Bill would require sexual assault kits reach state lab within seven business days; pilot allows common‑carrier transport

Senate Bill 145 would add a requirement that all sexual assault evidence collection kits (forensic medical exam kits) be transferred to the New Hampshire state crime lab within seven business days of collection and would create a limited pilot program to facilitate timely transport.

Sponsor Senator Deborah Ochsler told the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee the bill was prompted by a survivor's account of long testing delays and by operational gaps that left kits sitting in police departments for weeks. She said the state crime lab recently installed new DNA testing equipment with American Rescue Plan Act funding and the remaining delay is often the time it takes municipal agencies to get kits to Concord.

"All totaled, if a law enforcement agency brought the evidence collection kit from their station to the crime lab in Concord within two weeks...the evidence collected at the hospital from that sexual assault would be at a minimum 21 weeks old before any of it would be available for prosecutors to use," Ochsler said in testimony describing prior timelines when third‑party processing out of state was used.

The bill requires that when a department cannot meet the seven‑business‑day deadline by delivering a kit in person and maintaining chain of custody, the department may use a common carrier (for example, FedEx or UPS) with route tracking and from a staffed storefront; use of drop boxes would be prohibited and coordination with the lab to ensure receipt during business hours would be required. Ochsler said the Department of Safety suggested the common‑carrier option after meetings with the crime lab and county prosecutors.

Pamela Keilig, public policy specialist at the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, supported the bill. She said the state's kit‑tracking system has been "a game changer" but that outliers remain where kits have taken more than two months to reach the lab. Keilig said survivors expect kits to be tested and that timely testing is critical to prosecutorial work and survivors' healing.

Questions from lawmakers focused on fiscal impacts, refrigeration and package size for common carriers, and whether the courts had accepted chain‑of‑custody protocols that use common carriers. Ochsler and others said the original fiscal note—about $200,000 for staffing and a vehicle—applied to an earlier version of the proposal; they said the current common‑carrier approach would likely cost substantially less, but that a revised fiscal note was not available at the hearing.

The bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee 4‑0 and passed the Senate on the consent calendar, according to testimony presented to the committee. The public hearing closed after supporters spoke; no committee vote is recorded in the transcript.