This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Even when the criminal justice system works as it should, rape is a particularly difficult crime to prosecute. There is shame, pain, confusion, attacks on the honesty, the memory and the character of both the alleged victim and the accused.

So whenever there is any solid physical evidence to be had — in a crime that is all too often one person's word against another's — it is in the interest of justice that evidence be quickly available to prosecution and defense alike.

That this fact even has to be mentioned is behind the fully justified judicial anger expressed recently by 2nd District Judge Thomas Kay.

Rightly frustrated that the DNA analysis in a Davis County rape case hasn't been turned into a report some 13 months after the alleged assault, his honor is threatening jail time for somebody who works for the Utah Department of Public Safety's crime lab if the report hasn't been submitted in time for a hearing set for Dec. 15.

A crude weapon for a judge to use, perhaps, but it will probably work. This time.

The person charged with the assault has been sitting in jail, unable to post a $100,000 bond. Even if he is eventually acquitted, he has lost more than a year of his life to the dawdling of the judicial system.

The alleged victim, meanwhile, has likely been living in another kind of prison, waiting for whatever degree of resolution or closure the oft-delayed proceedings may provide.

No matter what happens at trial — now set for April — this is not justice in any sense of the word.

As the science of DNA testing has improved, and the public's expectation that state-of-the-art scientific tools be used has grown, the short-term result has been serious backlog in the processing of physical evidence.

State officials say their budget and manpower have been overwhelmed by increasing demands for such testing and analysis. And political pressure has been applied, rightly, by members of the Utah Legislature, Salt Lake City Council and others who no longer want to hear that allowing the samples to gather dust on the shelves of the crime lab is anything other than misconduct.

There is some hope that, once the lab moves into new facilities next month, the turnaround time on such work will fall from a year or more to 60 to 90 days.

It would be about time. Making the testing of DNA samples routine and rapid will help prosecute the guilty, exonerate the innocent, connect the dots in cases of serial rapists and encourage often reluctant victims to come forward with the confidence that, even in the most difficult of crimes, what can be done, will be done.