How Eugene DePasquale, Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, helped clear 90% of PA’s untested rape kits

Eugene DePasquale cleared Pennsylvania’s backlogged rape kits by more than 90% when he has Auditor General. Now, he cites that experience as to why he should be PA’s next Attorney General.

Clearing the backlog of untested rape kits across the commonwealth by more than 90% was one of Eugene DePasquale’s crowning achievements during his tenure as Pennsylvania’s Auditor General, and he believes it’s a perfect example as to why he should be the commonwealth’s next Attorney General. 

“It shows that I know how to conduct a statewide investigation,” DePasquale said in an interview with The Keystone. 

“It shows I know how to work with victims and survivors, that I know how to work with law enforcement and I know how to put together the right type of team to knock down walls to get at the information so that we can bring justice.”

DePasquale is running against York County’s Republican District Attorney Dave Sunday for the open attorney general’s seat in the upcoming election, and according to him, it all started in 2016 after reading reports of more than 1,800 untested rape kits were discovered in Michigan.

“I was at an auditor’s conference down in Cary, North Carolina, and while I was there, it just was a story that came across about…the whole state of Michigan,” DePasquale recalled. 

“The Detroit Free Press had a story about they found all these untested rape kits in Michigan. And when that happened, I remember there was just a couple of us sitting around and literally one of the just random conversations, I said, ‘what are the chances that’s the only place that’s going on?’”

The week following the conference DePasquale assembled a team to start combing through the commonwealth for untested rape kits, and discovered over 3,200 untested rape kits. DePasquale’s office reduced the number of untested rape kits from 3,217 to 339 in three years. 

The auditor general’s office defined a backlogged rape kit was defined as a test sitting in storage for 12 months or more. 

A report issued by DePasquale’s office noted that Act 27 of 2015 required local law enforcement agencies and crime labs to report how many rape kits they had awaiting testing and how many of those kits were backlogged to the Pennsylvania Department of Health (DOH).

However, Act 27 failed to provide resources to the DOH to collect this information and was unable to allocate extra resources to keep track of untested kits. 

As in Michigan, clearing the backlog of untested kits allowed law enforcement officials to prosecute cases that went unsolved. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said in 2019 that 65 cases were impacted by clearing the city’s backlog, which was the largest in the state.

“At the time when the kits started getting tested, prosecutors, mostly in the Southeast, were quoted in papers saying, this is helpful, we’re now renewing investigations [and] it’s leading to arrests,” DePasquale said.