By Matthew Langston
As the 2020 election cycle draws closer, campaigns have continued to heat up for the various races that will take place across North Carolina.
One of those elections is for the office of Attorney General. The incumbent is Democrat Josh Stein, who was first elected in 2016 over Republican Buck Newton by just over half a percent.
Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill, who also ran in 2016 but lost to Newton in the Republican primary, is the only announced Republican candidate for Attorney General in 2020.
Stein holds a fairly large fundraising lead over O’Neill, who has started to make a case that voters should choose him over Stein in the 2020 election.
One of the issues that O’Neill has criticized Stein about is Stein’s handling of North Carolina’s rape kit backlog, as seen in the following tweet.
.@JoshStein_ is not a prosecutor and never has been. Stein has stood on the sidelines for almost his entire term while more than 15,000 untested rape kits have sat on the shelves of the lab that Stein is responsible for, collecting dust. #WhereIsStein
— Jim O’Neill (@JimONeillNC) October 7, 2019
Has Stein actually “stood on the sidelines” on the issue, as O’Neill, whose campaign could not be reached for comment, claimed?
To find an answer, it is necessary to examine both the history of North Carolina’s rape kit backlog and Stein’s record on the issue.
The History of North Carolina’s Rape Kit Backlog
In 2017, the state legislature included a provision in the budget that required a statewide audit of how many untested rape kits were in the custody of law enforcement agencies. Like many states at the time, North Carolina did not have a centralized system that tracked rape kits.
The audit report, which was completed in early 2018, found there were 15,160 untested rape kits in North Carolina at the end of 2017. The report, which was written by the North Carolina Department of Justice, does note that the reported numbers “should be understood as a snapshot in time” because the data was reported over several months by law enforcement agencies.
As to why a kit had not been tested, law enforcement agencies were given four main categories to select and an “other” category for kits that did not fit in the main categories.
In addition to making several policy recommendations, the report said that it would cost about $10 million to test all the rape kits found in the audit. The report also said that some older kits would need to be outsourced to private companies for testing because the State Crime Lab did not have the capacity to test all of the backlogged kits and still keep up with testing for newer kits.
What has Stein done about the backlog?
One of Stein’s priorities during his term as Attorney General has been addressing the rape kit backlog and related issues, such as the lack of both a tracking system and standardized requirements for how law enforcement agencies should handle the rape kits they receive.
After the audit was released, Stein called for testing “all untested rape kits located in local law enforcement offices,” as shown in a March 2018 tweet. He also urged the state legislature to provide additional funding to reduce the backlog and authorize a tracking system that would allow the state to know the number and location of kits.
Before the state Department of Justice received additional funding from the state legislature, it received $4 million in grants from the federal Department of Justice and the Governor’s Crime Commission to help with the backlog.
Stein also worked with a bipartisan group of state lawmakers to get funding allocated that would supplement the grant money. The result was House Bill 29, the Standing Up for Rape Victims Act of 2019. Also known as the Survivor Act, it was unanimously passed and signed into law last month.
The law appropriated $6 million to the state Department of Justice to help with analyzing untested rape kits, with $3 million for the 2019-2020 fiscal year and $3 million for the 2020-2021 fiscal year.
In addition to the funding, the Survivor Act introduced new requirements that are meant to prevent backlogs from happening in the future. Within 45 days of receiving a reported rape kit, a law enforcement agency must send that kit for testing to the State Crime Lab or another approved lab. The same timeframe applies to unreported rape kits, which are sent to the Department of Public Safety for storage.
The state legislature also followed Stein’s recommendation for a statewide tracking system and passed House Bill 945, the Rape Evidence Collection Kit Tracking Act. The law went into effect after Cooper signed it in June 2018, and the tracking system went online in October 2018.
In a news release earlier this month, North Carolina’s Department of Justice celebrated the one-year anniversary of the tracking system, which provides access to both law enforcement and victims. The release also said that over 10,000 kits had been entered into the system, with 8,299 of those kits being older ones that were originally counted in the audit.
So, what does it mean?
These details show that during his time as Attorney General, Josh Stein has been directly involved in efforts to alleviate North Carolina’s rape kit backlog, and that conflicts with the narrative of Jim O’Neill’s tweet.
Stein has not “stood on the sidelines” of the issue, and there are not “15,000 untested rape kits” sitting on shelves at “the lab that Stein is responsible for.”
The statewide audit said there were 15,160 untested rape kits in the custody of more than 500 law enforcement agencies. A kit being in the custody of a law enforcement agency is not the same as a kit being in the custody of the State Crime Lab, which Stein oversees as Attorney General.
Stein also said in October 2018 that the federal grant would fund the testing of about 1,400 kits, and he said in January of this year that the state grant would fund the testing of about 3,000 kits.
The most recent update on the number of untested rape kits remaining in the backlog appears to have been in a September press release from the Department of Justice. That release said 904 kits had been tested since January 2018. Stein previously said in January 2019 that between 800 and 1,000 backlogged kits had been tested.
When asked if they could provide a current count for the number of untested rape kits and if they wanted to respond to O’Neill’s tweet, a Stein spokesperson did not specifically address either subject. They pointed to several backlog-related press releases from the Department of Justice, most of which have already been linked to in this story.
In the end, the facts show that O’Neill’s tweet about Stein’s record on the rape kit backlog was misleading at best and false at worst.
