NEW YORK - Trying to clear thousands of unsolved rapes, New York City has contracted with three DNA labs to analyze evidence before the statute of limitations on the crimes runs out.
Officials said Wednesday that New York is the first city to award such contracts to clear a backlog of rape investigations. The contracts total $12 million.
The city has a backlog of about 16,000 ''rape kits'' containing semen, hair or other biological evidence collected from victims. About half of the kits were assembled more than five years ago, too long to even prosecute the cases.
''This initiative will enable us to make a significant investment in making the city safer for the city's women,'' Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson said.
''This DNA testing of the backlog combined with the databank that's being assembled in Albany will allow the district attorneys to make cases and prosecute people who had for years eluded capture and evaded punishment.''
Both Johnson and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau pointed out that the analysis could also clear some men who have been wrongly convicted of rape or other crimes.
''It works both ways,'' Morgenthau said. ''It exonerates the innocent, convicts the guilty.''
Tests on the rape kits will be performed first for rapes that occurred within the state's five-year statute of limitations for prosecuting sex crimes. Rape kits for crimes that can no longer be prosecuted will be analyzed anyway.
But of the 16,000 rape kits that need analysis, the three contracts cover testing for only 12,000. The rest, some dating from the early 1990s, will be analyzed later, city officials said.
Once analyzed, the DNA from the kits will be stored in city, state and federal databanks and compared with genetic material from convicted offenders, as well as DNA from unsolved cases.
A 1999 state law also requires those convicted of violent felonies, including sex crimes, to provide DNA samples for the databank.
Opponents of DNA testing say the process violates people's civil rights. But Harriet Lissel, executive director of the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assaults, said the tests are an important tool.
''Rape victims who have been raped by strangers who have not been caught lack a sense of closure to the incident,'' she said. ''They continue to feel unsafe and fearful because rapists often tell them that they will come back to harm them as a way to keep them quiet. DNA testing gives them new hope.''
There were 2,087 rapes reported in the city in 1999.
An effort to do away with the five-year statute of limitations on sex crimes died in the Legislature last year.