[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12180-12181]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            NATASHA'S STORY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Poe) for 5 minutes.

[[Page 12181]]


  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, Natasha's life changed because she was 
the prey of a sexual predator.
  Here's the beginning of her dramatic story:

       In 1993, I was violently raped, sodomized and robbed at 
     gunpoint by an unknown assailant. When I escaped and 
     thankfully found myself in my apartment, my roommate insisted 
     that I go to the hospital.
       I agreed to wait for an ambulance, even though my first 
     instinct was to take a shower. I'm so grateful today that I 
     made that choice to go to that hospital.

  Mr. Speaker, Natasha is one of many victims of this barbaric and 
dastardly crime. According to information released by the Centers for 
Disease Control, nearly one in five women in America has been raped at 
some point in their lives. As both a former prosecutor and a judge in 
Texas, I was involved with the criminal trials of rape cases for 30 
years.
  I learned firsthand the devastation that sexual assault victims 
experience, and I understand and learned that sexual assault does not 
just physically harm the victim; it harms their entire being both 
physically, emotionally, and mentally; and the pain sometimes lasts 
forever. Mr. Speaker, rapists try to steal the soul from their victims, 
and they try to destroy the self-worth of victims, and sometimes they 
do.
  One of the most critical pieces of evidence for rape trials is the 
rape kit, a tool that gathers forensic evidence, including DNA 
evidence, to link the rapist to the crime. But, unfortunately, rape 
kits often languish in evidence rooms across the United States, some 
untested for years, some discarded before ever being tested, and some 
gather dust so long that the statute of limitations on the crime of 
rape has expired and the criminal can never be prosecuted. This ought 
not to be.
  Mr. Speaker, Natasha's story did not end in that cold hospital 
examination room. She says further:

       Ten years later, in 2003, I received a call from the New 
     York City District Attorney's office. My rape kit, which 
     unbeknownst to me had been sitting on a shelf for almost 10 
     years, had at last been finally processed. I had long since 
     reconciled the fact that my perpetrator would never be held 
     accountable for his actions. But now there was hope.
       After a long trial, Victor Rondon was tried before a jury 
     of his peers in 2008 and was found guilty on all eight counts 
     of violent assault against me. He's in jail now for a long 
     time. The best part for me is that he can never hurt anyone 
     else.
       My rape kit sat on a shelf for many years. It was not just 
     a number in a police department. My rape kit was me--a human 
     being. Every rape kit that sits on the shelf somewhere is a 
     human being.

  Mr. Speaker, Natasha's story humanizes rape kits ignored in evidence 
rooms throughout the country. Victims of sexual assault deserve 
justice, and their perpetrators deserve to be punished by courts and 
juries in America.
  Stories like Natasha's compelled Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney from 
New York and me to introduce the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence 
Registry Act, the SAFER Act, in the House, and Senators Cornyn and 
Bennet to introduce the same bill in the Senate. This bill would allow 
existing funds to be used to provide grants to States and localities to 
audit their rape kit backlog and also would call upon the Attorney 
General to create an Internet-based rape kit registry for sexual 
assault evidence testing. Estimates of untested rape kits are as high 
as 400,000 in America according to Human Rights Watch.

                              {time}  1040

  According to the DOJ's National Institute of Justice, 43 percent of 
the Nation's law enforcement agencies don't even have a computerized 
system to track forensic evidence, either in their inventory or after 
it is sent to a crime lab. The SAFER Act would allow criminal evidence 
to be prosecuted and processed, and these do-bads to be held 
accountable for their dastardly deeds.
  Mr. Speaker, the insensitive say there's no money for these exams, 
these rape kit tests. Well, Congress needs to find the money. Maybe, 
instead of sending money to foreign countries to help them, keep some 
of that money in America to help American rape victims like Natasha. 
Help them get justice. Because, Mr. Speaker, justice is what we do in 
America.
  And that's just the way it is.

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