Criminal Justice : Maryland Is on Track to Process a Nearly 50-Year-Old Backlog of Rape Kits

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A new law extends the state’s sexual assault evidence protections to cover DNA samples. But getting justice in hundreds of cold cases will require more than just testing, survivors say.

One of the country’s oldest backlogs of untested evidence from rape exams is on track to be processed by the end of the year after new laws in Maryland put more than 1,400 cases dating back to 1977 on an expedited timetable.

As detailed in ProPublica’s 2021 series “Cold Justice,” a doctor at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center began quietly preserving physical evidence obtained during exams of rape survivors in the 1970s, believing that one day the technology would exist to be able to connect specimens to perpetrators.

Despite advancements in DNA science that proved Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker right, and despite the fact that sporadic tests of his evidence have led to the exonerations of two men and solved 80 cold cases, much of the trove has sat unused by the Baltimore County Police Department.
https://www.propublica.org/article/maryland-moves-to-process-rape-kits-backlog?utm_campaign=propublica-sprout&utm_content=1722474000&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter