Frustrated because DNA evidence collected from more than 1,000 Chicago rape victims sits unanalyzed in police vaults, several women have banded together to raise as much as $1 million to have the evidence tested by private firms.
Police and rape-victim activists blame tight budgets, conflicting priorities and even prejudice for letting the cases languish, creating a backlog at the Illinois State Police Crime Lab dating to 2000.
Known to police and prosecutors as rape kits, the evidence cartons hold traces of DNA left by attackers and often represent the best chance of identifying a suspect by searching for a match on fast-growing national databases of offenders. Authorities admit that victims may never have been told the kits have not been processed and the databases searched.
Nationally, the Department of Justice estimates there are “tens of thousands” of rape kits that haven’t been analyzed. Howard Safir, a former New York City police commissioner, puts the number at nearly 350,000.
“I think this is a national disgrace,” said Safir, who persuaded former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1999 to spend $12 million to analyze a backlog of more than 17,000 rape kits there. It took four years and led to 107 arrests.
The effort to clear the backlog in Chicago is the brainchild of Sheri Mecklenburg, the general counsel to new Police Supt. Philip Cline. She formed the Women’s DNA Initiative to raise the money after attending a meeting with Cline and Mayor Daley at which the backlog was discussed.
Other members of the group include Lynn Martin, former U.S. secretary of labor; Gabriela Monahan, a lawyer with Kirkland & Ellis; Penny Pritzker, president of the Pritzker Realty Group; Desiree Rogers, a Peoples Energy vice president; and Susan Gallagher, a director of the Huron Consulting group.
Testing the kits at private labs will cost from $500 to $1,000 apiece, the group said. In addition to possibly identifying rape suspects, quickly analyzing the kits allows Illinois prosecutors to beat the 10-year statute of limitation for filing rape charges, authorities said.
Mecklenburg said the group is not trying to take the place of government. Nor are members trying to tell police how to do their job.
If the group is successful, it will be the second band-aid solution in three years as state authorities grapple with the growing demand for expensive DNA testing.
To erase a backlog in 2001, Chicago police and the state police lobbied the legislature for $2.3 million to expand the nine labs that process evidence. Eleven scientists were hired to deal exclusively with DNA.
But the labs soon fell behind again, said Lincoln Hampton, a state police spokesman. The overall backlog now includes the 1,500 rape kits from police agencies statewide and more than 400 other criminal cases for which DNA evidence has been gathered, authorities said.
In 2001 a law required felons in state prisons to have their DNA collected and analyzed. Last year, more than 42,000 inmates were housed in Illinois prisons. Hampton said he did not know how many of them had been tested but the law had added to the labs’ workload.
The rape kit DNA samples are usually collected during hospital examinations. After analysis, the attacker’s genetic profile is entered into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System. If no match is found, the sample stays in the database for future comparison. The database was created in 1992 and now has more than 1.4 million genetic profiles.
Most police departments only test rape kits when a viable suspect exists. When cases have a common link that suggests a serial rapist is on the loose, police ask the state lab to analyze a rape kit immediately, said Chicago police spokesman David Bayless.
Even at the relatively modest cost of $1 million, Bayless said the Police Department simply doesn’t have the money to test the kits.
“The desire to get it done is there,” Bayless said. “The money has been a challenge.” The Police Department backs the private fundraising effort, he said, because victims “shouldn’t be victimized again by having these kits sitting there.”
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Edited by Patrick Olsen (polsen@tribune.com)
