Justice is Blind Broke

L.A. County Sheriff's Department suspends DNA testing in sexual assault cases:

Out of cash and understaffed, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has suspended its faltering effort to analyze DNA evidence from thousands of rape and sexual assault cases.

The department halted shipments of the genetic evidence to private crime laboratories at the end of May after funds allotted for the testing ran dry, according to a report submitted by Sheriff Lee Baca to the county Board of Supervisors late last week.

Sheriff's Department officials said they expected to receive federal grant money next month, and more funds in the fall, that would allow them to continue testing for four or five months. After that, however, the department will have to rely on an uncertain stream of state funding, officials said.

The haphazard approach underscores the trouble Baca has had delivering on a promise he made in November to clear the decades-old backlog of evidence from roughly 4,600 cases and to keep pace with testing evidence from all new cases.

...L.A. County is hardly alone in its predicament. A state legislative budget committee recently recommended that funding for the California Department of Justice lab be slashed by $20 million next fiscal year -- a move that, if approved by lawmakers, would force the lab to stop providing free DNA testing to 47 of the state's 53 county governments.

It's almost impossible to successfully prosecute a rape case with physical evidence; without it, justice is almost always elusive. This is terrible.

I don't even know what else to say. Terrible.

[H/T to Shaker SamanthaB.]