The Charlotte Observer is reporting that since 2000, law enforcement personnel in Charlotte-Mecklenburg have destroyed the results of sexual assault exams in about 1,000 cases—this includes the alleged sexual assaults against children.
An expert who has studied sexual assault investigations for the U.S. Department of Justice said she had never heard of that many rape kits intentionally destroyed by a police department.
Contacted by the Observer in September, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police said they did not know how many rape kits remained in their custody. The newspaper then requested the department’s records under North Carolina’s Public Records Act.
While this falls far short of recent laws and standards of practice, Lt. David Robinson of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department says that all of the destroyed evidence was connected with closed cases—ones where sexual assault complaints had been dropped by the alleged victim or by the prosecutor.
In its analysis of the records, however, the Observer’s found that kits were discarded in 72 cases that were still categorized as open. About half of those cases fall under a 2009 state law that requires police to retain biological evidence in unsolved rape and homicide investigations.
Asked to explain the open cases, the department said it would examine them one-by-one, but it would do so only for cases that had occurred since the law was passed. Robinson later said the review found that those cases had been mislabeled, and many should have been listed as closed.
In the CMPD’s defense, the laws and standards of practice have evolved since 2000, but the evolution of sexual assault laws in North Carolina seem to work at a snail’s pace in comparison to laws about bathrooms.