Random Thoughts

Sorry, but I have to go back to local politics for a few minutes. The State of Ohio’s Attorney General, Betty Montgomery, unveiled her “New Hope Initiative” yesterday. Cleveland has been selected as the pilot site for this program. Basically, the State of Ohio got a $2.2 million grant from the Justice Department to create a statewide DNA database. They hope to link up this database with other states eventually, so we can share information about suspected criminals. What is wrong with that you say? Nothing, unless you read further.

The City of Cleveland has over 3,000 untested rape kits from unsolved cases. The Attorney General’s initiative will give $100 for every DNA sample submitted from cold cases. The city plans to submit approximately 15 a week for testing. I don’t know if any of you have ever had a rape kit done before, but the experience is incredibly invasive and grueling. They take samples from every imaginable part of your body and then some, looking for evidence. It takes hours. We submit because we think it will help find the criminal who did this to us, and you mean to tell me over 3,000 of these tests were never even sent to the lab? And now your laziness and incompetence is being rewarded with $100 for each one. My tax dollars are paying you for what you should have done in the first place? Why make someone go through an additional ordeal if you aren’t even going to test the samples collected?

Their excuse is, the victims of these rapes didn’t know who the assailant was, so there was no one to test the sample against. Hello, that is where police work and investigation come into play. If you test my sample and you can’t find a match, what about the next victim? If our samples match each other, watch the evidence add up. I can’t believe it took a Federal Grant and prize money to figure this out. If anyone should get $100, it should be the victims whose kits have remained untested all this time. I hope Betty Montgomery has her checkbook handy; she’s got a lot of explaining to do.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 21st, 2002 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.