In Angela D. Wharton’s long journey as a sexual assault survivor, Thursday was a day that signaled there should be no more cases like hers in Maryland.
In 1996, Wharton was raped at gunpoint outside her apartment building in Baltimore. Two years later, her untested sexual assault kit and other evidence were destroyed by police — an act she didn’t discover until 20 years later.
“The very evidence that could have brought my assailant to justice had been callously discarded,” Wharton said, “At that moment, I was devastated, revictimized and began to spiral into a deep depression.”
Wharton, who founded a support group for assault survivors after her attack, joined advocates and Maryland political leaders Thursday morning to announce a new tracking system for sexual assault evidence kits. When a rape kit is collected in Maryland now, it will receive a bar code that victims can track, so they can see exactly where the kit is located and whether it’s been tested, state officials said.
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Maryland joins about 40 other states and D.C. that have already implemented case tracking for victims, according to End the Backlog, a project that aims to reduce the number of untested kits across the country. Maryland also will place bar codes on its backlog of about 5,000 untested rape kits, enabling more victims to monitor their investigations, and it will require kits to be preserved for 75 years.
“What a glorious day this is,” Wharton said, adding that her “heart overflowed with a mixture of emotions: gratitude and hope and a profound sense of responsibility.”
The system was unveiled at a news conference held by Gov. Wes Moore (D) and Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D), but it actually became operational May 24. Brown said it had already been used 90 times by 14 assault survivors.
“Survivors want action,” Brown said. “They expect all of us to do our jobs. The tracking program is going to give survivors the transparency, accountability, dignity and support they deserve.”
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He said the program would help police and prosecutors find perpetrators, in part by tracking delays and monitoring compliance with laws requiring testing.
“Survivors of sexual assault will no longer be kept in the dark after forensic evidence is collected,” he said. “We will empower survivors.”
Ilse Knecht, director of policy and advocacy for the Joyful Heart Foundation, which runs the End the Backlog project, said that in states where the tracking system has already been operating, “it’s definitely had an impact in that backlogs don’t get created again.”
For states such as Maryland, which have deadlines on submitting kits for testing, the system can notify police, prosecutors and victims if a deadline has been missed, Knecht said.
“That’s a big issue,” Knecht said. “Most survivors leave the hospital and never hear about their kit. It’s very important for survivors to have information about their kit. … It’s not always about the outcome. It’s how they’re treated during the process. This is a piece that’s giving them back some peace, some control over the process.”
The discovery that sex crimes victims had supplied police with physical evidence of their assaults and that vast amounts of this evidence had never been sent to a lab for DNA testing set off a nationwide surge of activity to remedy the problem. Maryland’s progress toward a tracking system — and the gradual reduction of its backlog of cases — began with a 2017 law that standardized the way rape kits were preserved and tested, state Sen. Shelly Hettleman (D-Baltimore County) said. The kits are now required to be picked up by police within 30 days and sent to a lab within the next 30 days. In 2018, the Maryland General Assembly directed the governor’s office to apply for federal funding for a tracking system, and the state has received more than $5 million for that purpose, Hettleman said.
But state officials also had to determine how many kits were already in police property rooms or labs or hospitals around Maryland, according to Carisa A. Hatfield, an assistant attorney general who advised the state’s committee on evidence kits. The process involved counting every one by hand, retrieving victim information and other important data, and was delayed by the pandemic, Hatfield said.
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Finally, in October, after having assessed the size of their backlog and expected flow of cases, Maryland hired a vendor, Invita’s “Track-Kit,” which is used by about 15 other states, and got the system running by last month, Hatfield said.
Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger (D) said he’d already used the system to check on an active case in which two people were sexually assaulted by a stranger.
“I actually went into the system and did a few clicks,” Shellenberger said, “and next thing I knew, I knew exactly where those two [evidence] kits were. They were still at the hospital.” He said he recognized the name of the nurse who had done the exam on the victims.
Shellenberger said he clicked on the tracking system again before the news conference and saw the kits were now in the Baltimore County police property room. “What has to happen next,” Shellenberger said, “is when I click on that the next time, in 30 days, 60 days, I better see that it’s not sitting in property evidence. I better see that it’s somewhere else being tested. And that’s where it comes to accountability. And that’s what this system does.”
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“Today marks a huge step forward,” said Lisae Jordan, executive director of the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault. She said she looks forward to an expansion of the system to allow rape crisis centers, child advocacy centers, and sexual assault advocates and attorneys to also access the system. Jordan said MCASA also will probably be involved with locating and notifying victims whose cases are in the backlog.
“We stand ready,” Jordan said, “to help survivors navigate the tracking system itself, to use that tracking system to enforce the rights of survivors and to ensure that Maryland never again has a backlog of untested rape kits.”
Erin Cox contributed to this report.
