated most recently last year, advise agencies not to submit kits for testing if the alleged offender is known to the alleged victim and disputes whether sex was consensual. “Where the issue is consent and not identity, please consider not submitting DNA evidence for processing unless needed,” the lab’s guidelines say.
The state lab’s guidelines also advise law enforcement to submit only evidence related to current prosecutions.
Some states, including Connecticut, Kentucky and Michigan, have mandated testing of sexual assault kits within certain time frames to ensure backlogs never happen again and more victims get justice. Iowa has not.
Dr. Matt DeLisi, a renowned criminologist at Iowa State University, said his examination of the arrest records of offenders identified through DNA testing shows they are almost all chronic and, often, serial offenders responsible for a variety of serious crimes over time.
DeLisi, who examined over 100 cold cases resolved by DNA evidence in a book released this year called “What DNA Evidence Reveals About Criminals: Cold Case Criminology,” said allowing kits to gather dust in evidence rooms, rather than testing them, enables offenders to continue committing crimes under the radar of law enforcement.
“Even when states do widespread testing, it’s not something that’s going to produce an 80 percent conviction rate,” he acknowledged. But thoroughly and conscientiously collecting DNA data and testing it, he said, helps solve not just cold case sexual assaults, but murders and other crimes.
Untested sexual assault kits across Iowa: What the numbers show
The greatest goals of the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative were to test untested sexual assault kits across the nation, develop comprehensive community responses to cases centering on the victim, support the investigation and prosecution of cases for which kits weren’t being submitted, and prevent backlogs from piling up again.
Across Iowa, hundreds of kits aren’t tested because victims who turn up at hospitals after assaults say they want to remain anonymous or don’t want to proceed at that time with a criminal investigation.
“Honestly, what we find is it’s not a safe time for them to pursue an investigation,” said Shannon Knudsen, a sexual assault nurse examiner since 2010 and veteran coordinator for response teams in Polk and Story counties. “Some don’t have a kit collected. Some do and want their kit tested. Sometimes, they think there’s going to be an automatic answer about who raped them. But DNA doesn’t necessarily prove or disprove sexual assault.”
In Madison County, Sheriff Jason Barnes said a backlog of untested sexual assault kits has never been an issue because all kits collected are submitted for testing.
“Once testing is complete, that kit is returned to this office and stored in evidence and never destroyed. Evidence storage has never been an issue,” he said.
But several law enforcement agencies, including the Des Moines Police Department and the Linn County Sheriff’s Office in Cedar Rapids, said they have prioritized DNA testing in cases where the alleged assailant is unknown. And some don’t test if county attorneys’ offices deny prosecution.
Shawn Ireland, deputy Linn County sheriff and president of the Iowa State Sheriffs’ and Deputies’ Association, said he’s not sure why so many departments failed during the SAKI project to submit kits for testing.
He said investigators sometimes face “sticky situations” where they harbor doubts about a person’s account. “I think we all want to have the best process to deal with these situations,” he said.
But Linn County investigators feel their hands are tied if a victim does not want to proceed with a criminal investigation, he said, so they have long prioritized cases for testing that involve an unknown assailant.
In many locales, the numbers of untested kits are far larger now than in 2016, when the state surveyed law enforcement to take an inventory:
As of mid-January, the Des Moines Police Department had 1,673 kits in evidence going back to as far as 1993, according to police spokesperson Sgt. Paul Parizek. Of the total, 325 had been tested; 1,348 hadn’t. Eight years ago, the department had 877 untested kits. The Ames Police Department said in January it had 300 untested sexual assault kits dating back to the early 2000s. It counted 139 in 2016. Ankeny Police Department reported 96 untested kits in January. It counted 43 in 2016. West Des Moines had 325 untested kits; it had 76 in 2016.
Meggan Guns, a veteran prosecutor at the Polk County Attorney’s Office who specializes in sex crimes, said the value of testing a sexual assault kit varies by the case.
A 15-page medical record also is attached to the kit when someone undergoes a sexual assault exam at a hospital, which includes the victim’s version of events, evidence of physical injuries like bruising and other details that may be useful in a case. If the victim consents, Guns said, that report is released to law enforcement.
If two people disagree over events leading to an alleged sexual assault, prosecutors will almost always test the sexual assault kit, she said. But if two people disagree only over whether a sexual act was consensual, testing a kit may be of little use in deciding whether to prosecute, she said.
In many of those cases, she said, any sexual assault nurse examiner, who would have to testify in a court case, would say: I can’t tell whether or not that’s from a forcible assault. Guns said Polk County’s sexual assault response team helps guide law enforcement in best practices on handling cases.
