Texas Senator Strives to Improve Rape Kit Backlog

There are more than 19,000 untested rape kits right here in Texas, but new legislation is designed to help solve those cases.

Texas Senator John Cornyn toured the very facility where these kits are tested and touted his Justice for All Reauthorization Act.

Just as a rape kit is used to convict a guilty person, it can also be used to exonerate an innocent one.

"One thing I never wanted anybody to see me do in prison was cry, so sometimes at night I would just cover my head and cry and say 'God, please help me. Please you're the only one that can help me with this,'" recalled Johnny Pinchback.

He shared his most personal struggles while serving time for crimes he didn't commit.

In the late 1980s, he was arrested and charged with committing two rapes.

Twenty-seven years later, DNA would prove he was an innocent man.

"I felt like it had completely failed me, completely," he said. "There shouldn't be a minute, another second, where it goes untested when something like this happens," said Lavinia Masters, who also waited decades for justice.

At just 13, she was raped at knife-point by a serial rapist. She says her rape kit sat untouched until 2006.

"DNA is a footprint from God and it heals because it revealed a lot to me," she said.

Both Masters and Pinchback joined Cornyn at the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences Wednesday.

The facility is the cornerstone of DNA testing in Dallas County and a place where the Senator has made it his personal mission to reduce the state rape kit backlog.

"We need to make sure public confidence remains high in our criminal justice system by providing the resources for labs like this," Cornyn said.

"This has been his fight and he was like, 'I was proof, this is proof in the pudding that this stuff really works and the lives change because of this,'" sad Masters. "It's very emotional, very emotional because this man genuinely cares about us."

The Cornyn said his Justice for All Reauthorization Act means that DNA testing right here in Dallas will soon be expanded.

It's designed to help reduce the rape kit backlog, exonerate the innocent and provide quality forensic science.

The Act also protects housing rights, domestic violence victims and funding allocated through the Violence Against Women Act.

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