Ohio Attorney General Mike Dewine says nearly 12 thousand rape kits have been tested under an initiative launched in 2011. More than 13 thousand kits submitted by law enforcement agencies statewide have been tested as of November 1, leading to nearly 43 hundred hits in a DNA database and the indictments of hundreds of defendants. Kevin Niedermier of member station WKSU in Kent reports.
When DeWine took office in 2011 he started the effort to test the thousands of rape
kits languishing on police department shelves across the state.
He says of the nearly 14-thousand submitted, some more than two decades old, all of
those from Cuyahoga County have now been tested.....
DeWine
"That consists of 4,996 kits from 40 Cuyahoga County departments. Eighty-eight
percent of Cuyahoga County's kits were from just one agency and that's the Cleveland
Police Department which submitted more kits to us than any other agency in the
state."
The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's office says these kits have resulted in 233 convictions with many more expected. About 85-percent of all the kits from across Ohio have been tested. DeWine's effort spurred a state law requiring all new kits to be processed within 30-days.
