RALEIGH — Wake County House Rep. Julie von Hafen has filed a bill to give more control over rape kit testing status updates to sexual assault survivors.
House Bill 367, filed March 11, aims to provide victims of sexual assault with rights to information and notification regarding the testing status of sexual assault examination kits, commonly known as rape kits.
Additionally, it establishes mandatory notifications in specific circumstances: when a determination is made that the kit cannot be tested, when a decision is made not to test the kit for reasons other than inability, and when a decision is made to destroy it.
The bill requires the State Crime Lab to develop procedures for victims to exercise these rights, including methods for gathering and maintaining victim contact information and how notifications will be delivered.
Victims will be responsible for ensuring the State Crime Lab has their current contact information.
If passed, the bill would take effect on Oct. 1 and apply to all sexual assault examination kits, regardless of when they were submitted.
Currently, local district attorneys and law enforcement typically coordinate to notify individuals about their kits, but rape survivors can track the progress on their own through the North Carolina Department of Justice’s Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit Tracking and Information Management System web portal using their kit’s tracking or serial number.
While von Hafen’s bill deals mainly with the State Crime Lab notifying the victims of certain changes in their kit status, a law already exists that grants victims the right to view the status of their kits. In 2017, Session Law 2018-70 (H945) directed the heads of the State Crime Lab and the Department of Public Safety to develop a tracking system. That law had a provision to give victims access to view the status of their kit.
This is not the first time von Hafen has filed such a bill. During the 2023-24 legislative session, House Bill 703 was filed, and it contained similar language. Senate Bill 509, with the same intent, was filed that same session in that chamber.
The status of rape kit testing in North Carolina has been an ongoing issue.
Then-Attorney General Roy Cooper claimed during his 2016 gubernatorial campaign that “there is no backlog.”
In May 2017, when Gov. Josh Stein was attorney general, he told media outlet ABC 11 that he had cut the state crime lab backlog, which included rape kits, from 52,000 to 9,000.
Cooper had promised to clear the rape kit backlog in 2003, yet before legislation enacted by the General Assembly to track and test kits, North Carolina led the nation in untested rape kits with 15,160.
In June 2017, Session Law 2017-57 required the NCDOJ to conduct an inventory of the kits. By the end of 2019, the agency had found “over 16,000” untested kits, although the number may have been higher since a 2018 NCDOJ report on the inventory process showed 46 agencies did not respond to requests for kit numbers.
Stein, then the attorney general, was given legislative approval in 2018 to start tracking the kits, and the NCDOJ later launched a live dashboard to show the status of each kit under the NCDOJ’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.
In September 2019, the legislature enacted the Survivor Act to clear the backlog, which included $6 million to be spent over two years to test kits collected before January 2018. The act also required all submitted kits to be tested in order to be eligible to enter results into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). Additionally, the act requires law enforcement to be notified within 24 hours of a kit collection, and in turn, that law enforcement agency then has 45 days to investigate before it must submit the kit for testing.
The rape kit backlog became an issue for Stein during his 2020 reelection bid against Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill, and in April 2024, during Stein’s run for governor, he announced the backlog had been cleared. Stein’s gubernatorial opponent, Lt. Gov. Mark Robisnon, again raised the issue during last year’s campaign.
When Stein announced clearance of the backlog, the tracking dashboard showed that 11,841 out of 16,221 kits had been tested or were in the process of being tested, as well as 1,405 kits that remained untested due to being labeled “unreported or anonymous.”
The dashboard on March 12 showed little change over 2024, with 16,298 kits collected and 11,738 kits submitted for testing. The dashboard also listed 2,785 kits that had a hit in the FBI’s CODIS.