Polk County supports a victim’s wishes on whether to proceed with a case, including whether to test a kit. “I always want victims to feel heard through the process, and I want their legal rights to be met,” Guns said.
She said she could think of only one instance where a victim in Polk County wanted a kit tested and her office declined “for a number of reasons.”
But whether all kits should be tested is a policy and resource decision, she said.
The state lab’s turnaround time for testing is 55 days. Guns said there’s a 14-day “best-case scenario” turnaround time in urgent cases. A couple of years ago, she said, that was six months to a year.
Testing DNA samples in each individual kit also runs on average about $1,400 in addition to analysts’ salaries.
‘DNA is inarguable,’ says veteran lawyer and victim advocate
Conlin said sexual assault often has lifelong consequences, and results from sexual assault kits can be critical evidence in a civil case if the survivor chooses to sue a perpetrator to help cover costs tied to the trauma of the assault. Lawyers can’t use that evidence if law enforcement agencies aren’t willing to submit tests.
“DNA is inarguable,” she said.
Conlin said she lost a civil case this year in which a woman said she was sexually assaulted shortly after meeting the perpetrator. Conlin said a sexual assault nurse confirmed the woman’s injuries were consistent with rape, but the county prosecutor’s office would not press charges, and the law enforcement agency would not test the sexual assault kit.
(The victim did not want to be interviewed, she said.)
In Iowa, Conlin said, survivors also have just two years from the occurrence of a sexual assault, or the date of the discovery of the occurrence, to sue in civil court in most cases.
“Some states have abolished the civil statute of limitations altogether, and that would be my preference,” she said. “I cannot tell you how many older people who have come to me and said, ‘You are the very first person I’ve told.’”
Erica Nichols Cook, director of the Wrongful Convictions Division of the Iowa State Public Defender’s Office, said testing as many kits as possible also is important because testing can rule out suspects quickly and exonerate innocent people.
Iowa, she said, is the only state in the country that has never had someone exonerated by testing DNA evidence post-conviction.
“If there are offenders out there who are continuing to offend and their profiles aren’t in the databases, we’re not going to find them,” Nichols Cook said. “But when we do testing post-conviction, we’re trying to clear the innocent and find out who was involved. The only way you will find the person is if they’re in the database.”
How many kits are untested? Some Iowa agencies don’t know.
Under the national best practices developed after passage of the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Reporting Act, police departments are supposed to do annual inventories of their sexual assault kits and make sure officers who investigate sexual assaults are trained in trauma-informed investigations.
But some of the state’s largest police departments, including Sioux City and Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa and more than 33,000 students, could not tell the Register earlier this year how many untested kits they have stored in evidence. Many departments also don’t receive training on trauma-informed investigations.
In Iowa City, police counted 210 untested kits during the state’s inventory in 2016. This year, spokesman Lee Hermiston said his department wouldn’t count untested kits.
“In order to get the number you’re looking for, we would have to examine the chain of custody of each individual kit. That’s not a task we can dedicate our resources to at this time,” Hermiston said in an email.
The spokesperson for Sioux City’s police department said 670 kits were held in evidence as of January, compared to 275 in 2016. But “providing an exact number of untested kits in house would require an extensive and time-consuming amount of research due to limitations of the property management software, with a very delayed response,” Capt. Ryan Bertrand wrote in an email.
“Anecdotally, it is safe to say that far more kits are collected than are submitted,” Bertrand wrote.
Police agencies take vastly different approaches to DNA testing in sex assault cases
Some law enforcement agencies, such as West Des Moines, Sioux City or the Madison County Sheriff’s Office, insist they test every kit in cases where a victim consents and wants a criminal investigation.
“It’s safe to say, once they’ve come to us, they’re willing to cooperate,” said Barnes, the Madison County sheriff. “We will gather as much evidence as we can as fast as we can. Yes, that kit will still be tested and then returned to this office for storage if a victim decides to not cooperate further.”
Cmdr. Jason Tuttle of the Ames Police Department, home to Iowa State University, said the department tries to honor victims’ wishes in sending kits to the lab, but the lab will not accept a kit if the alleged victim wishes to remain anonymous. His department also may not test kits when two people disagree over whether sex was consensual, in part because of the state lab’s guidance.
“If there are questions, then we would consult with the county attorney and the DCI lab,” Tuttle said. “We would also evaluate whether the victim wants to move forward with a criminal investigation.”
