When I got out of school in 1972 after a great education here, I wanted to do public service, not thinking it would be a career, but for a period of years, and the former Dean of Law School, Monroe Paulson was my Criminal Law professor. He had been very generous to me. He helped open the door of the New York County District Attorney; he was then a legend in law enforcement with only one sort of serious impairment to my point of view: he didn’t think women belonged in the work place. He had 170 lawyers on his staff, but the seven women there were not allowed to try violent, felony crimes. They weren’t allowed to go into court and to argue in front of juries, they weren’t allowed to discuss “blood and guts”, as he said in front of the fine citizens of the county of New York so we were supposed to be in the law library researching, doing appellate briefs and appellate arguments in the higher courts. A little more refined practice. And it was shortly before Mr. Hogan died in 1974 that he considered starting a Sex Crimes Unit. I had nothing to do with founding it. It was two lawyers before me. I was too junior to be considered as part of that team. And the reason that the unit had started was the fact that we had laws in every state in this country that are very archaic and didn’t allow prosecutors to take victims into court in the overwhelming number of circumstances where there was alleged sexual assault.

When I was in Law School here, the New York Times had its first magazine section story on sexual assault in 1970. And in that report, a woman who had been a survivor wrote the story that more than a thousand men were arrested that year in New York City for sexual assault; 18 of them were convicted of the crime. While the statistic was more volume than most places in America, obviously because of the size of the city, it was very reflective of the fact that women weren’t getting in the courtroom doors. Prosecutors weren’t losing the cases; they simply weren’t allowed to try them. And the reason – I have a very short part of the legal history, the laws in New York and every other state and territory at different points in time, but until the 1960s and 70s, New York, very late until the very late, mid-70s, required independent evidence. The word of a woman. Any one of you. Your sisters and daughters and mothers was considered incompetent as a matter of law to testify about sexual assault. And every state required independent evidence, more word than the victims’ story. There had to be independent evidence of who the attacker was, meaning somebody had seen or go to or leave the crime scene, or seen the crime itself occur. And obviously with the tragedies we saw on Friday and over the weekend in Atlanta and in the Midwest, murders happen in the broad daylight with a lot of witnesses. Rapes really do. So there had to be evidence of that. There had to be evidence of the sexual nature of the attack long before we had hospital systems with protocols to do exams. There had to be evidence, independent evidence of the force that was used meaning a woman either had to exhibit injuries or the weapon had to be recovered from the offender when he was arrested. Happens rarely if he’s not caught at the scene of the crime and so women were deemed to have consented to a sexual act unless all three of those elements were in place. And that’s why there was a bad history of no prosecutions before the early 1970s when the law began to change.

The laws changed sadly, not because prosecutors, and judges, and people within the criminal justice system recognized these inequities, they changed because of the feminist movement in the sixties and a lobbying effort that was just grassroots and then began to be covered by the women’s media long before the mainstream media or anybody in the New York Times and Washington Post cared about it. The history of that came from British case law. We got much of our law from the Brits and some of it is good, but this corroboration requirement came from case law that said because rape is a crime that is easy for women to allege and hard for men to defend against because it is so prejudicial, we have look at women’s testimony more carefully when they allege rape than any other crime. It’s the only crime that had these rules. And that case opinion was written in the year 1671. Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Justice of King’s Mansion. And yet as every state and territory was formed, it was incorporated and adopted into the law so it took three hundred plus years in New York to get that legislation off the books and open the courtroom doors and when those doors opened, none of us had any experience handling these cases. Nobody knew how to investigate them well, nobody knew how to take them into a courtroom and try them. And the advances that have occurred in the last thirty years are extraordinary. The establishment of prosecutors units and police units to handle these cases was very new. They didn’t exist anywhere in the country when I got out of Law School. And I had nothing to do with founding them.

The LAPD and New York Police Department realized in the early 1970s that as these laws began to change, unless people learned how to do this work better, not only would we not get convictions, but women would not come into the system. Women would not report these cases, terribly under-reported them. There were no psychiatric and psychological services available. There were no rape crisis counseling groups except for a handful in large cities across the country. No peer education on college campuses. And literally no medical protocols to even deal with evidence collection. Those weren’t established until the late 1970s so when I first started working on cases, there was literally no way to have a chain of custody to get slides taken at a hospital examination to a police laboratory for analysis. It was just dumb luck if those things were transported if you had a cop who cared enough. The first evidence collection kits were designed in Chicago and word got to me in about 1975 that these kits existed and they were called Vitulo kits so I assumed Dr. Vitulo was biochemist a who had devoted a lot of time and energy to this issue. Trolley Vitulo was a Chicago sergeant who began to take cardboard shoe boxes from his wife and from all of his wife’s friends because he despaired of losing the evidence and having no way to connect it. And he just fashioned these boxes and labeled them and taped them so they could go from a hospital to a lab to be developed. And that was the beginning of evidence collection.

