An initiative to test almost 5,000 previously untested rape kits in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, has resulted in over 250 convictions, as well as unsettling information about sex offenders’ behavior, according to a press release from Case Western Reserve University.
Vice President Joe Biden and Attorney General Loretta Lynch were in New York Thursday to announce that the White House has awarded $41 million in new rape kit testing grants to police departments across the country, added to the $38 million in grant money that Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance already contributed.…
The Manhattan District Attorney has charged Joseph Giardala, 44, with raping and robbing a woman in New York City’s West Village in 1995. New York couldn’t identify Giardala by name after the rape, but entered his DNA into a national database, where it matched with a case in Florida earlier this year. In the years…
How did the rape kit backlog in the United States get so serious? How did we get to a place where there are roughly 400,000 untested rape kits nationwide, dating back as far as the 1980s, gathering dust as the cases they represent grow colder and colder? The answer, broadly, is a lack of funding, combined with a…
How bad is the problem of rape kits going untested? We don't even know how many are lying around on police department shelves. Several groups in New York have teamed up to put an end to the rape kit backlog, and their first step is to finally get an idea of what they're dealing with.
As a teenager, Helena Lazaro was raped; it was over a decade before the authorities properly investigated her case. And the numbers suggest that Lazaro is far from the only one ill-served by the system.
