"A 2016 federally funded rape kit testing program through Case Western Reserve University in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, had similar results.
More than half of the DNA specimens in the rape kits tested were traced back to prior sex offenders.
DNA is what finally brought 52-year-old Alfred Berry to justice for sexual assaults he committed in New Orleans in the 1980s. Berry was already a Louisiana inmate for armed robbery when, in 2019, he was finally convicted on six counts of kidnapping women, raping them at knifepoint and gunpoint, or binding them and taking them to secret locations to assault them.
And although he’d been accused of sexual assault several times before
his incarceration for armed robbery, Berry always escaped conviction. One of his victims died of suicide after the jury reached a deadlock in her rape case against Berry, and he was acquitted in another rape case in 1988.
Preserved DNA evidence, which couldn’t be reliably tested when
Berry’s victims first came forward, finally caught up with the serial predator. Berry pled guilty to
six counts of second-degree rape and second-degree kidnapping, reduced from first-degree rape and aggravated kidnapping as part of his plea deal. He was sentenced to
35 years in prison in September 2019. His victims, who delivered emotional impact statements at Berry’s trial about how his assaults haunted them for years to come, reportedly hugged each other in relief after court."