So what happened throughout the 70s and throughout the 80s was massive legislative reform as most of you realize, our criminal laws are different from state to state so there was never a national movement to do this. That didn’t happen until the Violence Against Women Act sadly in 1993. Every state dealt with this in its own way, on it’s own timetable, with its own legislators, whether they cared about this issue or not. And parts and pockets of the country lag way behind other parts of the country. So first corroboration was eliminated in most states, rape shield laws, which we heard a lot about last year in some of the more high profile cases. Rape shield laws went into effect; have had a dramatically wonderful impact on survivors of crimes who can come forward knowing that their social and sexual lives will not be the history of cross examination in a courtroom unless they are relevant, enormously protected. Many, many of the barrial laws through the 1980s were brought up to speed and changed throughout the country and a lot of the old requirements eliminated. So we made, I would say probably the most progress in terms of legislative reform in the 1980s and also the most progress with putting in place units to better investigate and handle these cases to better meet the needs of survivors of these crimes who wanted to come forward.

I would say legislation, practical reform, the third piece of this that has just revolutionized the criminal justice system, and I can’t say that word underscored enough has been DNA technology. It was 1986, halfway through my thirty years in the DA office, before I even heard the three letters of the alphabet sequenced that way. And the first time I heard them was in fact, the Robert Chambers’ Preppie murder case. And the victim’s body was found with her denim jacket next to her body. Robert Chambers was bleeding, was injured only in one place; that was his fingers. There was blood on the jacket and you could test blood types then. It was his blood because Jennifer had bitten his fingers while she was struggling to get his hands off her face and throat. And the only way to prove that that jacket had been on her face suffocating her was whether we could find salvia on the jacket. And there was no blood typing test for that; there was no way to do it. It was the first time I heard in 1986 that the Chief Medical Examiner called me and said there is a new scientific technique, it is called DNA Analysis and that might tell us if there is any fluid of Jennifer’s on the piece of clothing. Great, the reason I didn’t go to medical school was that I didn’t have any clue about any kind of scientific detail. He said, “We’ll have to take a crash course and learn how to do it. I’ll sit you down with some serologists. We did it. Sent the jacket, of course we didn’t have to do the analysis, but we had to understand what was being done. The jacket was sent to the FBI. It was the only laboratory in the country then doing DNA analysis for any office in the country that wanted to submit it. It took six months to get a preliminary report on what was on that jacket. And we got the good news in fact it was something called salivary amylase, the enzyme in salvia. It’s also in other body fluids, but proving that it was Jennifer’s salvia. It matched exactly where his fingers would have been, and her mouth would have been on this jacket, but the jury was never allowed to hear it. We had a three-week hearing in front of the judge. It was one of the first in the country to try to introduce DNA evidence into court and the judge listened for three weeks of scientific testimony and said this DNA stuff won’t work, not valid, not reliable, the jury will never hear that this is the murder weapon that killed Jennifer. And I think probably 1989 was the first time that DNA was accepted in courts in New York and around the country.

The most frustrating time of all for police and prosecutors was the period between 1986 and 1989 when we were getting results, we could exonerate people and say this definitely does not match this man’s DNA so we can’t charge him, but juries were not allowed to hear all of the cases in which it was successful, we still had to prove them the old-fashioned way. The changes throughout that, from 1986 to the time I stepped away from the DA’s office in 2002, have been the most remarkable. The nature of the science itself, how the technology, how the technique is analyzed or how the substances are analyzed is entirely different. It gets better and better and better and more reliable and can be done with smaller and smaller pieces of evidence. We can now get results in 24 hours. And what used to take six months, and of course, it is accepted everywhere in the country. When we were working cases since 1998 on in New York, if we were worried about whether or not we had the right individual, we’d call the lab, ask the Chief Serologists to just jump that sample to the front of the line and if you were drinking from plastic water cups like mine, I could come back at this time tomorrow and hand each of you the right cup today because of the accuracy and speed of DNA analysis. And as most of you know if you watch Law and Order SVU or CSI Charlottesville, I could take the shirt off the back of any one of you today and have that analyzed and come back tomorrow with skin cells analyzed reliably enough to return to you your piece of clothing. So little substance is needed and such definite testing.

