Malkin: Lost, Buried, Burned: Oklahoma’s Rape Kit Scandal – IOTW Report

Malkin: Lost, Buried, Burned: Oklahoma’s Rape Kit Scandal

Newsbusters: If you are puzzled by the nationwide rape kit testing backlog, Oklahoma provides maddening insight on the bureaucratic forces that create intolerable inertia — and injustice.

An estimated 225,000 rape kits have gone unprocessed across the country; more than 7,200 have been neglected in Oklahoma. Last month, a woman who reported an Oklahoma City sexual assault to police back in 2011 discovered that her rape kit had gathered dust on a shelf in Tulsa’s police department for seven years — after the Oklahoma County district attorney had informed her he was dropping the case because no rape kit existed.

Police, prosecutors and politicians do not have a sense of urgency about the issue. Why? My ongoing investigation shows that status quo obstructionists don’t want to clear the backlog because they don’t want the public poking around government-run crime labs — especially ones with a shameful history of forensic misconduct and a culture of destruction.

Solving the rape kit testing problem requires accountability and transparency. That means shedding light on long-buried secrets that go well beyond the usual incompetence and inattention that have led to backlogs. It’s not just rape victims who suffer when criminal justice agencies shut out the public. It’s criminal defendants trying to prove their innocence against charges of sexual crimes.

Consider Rayshun Mullins, who petitioned the state of Oklahoma three times for post-conviction testing of DNA evidence used against him in 2009. (The Sooner State was last in the nation to adopt a post-conviction DNA testing statute in 2013.) Three times he was denied. Why? Shockingly, dozens and dozens of crucial forensic items in Mullins’ case have been destroyed or ‘lost.”

Gone. Poof. Disappeared.

13 Comments on Malkin: Lost, Buried, Burned: Oklahoma’s Rape Kit Scandal

  1. There are too many people in an ‘official capacity’ that no longer feel the need to respond to the needs of the general public; coupled with laziness and a realization that there is no criminal end in sight.

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  2. “Police, prosecutors and politicians do not have a sense of urgency about the issue. Why?”
    That’s easy. Obama-era policy to reduce the number of incarcerated minorities. Too many minorities in your jail? Get investigated and sanctioned by the Federal DOJ.

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  3. We’ve recently gone through a quite similar situation in Detroit. Found all kinds of rape kits collecting dust in Wayne County mostly. They finally declared a push to process them. Now of course, being a Democrat run crap hole they’ve had to request additional funding from the state to do so. But how many women have been possibly raped in the meantime because of the ineptitude?

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  4. FBI admits flaws in hair analysis over decades

    1. The FBI covered up the Boystown scandal.
    2. The lazily let 911 happen.
    3. They tell people who draw Mohammad on facebook to “go into hiding.”
    4. Their crime labs are a decades-long miscarriage of justice.
    5. They conspired to remove Trump.

    Nothing that they say or do has any legitimacy. “But but but the FIELD officers are the BEST, it’s just the Washington FBI that’s corrupt!”

    Screw you. They whole place is corrupt.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic-hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for-decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html?noredirect=on

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  5. Death and Justice is a book by Mark Fuhrman that exposed the corruption in the prosecutors offices in Oklahoma that was sending people to death row on falsified evidence given from the state crime lab. It was an eye opener.

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