Justice for All Reauthorization Bill

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, today the House will take up a piece of legislation known as the Justice for All Reauthorization Act, a bill that will help victims as they seek to restore their lives and will better equip law enforcement to fight some of the most heinous crimes imaginable. This legislation will help put more of the guilty behind bars and provide key resources to forensic labs across the country while aiming to end the rape kit backlog.

The rape kit backlog in particular has been something that a wonderful woman named Debbie Smith has committed much of her life to, making sure we provide the resources to local forensic labs that test those rape kits because of the power of DNA and forensic testing. One can literally tell with almost certainty whether the evidence contained in a rape kit matches a DNA sample from a suspected sexual offender. Likewise, one can also exclude the suspect from being the one who provided that forensic DNA sample. In other words, you can exonerate as well as convict people as a result of testing from these rape kits.

Being involved in this issue, we initially heard there were as many as 400,000 untested rape kits in America. Some of them had been tested 20 years after the fact only to find that the sexual offender didn't just commit one act of violence or sexual assault but was a serial offender.

There are stories of individual courage on the part of victims of sexual assault who have come forward to tell their story about the impact of this important elimination of the rape kit backlog. There are cities like Houston--Houston, under the leadership of Mayor Parker, basically said they are going to eliminate the rape kit backlog in Houston on their own, with perhaps some Federal assistance. They were able to identify a number of perpetrators in unsolved crimes because they were able to tell that the DNA in these rape kits matched certain hits on the FBI's CODIS list, where they maintain the data bank of DNA samples that are matched against those collected from suspects, collected in forensic examination.

Suffice it to say that this legislation will contribute to ending that rape kit backlog, and I believe that is a good enough reason to support it. It will make sure that brave people like Debbie Smith, who years ago suffered a sexual assault and who has made this one of her causes in life--it will make sure that no woman would have to endure what she had to endure, and that is where law enforcement fails to use all the resources available to it to find her assailant and to bring them to justice.

Most importantly, this legislation will also help strengthen victims' rights and help them pursue their justice in court.

We already passed it once unanimously in the Senate back in June, and I am thankful to the leadership in the House for bringing this bill up in the waning days of the 114th Congress. I look forward to the House bringing up and passing this legislation today and to us taking it up here with any amendments that the House may offer and taking it up here I hope by unanimous consent and passing it before we leave for the holidays.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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