Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel says the Wisconsin Department of Justice is mailing the last of thousands of untested sexual assault evidence kits to private laboratories for analysis.
Schimel made the announcement Tuesday, countering criticism that the DOJ is moving too slowly to finish testing.
The attorney general began a project in 2016 to test thousands of sexual assault kits sitting on police department and hospital shelves. The DOJ has identified 6,800 untested kits and is working to test 4,122 of them in hopes of developing DNA profiles. The agency chose not to test kits in cases where the victim wouldn’t consent to analysis or there’s already been a conviction in the case.
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The attorney general said during a news conference Tuesday that testing has been completed on 1,884 kits with 2,271 still being analyzed. The DOJ sent the last 48 kits to labs for testing on Tuesday. He says testing on all the kits will be done by the end of the year.
Editor’s Note: This story was last updated at 2:10 p.m. Tuesday, May 29, 2018 with information from the news conference.
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