Denver City Police Admit to Evidence Destruction

For the first time, the Denver Police Department has acknowledged that it destroyed all evidence, including items that could have yielded DNA, in 90 percent of sexual-assault cases before 1995.

The department made the disclosure in a recent grant application seeking funds to reduce a backlog of items needing DNA analysis. The application does not say what kind of evidence was destroyed or how many cases might be involved, though it notes that the department investigated about 480 sexual assaults each year during the 1990s.

Police Chief Gerry Whitman said that prior to 1995, evidence was destroyed on an ongoing basis because, at the time, the department was unable to do DNA testing on all evidence. Also, at the time

there was a seven-year statute of limitations on prosecutions for sexual assaults, and the department destroyed items as unsolved cases reached that time limit.

But after the statute of limitations for prosecution of sexual assault was extended to 10 years, police in 2002 made plans to return to crimes committed between 1991 and 1995 for reinvestigation. That's when they discovered that the old evidence was routinely being destroyed.

Whitman said it's unclear how much of the evidence that was destroyed would have yielded DNA evidence, which police have used to great effect in solving other "cold case" homicides and rapes. But since the destruction stopped in 1995, when the department crafted new policies to preserve DNA, the department has been able to find DNA hidden on about 80 pieces of evidence - clothing, carpets and other items - per year in past unsolved sex-crime cases, helping to solve some of them.

Whitman said the department did not start DNA analysis until 1994 and did not first analyze most of the evidence that was destroyed to see whether it could have yielded DN

the Denver Post