Committee agrees to reconvene assault exam‑kit task force to guard against new backlog
Get AI-powered insights, summaries, and transcripts
Subscribe
Summary
House Memorial 39 was advanced after testimony from victim advocates, law‑enforcement and prosecutors about prior backlogs and current testing delays; the memorial requests a task force to review lab capacity, tracking and victim notification systems.
Representative Ferrari introduced House Memorial 39, which requests the creation of a task force to examine the state’s handling of sexual assault examination kits and report on backlog reduction efforts. Alexandria Taylor of the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs told the committee a prior task force helped reduce a backlog of more than 5,000 kits and established barcode tracking and a survivors’ right-to-know system; she said new delays reported in FY25 (1,419 kits not completed within 180 days) justify reconvening stakeholders.
Prosecutors, victim-service providers and the Crime Victims Reparation Commission supported the memorial, which Silva and others framed as a coordination exercise to pinpoint whether current slippage is driven by local evidence‑management, chain-of-custody or lab analyst shortages. Representative Reed and other committee members pressed witnesses about whether the problem is a lab-capacity shortage (taking DNA analyses a year or more) or whether local agencies are failing to forward kits to labs; witnesses said both dynamics require review and the memorial will reconvene the network to identify targeted fixes.
The committee moved a due pass and advanced the memorial. The next steps will be stakeholder convening to scope recommendations and potential statutory fixes.