State unveils online tracking system for rape kits, providing a ‘ray of hope’ for victims

Baltimore County State's Attorney Scott Shellenberger speaks with rape survivor Angela Wharton at a June 20, 2024, news conference on a new online system that lets victims track rape kits. With them is Sen. Shelly Hettleman (D-Baltimore County). Photo by Steve Crane.

State officials unveiled an online system Thursday for tracking sexual assault evidence kits, a process they said should help bring peace of mind to victims and accountability to law enforcement officials.

Under the system , all new rape kits will have a unique bar code attached to them, and victims will be given a password that will let them go online and track the status of the sexual assault evidence that was taken from them.

“For too many victims and survivors, in too many communities … when kits left hospital rooms, victims were left with nothing but questions,” Attorney General Anthony Brown (D) said at Thursday’s unveiling. “Where’s my evidence kit? When does justice come?

“Now, we’re going to use a bar code system to change everything here in Maryland. It is the key to the new statewide system that will provide survivors with answers,” he said.

The state is also in the process of adding bar codes to the thousands of evidence kits currently in the system, some of which have been languishing for years. Brown said that process “will take some time,” and an official in his office said the goal is to get all the backlogged cases tagged by the end of 2025.

Gov. Wes Moore (D) said the new system is aimed at addressing the backlog of 5,000 rape kits that the state reported in 2022.

“We know too often that sexual assault evidence kits end up sitting in hospitals or in precincts or in labs. It’s very easy for these kits to get lost when there is no accountability,” Moore said.

“It changes today,” he said. “Survivors can go online and see exactly where their evidence stands, through every single step of the process, and if the evidence is not moving, survivors can speak out.”

Thursday’s event was highlighted by the testimony of Angela Wharton. The Baltimore resident told of being raped at gunpoint in a wooded area of the city in 1996, only to find out more than 20 years later that the evidence she had provided after her attack – what is known as a Sexual Assault Forensic Exam, or SAFE examination – had been destroyed by police without ever being tested.

“In the aftermath of the assault, I summoned every ounce of courage within me to undergo an invasive and humiliating process called the SAFE examination,” Wharton said. “It was a grueling ordeal, where my body was a literal crime scene, but I endured it … with the hope that justice would prevail and that my perpetrator would be held accountable for his heinous actions.”

But she found out in 2018 that police had destroyed the evidence in her case, less than two years after her assault, without ever having it tested. She was left feeling “betrayed, violated and utterly powerless” and felt “revictimized.”

Wharton said the new system offers “a ray of hope for survivors like me who have endured the anguish of having their trauma dismissed and their pursuit of justice thwarted by a system that failed to protect and serve.”

Besides helping victims, officials said they hope the system will be used by advocates and law enforcement officials to help press cases. The collection of DNA evidence through SAFE examinations can be entered into a national database where it can help find predators in what may seem like unrelated cases, or close cases that have long been open.

The kit-tracking system is the latest step in several years of efforts by advocates for sexual assault victims, including funding to clear up the backlog of untested rape kits and a law requiring that law enforcement officials retain the kits for at least 75 years after the evidence is collected.

Maryland is not the first state to use a bar code system to keep track of sexual assault evidence kits. Moore said similar systems have been created “in red states and in blue states, from North Carolina to Ohio and Oklahoma.”

Brown said the system had already been used by 14 victims who had visited the site a total of 90 times since it launched on May 28.

“What does it tell you? Survivors want action. They expect all of us to do our jobs,” Brown said. “The tracking program is going to give survivors the transparency, accountability, dignity and support they deserve…. Survivors of sexual assault will no longer be kept in the dark after forensic evidence is collected.”

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