Wichita police have 1,125 sexual assault kits untested for DNA

The Wichita Police Department has more than 1,000 sexual assault kits that have yet to be tested for DNA, but District Attorney Marc Bennett said that does not mean the cases are not being investigated.

“The notion that they’ve been forgotten on a shelf because no one ever took the time to evaluate and even see what they might have to offer, I take exception to that,” Bennett said at a news conference Friday, which was held in response to a national USA Today investigation that found that tens of thousands of kits around the country remain untested.

DNA samples are just one part of the kits; they also include a victim’s medical history, details of the injury and photographs, which in some situations can help investigators more than DNA testing, Bennett said.

“If the only thing that’s being used for analysis to identify the perpetrator is she says she knows who it is, and his defense – as is often the case in these situations – is a consent-based defense … a DNA analysis of that test does not inform or further the investigation at all,” he said.

Bennett said sexual assault kit testing accounts for 30 percent of all DNA analysis performed by the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center.

He said if a suspect has not previously committed a crime, his or her DNA will not be in the federal database. When someone is convicted of a felony, or arrested on suspicion of certain felonies, DNA is taken and added to the national FBI database.

Bennett said that has been a “real game-changer” in sexual assault investigations.

Instead of immediately sending every kit to be DNA-tested, Bennett said it is more beneficial for investigators, when faced with a consent defense, to look through call records, text messages and Facebook posts.

“Our resources should never be used as an excuse, but we do have an obligation to prioritize and efficiently utilize the resources we have available,” he said. “Sometimes we have to take a look at the case and say if he’s acknowledging that they had sex – he’s not disputing that – we may not test that DNA in the kit.

“We’ll evaluate the kit. We evaluate all the kits, but testing for DNA is not going to be the ultimate determination.”

Bennett said he has successfully prosecuted many sex crimes without DNA testing, but he said it is a valuable resource.

“What does DNA do for us? It doesn’t give you time and place; it gives you presence,” he said. “Was this person’s semen, blood, saliva in a location?

“It can’t tell you when it got there, it can’t tell you how it got there, but it can tell you it was there.”

The Wichita Police Department currently has 1,125 sexual assault kits that have not been tested for DNA. The Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office has 65. Some of those kits date back to the 1990s, Bennett said.

Wichita police Capt. Jeff Weible said the department analyzes evidence on a case-by-case basis and assigns a detective to every case that is reported.

“We’ve had the discussion about this topic for some time,” he said. “We try to continually re-evaluate our processes based on changes in law and changes in technology.

“We’re continuing the inventory of those 1,125 to make sure that our processes are accurate and if we need to re-evaluate one of those cases from the ’90s because the technology has changed, the processes have changed.”

Bennett said he would be “shocked” if there were kits that were not being actively evaluated.

“I don’t want victims to think that this community doesn’t take this desperately seriously,” he said. “We do.

“The amount of resources that go into sexual assault examinations and solving sexual assaults in the community, I’m very proud of.”

This story was originally published July 17, 2015 at 8:15 PM with the headline "Wichita police have 1,125 sexual assault kits untested for DNA."