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Attorney General Transferring Funds To Ease Rape Kit Backlog

Andy Beshear
J. Tyler Franklin
Andy Beshear

More money is being set aside to ease Kentucky’s backlog of untested rape kits.

Attorney General Andy Beshear on Monday announced funding to test more than 3,000 kits that remain in the state police crime lab.

Beshear says his office is transferring $4.5 million to Kentucky State Police to pay for additional equipment and personnel to test DNA evidence recovered from sexual assault victims. Police check that evidence against a national database of DNA profiles to look for suspects.

The backlog of rape kits was the subject of a critical state audit in 2015 which estimated that it took about eight months for a kit to be tested, once it was submitted to the state forensics lab.

The auditor said limited resources had contributed to the long turnaround time. The money used to pay for the increased testing comes from unrelated lawsuit settlements.