
District Attorney Jacqueline Sartoris, center, with Tina Panayides, an assistant district attorney, and Chris Coleman, the team leader for the sex assault unit, Monday at the Cumberland County Courthouse. Their department just got a grant for $2.5 million that will help track and test all sexual assault kits held in the county and fully investigate and prosecute eligible cases. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald
Cumberland County District Attorney Jacqueline Sartoris remembers reading a magazine story in 2019 that opened her eyes to how little the criminal justice system has improved when it comes to sexual assault investigations.
Many sexual assaults, she learned, were not aggressively investigated. And many rape kits – the term for an exam that involves gathering DNA evidence from women who say they were raped – were not even being tested.
“It made me realize how far behind we were in getting justice,” Sartoris said in an interview, referring to a piece in the Atlantic.
She vowed then to do something about it.
It took a bit longer than she expected.
Last week, Sartoris announced that her agency was awarded a three-year U.S. Department of Justice grant totaling $2.5 million that will help inventory and track all sexual assault kits currently held in the county, test all appropriate kits in line with national standards, and then fully investigate and prosecute eligible cases.
It’s the first time any Maine agency has been awarded a federal grant under the program, which launched in 2015.
“It’s the first time anyone in Maine has applied,” Sartoris clarified.
Sartoris said she’s excited to get the funding but lamented that it only affects Cumberland County cases. An initial estimate suggests there are 500 untested cases that will be sent out of state using the new funding so they don’t overburden the state’s lab.
The backlog, however, extends to every Maine county. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 in 4 women experience sexual assault in their lifetime, and criminal cases are extraordinarily difficult to prosecute even when rape kits aren’t sitting on a shelf somewhere.
Lawmakers had an opportunity during the last session to approve legislation that would have created a rape kit tracking system within the Department of Public Safety. Twenty people testified in support, and no one spoke in opposition. The initial votes in the House and Senate were unanimous.
But the bill died in a bit of end-of-session politics that left dozens of proposals unresolved.
The sponsor, Rep. Valli Geiger, D-Rockland, said she was disappointed with the outcome but promised to bring it back next year.
“We still have to go through the process,” she said. “Nothing is guaranteed.”
Even if the bill passes, Geiger said, another year of inaction will have passed at a time when Maine already is behind.
‘CIRCULAR LOGIC’
Sartoris wanted to apply for the federal grant program back when she was a prosecutor in the Kennebec County District Attorney’s Office.
But between her daily responsibilities as a prosecutor and the upheaval caused by the pandemic, it didn’t happen.
Then she decided to run for district attorney in Cumberland County where she lives. She was elected in 2022.
It was still on her mind this year when she hired a former colleague from Kennebec County, Tina Panayides, as a part-time prosecutor in the sexual assault unit.
“We both had this shared frustration about the backlog and about how this money was out there,” Sartoris said. “So, when she came over, she wanted to apply, and I, of course, I said ‘yes.’”
The DA’s office doesn’t have a grant writer on staff, so Panayides did the application on her own time. A law school classmate who wrote a grant for an agency in Kentucky provided guidance.
Panayides already had been serving on the state’s sexual assault forensic examiner advisory board and had heard a lot from nurses and advocates on the issue.
“It didn’t seem like a ton of things were moving forward here,” she said.
As part of the process, Panayides had to provide an estimate of how many sexual assault kits collected by police agencies in Cumberland County have never been tested. It was at least 500, going back decades.
Many assault survivors never have a kit done, for a variety of reasons. It’s a lengthy and invasive process. And far too often, they don’t feel like it will make a difference. As the Atlantic story that fed Sartoris’ outrage makes clear, the criminal justice system still disbelieves women, even blames them.
“Historically, we’ve only tested kits when we went forward with charges,” Sartoris explained. “The problem with that is that we’re not going to test unless we move forward with charges, but how do you move forward without evidence? It’s circular logic.”
Yet, even if testing doesn’t result in a conviction in a specific case, there are benefits.
Research indicates that DNA results from kits match other serious crimes 25% of the time. In as many as 12% of cases, they link to another sexual assault.
“What we learn by testing all kits is that a great number of rapes are done by a small number of assailants,” said Geiger, the state representative.
‘WRONG FOR DECADES’
The three-year grant for Cumberland County starts with a six-month detailed inventory of all sexual assault kits in Cumberland County.
It’s a commitment to survivors, Sartoris said, that there is a record that these assaults happened.
But the grant also allows the county to send kits for testing for the first time, which could aid investigators in pursuing charges and convictions.
There are also cases where an assault victim can have evidence collected anonymously. By law, those kits must be stored by a local law enforcement agency but may not be tested until the victim decides to come forward. Sartoris said the grant, which pays for a prosecutor and an investigator assigned to her office, could help reopen some of those cases if the victim wishes.
Carlie Fischer, systems advocacy coordinator at the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault, said Cumberland County’s grant is great news, but it’s temporary by design. The issue needs to be addressed statewide — and permanently — she said.
“Ultimately, because sexual violence is a public health issue, it’s important that state government take the lead on tracking and testing forensic evidence,” she said.
Geiger’s bill last year had a price tag of about $350,000 annually. Although it passed easily in both the House and Senate, it was among dozens of spending bills that were left unsigned by Gov. Janet Mills at the end of the session. Mills supported the bill, but she was concerned that lawmakers didn’t have legal authority to send additional bills after the Legislature’s statutory adjournment date.
Geiger said it was unfortunate her bill got caught up in politics, but she’s undeterred. Already, she and Republican Sen. Rick Bennett of Oxford are working on reviving her bill from last session. They also want to add a testing component that would pay for additional lab experts, so that the state could begin to address its backlog, not just quantify it. That would add to the cost.
During testimony on Geiger’s initial bill, lawmakers learned that the Maine State Crime Lab sends out about 400 sexual assault kits to hospitals and other health care providers each year but only about 20%-25% are returned to the lab for testing. What happens to the rest is unknown.
Maine is among only a dozen states that doesn’t have a tracking program, according to the Joyful Heart Foundation, a national advocacy group founded by actress Mariska Hargitay, who for years portrayed a sexual assault investigator on the show “Law & Order: SVU.”
In 2016, Joyful Heart published a set of proposed reforms intended to help states work through their testing backlog and provide better service and transparency to survivors of sexual assault in the future. Maine is the only state in the country that still hasn’t adopted even one of the recommended reforms.
There is no guarantee that Cumberland County’s recent grant will immediately pay dividends. A USA Today investigation from this fall found that even though $350 million in grants has been committed under the program, it hasn’t always provided closure for survivors or helped lock up serial rapists.
But Sartoris, who herself is a survivor of sexual assault, said the work matters.
“We aren’t delivering justice to a lot of people,” she said. “This is an area we’ve gotten wrong for decades.”
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