West Virginia Aims to Eliminate Untested Sexual Assault Kits and Improve Evidence Collection

The West Virginia Division of Justice and Community Services recently released a new online system that enables the tracking of sexual assault kits from the time they are shipped to a healthcare facility to when they are collected and returned for forensic testing. The system also collects invaluable feedback on the quality of the collected kits that will be used to identify potential areas of improvement and training opportunities to ultimately improve evidence collection.

The resulting benefit to West Virginia’s criminal justice system is significant: tracking where a kit is at all times will ensure that each is tested and none is lost.

After surviving a sexual assault, a victim may seek medical care and choose to have any evidence left on his or her clothes or body collected by a healthcare professional. The collected evidence is placed in a kit, which is one investigative tool that may help police and prosecutors identify the offender and find connections to other pending cases.

In West Virginia, sexual assault evidence collection kits are distributed by the West Virginia State Police Forensic Laboratory to authorized healthcare providers around the state. Before the implementation of the new system, distributed kits were recorded in a spreadsheet, and there was no mechanism in place to record when a facility used a kit and sent it on for forensic testing.

The new online Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit Information System enables authorized crime lab users to manage kit information that tracks what kits are sent to a facility and when. Once a facility collects a kit, the facility updates the system to indicate the kit was collected and that it was sent for forensic testing.

Additionally, the system provides the ability for crime lab users to evaluate each piece of evidence collected in a kit after forensic testing has been completed. The data collected will be used to provide feedback directly to healthcare professionals in order to aid in increasing the quality of the evidence collected. This in turn will increase the arrest and conviction rates of offenders in West Virginia.

"We are very excited about the new online system and the new processes we have in place that will lead the nation in eliminating untested and lost sexual assault kits,” said Rick Staton, Director of the Division of Justice and Community Services. “It is also part of our initiative to improve the collection of kits and the data from our new system will do just that. We won’t stop until the sexual assault kit backlog in West Virginia is zero and we lead the nation in the quality of collected kits."

The new online system was developed by the West Virginia Division of Justice and Community Services and the West Virginia State Police Forensic Laboratory in partnership with WV.gov. Guidance and recommendations were also provided by the West Virginia Sexual Assault Forensic Examination Commission, the West Virginia Foundation for Rape Information and Services, and the West Virginia Hospital Association.

"The West Virginia State Police Forensic Laboratory is pleased to have partnered with the West Virginia Division of Justice and Community Services, the West Virginia Sexual Assault Forensic Examination Commission, and the West Virginia Foundation for Rape Information and Services to develop a system for improving sexual assault kit evidence collection in West Virginia. The system is designed to better track sexual assault kits and provide feedback on evidence collection to healthcare professionals; ultimately improving the quality of sexual assault evidence collection,” said Sheri Lemons, Acting Director of the West Virginia State Police Forensic Laboratory. “The Forensic Laboratory has recently implemented the system and we look forward to seeing the improvements in the weeks and months ahead."

The Division of Justice and Community Services is part of the Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety. For more information about the West Virginia Division of Justice and Community Services, visit http://www.djcs.wv.gov.

About WV.gov

WV.gov is the official website of the state of West Virginia (http://www.wv.gov) and is the result of an innovative public-private partnership between the state and West Virginia Interactive. West Virginia Interactive works with state and local government agencies to build and manage interactive online services and is a subsidiary of digital government firm NIC (NASDAQ: EGOV).

About NIC

Founded in 1992, NIC (NASDAQ: EGOV) is the nation's leading provider of innovative digital government solutions and secure payment processing, which help make government more accessible to everyone through technology. The family of NIC companies provides digital government solutions for more than 4,500 federal, state, and local agencies in the United States. Forbes has named NIC as one of the “100 Best Small Companies in America” six times and the company has been included four times on the Barron’s 400 Index. Additional information is available at http://www.egov.com.

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