Bill would expand NC's DNA database, try again to keep hospitals from billing sexual assault victims
A bill moving this week at the state legislature seeks to address a long-running issue for victims of sexual assault by tweaking an existing law against hospitals charging victims for the cost of rape kit evidence collection. The bill also would add misdemeanor domestic violence charges to the list of crimes that require DNA collection for the state’s crime database.
Lawmakers have gone back and forth over just how to deal with the billing issue. Last year the North Carolina House unanimously passed legislation to fine hospitals $25,000 for each violation. That language has been dropped in the state Senate, although a key lawmaker said some fine may be added again before the measure is finalized in the coming days.
“We’ve just got to figure out what the penalty will be,” Sen. Danny Britt, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Tuesday.
North Carolina outlawed the billing of victims for rape kits decades ago, and it created a fund that hospitals can bill instead to cover evidence collection in sexual assault cases. But that fund caps payments at $800, and at times victims get additional bills totaling thousands of dollars.
Monika Johnson-Hostler, executive director of the North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault, said these bills are fairly common. Some hospital officials have defended billings in the past, saying there are separate costs for care associated with the trauma of sexual assault.
Johnson-Hostler said the bills she’s talking about are specifically for evidence collection.
To address this, House Bill 674 essentially restates existing state law forbidding the billings. It also adds more crimes to the definition of sexual assault and widens the definition of the forensic medical examinations done in sexual assault cases.
There was bipartisan support in the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday to strengthen that, potentially by adding a fine. Britt, R-Robeson, said that change may be made as the bill moves forward in the Senate this week, or it may come once the Senate approves its version of the bill and negotiates a final version with the House.
Either way, House Bill 674 will be the vehicle. That bill started life simply dealing with the DNA database, and in that form it also passed the House last year on a lopsided vote.
The House’s initial bill on the rape kit charges, House Bill 626, has been set aside.
DNA database expansion
The DNA database section of the bill would add new sample collections upon conviction, or after a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity, for the following charges:
- Assault on a female.
- Assault on a child under the age of 12.
- Various violations of domestic violence protection orders.
These crimes are strong predictors, Britt said, of sexual assault, one of the crimes the state’s DNA database was created to solve.
That database has more than 380,000 DNA profiles in it, with some 25,000 samples coming in each year. The state collects DNA for all felony convictions and, for the most serious crimes, including rape and murder, DNA is collected when someone is arrested.
The sample is removed from the database if the charge is dismissed, or the accused is acquitted.