Of the untested kits held in storage by the Des Moines Police Department as of January, 74% weren’t tested because either a victim did not make a police report (in 408 cases) or did not cooperate further with an investigation once a kit was taken (588 cases), Parizek said.
Of the remainder, in 108 cases, the county attorney’s office declined to prosecute the case. And in 92 cases, the kit wasn’t tested because it was determined to have no evidentiary value. In 76 cases, the suspect admitted a sex act occurred, so it was determined testing wasn’t necessary. And in another 76 cases, police decided no crime occurred.
Parizek said the department doesn’t send to the lab any kits when the presence of a known offender’s DNA “would not change the prosecutorial decisions.”
Lynn Hicks, chief of staff for County Attorney Kimberly Graham, said he can’t speak for decisions of past county attorneys on the reasons cases were turned down for prosecution. But he noted the kits go back to 1993 and said “the attitudes of law enforcement and society at large about sexual assault and consent have changed a lot in the last 30 years.”
Under Graham, he said, attorneys “assertively prosecute” sexual assault.
“The reasons for declining to prosecute a case are many, but generally, prosecutors cannot ethically charge someone if the evidence doesn’t support prosecution and they believe they would not be able to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Some advocates argue that testing all the kits collected from victims would lead to more DNA evidence in the national database that might lead to convictions in more cases. They say victims who don’t initially want to pursue a criminal case may also change their minds later if they learn there has been a DNA match to another case.
“It’s pretty unsettling,” said Ann Meyer, legal nurse consultant from Burlington who testifies in court cases. “I think they all should be tested. It seems to me they are kind of dropping the ball when it comes to evidence, especially with sexual assault. I can’t imagine they would take a sample and not finish the process.”
Tiffany Allison, who heads Iowa’s Soaring Hearts Foundation, an advocacy organization for victims of violent crime, said she thinks victims, not prosecutors, should decide whether kits should be tested.
Sexual assault exams are invasive and take hours, so a person’s permission to have one done should not be taken lightly, she said.
“If I am willing to report to law enforcement and have the kit done and I want to pursue a case, I don’t know that I think a county attorney’s office should be making that judgment,” she said.
Iowa Legislature declines to act on speeding testing of sexual assault kits
Under current Iowa law, Iowa Code 709.10, if a victim gives consent to have a sexual assault exam, law enforcement agencies are supposed to pick up kits at medical facilities within 48 hours. Agencies must store the kits in a clean, dry location for a minimum of 15 years for adult victims, or for 15 years after a minor turns 18. Preserving that evidence is required even if the reported victim does not file a criminal complaint.
But the law doesn’t designate a time frame for when kits must be tested.
When kits are tested, the laboratory is required to enter results into the state’s kit tracking system and return the kit to law enforcement.
Then the agency is required to notify the victim prior to the disposal of any kit, the reason for disposal, and the options that remain available for retention and analysis, if any.
This year and last, lawmakers in both the Iowa House and Senate proposed legislation to step up the timeliness of sexual assault kit testing or hold on to sexual assault kits longer to prosecute more offenders and possibly clear others who are wrongfully accused.
Thus far, however, no bill has advanced to the full Legislature.
Soaring Hearts, the Iowa State Bar Association and the Iowa Organization for Victims have advocated for years for such law changes.
“We remain backers of any legislation that would speed up tested kits and keep the findings available,” said Karl Schilling, a lobbyist for both Soaring Hearts and the Iowa Organization for Victims. “Having it on file can lead to the arrest and conviction of sexual predators and keep it from happening to other victims.”
Legislation that stalled last year, House File 441 and Senate File 70, would have required health care providers to notify law enforcement of kits within 24 hours, pick up the kits within three days, and then transfer them to a lab within another seven. The bills also would have required law enforcement to store them longer.
Legislation introduced this year, House File 2350, would have required the state to hold on to kits for 20 years — or a lifetime if the victim was a child. But the measure never advanced beyond committee.
Lee Rood’s Reader’s Watchdog column helps Iowans get answers and accountability from public officials, the justice system, businesses and nonprofits. Reach her at lrood@registermedia.com, at 515-284-8549, on Twitter at @leerood or on Facebook at Facebook.com/readerswatchdog.
Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=66f597d116604f4e94872a4bc28b7e53&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.desmoinesregister.com%2Fstory%2Fnews%2Finvestigations%2Freaders-watchdog%2F2024%2F09%2F26%2Fiowa-is-testing-less-dna-evidence-in-sexual-assault-cases-why%2F73092396007%2F&c=12598738931275918371&mkt=en-us
Author :
Publish date : 2024-09-26 00:00:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.