Ilse Knecht:
The other issue that we talked a lot about was the decision of which kits to test. Out of the 6,841 kits that were determined to be previously unsubmitted to the crime lab for testing, there were about 4,400 that were determined to be sent forward for testing. That's a concerning number to us. That's a lot. That results in a lot of kits still sitting on the shelf. We have heard every excuse in the book why not to test these kits, and Wisconsin came up with the top two. One is that the cases were unfounded, which through a lot of research and kind of picking apart these old cases that were deemed unfounded in many other states across the country, that was often a label that was put on investigations that detectives didn't want to deal with, right? They either thought the victim was not credible — they just didn't believe the victim, you know, it was too difficult of a case. There were so many reasons why these kits were, or the cases were deemed unfounded. And going into other communities where they have taken these old kits off the shelves, tested them, and the ones that were unfounded in many cases were the ones where they did find that it was a serial rapist. And I'll say that one of the things that's really important to understand is that many rapists are serial rapists, and it's more common than we thought. We know that by testing all these kits across the country, because all these cases are matching from decades and decades. It's often sort of the most vulnerable people in our society that these offenders target, because they do know they can get away with it, because these people — in the eyes of society and sometimes, you know, too unfortunately, too high, too much of a time — is the kind of person that law enforcement isn't going to care about. They target people that are very vulnerable and that society won't believe. So, the unfounded category is a very big concern for us. When we heard that, it just really, it made us very worried about what the process was going to be like. Another category was that the case had already been charged or, you know, the person had already been adjudicated. But again, importantly, you still need that DNA into the DNA database so that cases can match together. And so there were a lot of very — it seemed to us — very uninformed decisions going on that we were very uncomfortable with. And there were a lot of people inside of Wisconsin who were also uncomfortable with it too. At the time, it felt like we just don't have the energy and the resources to test all of these kits, and let's figure out what we can put aside for now. You know, there's only so far we can push and to get to get buy-in on testing every single kit is what we wanted to do. So, while we might say on our website that Wisconsin tested their backlog, you know, it was because what was approved and accepted by that state was tested. But I think we'll always wonder what would've happened if those other kits were tested.