In Support of Funding for the Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Program

Floor Speech

Ms. RICHARDSON. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my appreciation to Chairman Wolf and Ranking Member Fattah for working together to ensure that the Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant Program is adequately funded in the Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2013.

Given these difficult economic times, difficult choices must be made as to where scarce funds are to be allocated. Given the importance of the DNA Backlog Grant program to law enforcement agencies in my congressional district, I would have liked for the program to have received even more funding. But I am very pleased that the bill provides funding at the amount requested by the Administration, the sponsor of the authorizing legislation and my good friend, Congresswoman Maloney from New York, and is more than eighty percent of the amount of funding I requested the Committee to provide.

The DNA Backlog Grant program provides funding to help reduce and eliminate the backlog of DNA evidence in state and local labs across the Nation. The ``Justice For All Act'' (P.L. 108 405) expanded the use of DNA technology to convict the guilty and free the innocent. In 2008, Congress again showed its overwhelming bipartisan support for this initiative by passing ``The Debbie Smith Reauthorization Act'' which extends this program through FY 2014.

There is an ever-present need to continue robust funding for programs such as the Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant Program in order to make sure victims do not fall through the cracks of the system.

Women who have been raped have a right to expect police to thoroughly investigate the case and prosecute the offenders; however, many rape kits across the country are never even tested, and the perpetrators never face justice. Nowhere is this problem greater than in Los Angeles County, where there is a backlog of more than 12,000 rape kits sitting untested in storage facilities. Of those kits, 499 are attached to cases past the 10-year statute of limitations for rape in California, meaning that even if those kits are tested, the offenders cannot be tried for their crimes.

The current fiscal crisis has already hindered efforts to eliminate the backlog, as Los Angeles city officials have been denied the funds necessary for hiring crime laboratory analysts. Continued cuts, however small, will continue a trend of neglecting this pursuit of justice, and thousands of women and their families will be denied their basic security and peace of mind.

DNA evidence is critical in sexual assault cases, and I would like to highlight one recent success story from my district in Long Beach. The alleged crime occurred in August of 2003, when a 17-year-old student was sexually assaulted by a stranger on her high school campus. The DNA collected at the scene went untested for 7 years due to the laboratory's backlog, but in 2011 Redondo Beach police arrested the attacker. The DNA match showed the chance of the DNA belonging to someone else was one in a trillion, providing nearly irrefutable proof of his guilt. I ask for unanimous consent to include in the RECORD copies of newspaper stories that discuss in greater detail the importance of robust funding for the DNA initiative to reduce the backlog in Los Angeles, California.
Mr. Speaker, the DNA Initiative is an invaluable tool for law enforcement today, and it will continue to be a legislative priority of mine. That is why I am pleased that funding for this vitally important program was not reduced as so many other worthwhile programs have been. I commend my colleagues on the Committee for funding the program at the level requested by the President and those of us in this body that strongly support the program.

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