Future rape victims in Mississippi can have more confidence that the State will process their rape test kits in a timely manner after Gov. Tate Reeves signed House Bill 485 into law on April 17, but much work remains to be done, Ilse Knecht told the Mississippi Free Press.
She runs Joyful Heart Foundation’s End the Backlog program, which focuses on rape-kit testing across the country. Mississippi became a target for expanding the New York-based organization’s initiative during the 2023 Legislative session.
The new law requires timely testing of future rape kits and grants victims access to information on their cases. With those changes, the State ticked two of the organization’s six pillars for ending rape kit backlogs. The remaining pillars include creating a statewide inventory, clearing untested rape kit backlogs, funding reform and implementing a rape-kit tracking system. Before the passage of the Legislation, Mississippi and Maine were the only states with no progress on any of the six pillars.
The organization initially wanted the legislation to cover a third pillar by creating a statewide inventory of the rape kit backlog.
“We originally wanted the inventory, but you know, really what happened was everybody sort of said, we’ve got to take it a couple of steps at a time,” Knecht told the Mississippi Free Press on April 20. “The next step we really would like to see is an inventory of untested rape kits to make sure that we understand what is on the shelf now in Mississippi—what is sitting in law enforcement agencies and hospitals across the state.”
“Because the problem really is there are too many times when the decision is made not to test a rape kit, and then the rape kit sits in the hospital, maybe police might not ever pick it up from the hospital,” she added. “It might also sit in the law enforcement storage where they just keep it there, or it might be destroyed, frankly. So we need to get a real good count related to how many kits are sitting and then mandate the testing of those kits.”
One Mississippi
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