In the last serial murder cases, we solved - I didn’t solve, the police did, before I left the office – involved the only evidence we could seize from the defendant, he was a suspect in a series of computer thefts, hard drive thefts, and not yet probable cause enough to get him for rape and homicides and so the serologists said to me, get his computer mouse. 1998 when the investigation started and I said, what would that do? And he said his skin cells will be on the computer mouse and that eventually matched him to the homicides of five teenage girls and the rapes of four others. So it’s absolutely astounding what the technology can do. Nothing matched 9/11 and the same serologists who were doing all of our forensic work were doing all of the forensic analysis of the remains from the World Trade Center; stopped obviously all of the forensic work and just worked around the clock for weeks on the DNA analysis. You may have seen in the paper recently that the Chief Serologist in New York announced that they have now identified all of the remains that is humanly, scientifically possible to do at this point in time and yet he and everybody in the scientific community is well aware that within five years, the advances will continue, the science is still evolving so rapidly that obviously all of the remains will be held and analyzed and there will come a day when from the tiniest of particles, they will be able to continue to make identifications. So the science piece is extraordinary.

One of the innovations that we did in New York before it was a TV show was set up the first cold case squad in the prosecutors’ office and I can’t tell you the joy it gives the police investigators to be able to not enjoy, it sounds like a strange word, but to knock on the door of someone who has survived an assault eight, ten, fifteen years ago, someone who has never forgotten, but has gotten on with her life to have an investigator say, I’d like you to sit down. I want to tell you what happened. We found the man who assaulted you. And that happens literally everyday in the cities and communities that do investigation. The longest of many homicides have been solved going back twenty-five years plus. Two weeks ago I got a call from one of my colleagues in the office. A 1972 case while I was still in law school; the winter of ’72, there was a man on trial, one of the very few in New York for rape, he jumped bail; he disappeared; was never found again. He was caught two months ago south of here, I want to say South Carolina, and he was brought back. My colleagues from the office actually found the witness in the case who was then a twenty-five year old woman, she’s alive and well. There was of course no DNA analysis in 1972. They found the box of evidence with the bedsheets in it in which there was seminal fluid. They analyzed the seminal fluid. It in fact matches the man who escaped in 1972 and he will now be tried for that crime that occurred in 1972 and will spend the rest of his waking years I hope in state prison.

The advances have been astounding. The places across this country where there are prosecutors who care about these issues; doesn’t take any more money to handle these crimes than it does any other crime. Doesn’t take very many more resources to have prosecutors who specialize in sex crimes or child abuse or domestic violence. It takes training. It takes the care of people to want to do it. The forensic analysis is done in these cases anyway as a matter of course, but it really does take the kind of passion and understanding of these crimes to get local prosecutors to dedicate themselves to do it so the advances have been extraordinary. I’ll talk briefly about the differences between the two categories of cases. Stranger rape is one category and what is called acquaintance rape is the other. Stranger rape, and you are familiar with it sadly in Charlottesville, are the cases in which the victim does not know her assailant and she is sexually assaulted; her life at risk of course. And these are the cases that make up less than twenty percent of reported rapes. They are sort of what everybody fears most for themselves and their loved ones, but they are far less likely to occur than acquaintance rapes. The stranger rape cases are the ones here and everywhere else across the country that are generally handled a lot more aggressive and with a lot more interest and do much better in the criminal justice system. People empathize with the survivors of these crimes. They believe the survivors of these crimes. The issue in these cases is identification. It’s been made much, much easier by DNA analysis. All the weight is taken off the word of the survivor. It’s not just her trying to remember and recollect what the description was and what the assailant looked like and match that in a lineup months, or weeks, or years later. So those cases do extraordinarily well.

Acquaintance rape, by definition, takes in a much broader range. Many people use the word acquaintance and date rape as the same expression; they’re not. Date rape is obviously one category within acquaintance rape. And the acquaintance rape cases are easier for the police in the sense that the victim knows who the offender is. She may not know his name and address, but its somebody she’s either met at a party, socialized with at school, met at a bar, to the cases where there has been intimate partner violence. Where there has been a relationship between, a previous sexual relationship between the victim and the offender, or they have been married, for example. These cases are easier for the police to investigate than stranger rapes. They are the ones that tend to be still much, much harder for the victim. They are the cases in which the defense in the case always blames the victim for the occurrence of the crime; either that it never happened at all and she is making up the crime or that there was a sexual encounter and she consented to it. The defenses in these cases do not get much broader than that. So they are uglier. They are much harder for the victim and they are the cases that probably I hear the most complaints about from around the country when victims can’t get access to the system; when victims can’t get a prosecutor to take the case seriously. When you hear a defense attorney use the expression, “It’s just a he said, she said case.” Perfectly fine phrase. If it’ll work well, it makes a good argument to a jury. If you hear a prosecutor ever say a case was, “he said, she said”, shoot the prosecutor. There is no such thing. These cases are made, investigated, enhanced, because of the fact that these are two people who have spent a period of time together whether its twenty minutes or half a hour, which would be very short for an acquaintance rape, to the four, six, eight hours overnight or longer that they have been together. And again, it’s the investigators job and the prosecutors’ job to get that information, enhance it, and support whichever person’s story is more credible and makes more sense. So these are cases, still the hardest to talk about.

I see not everybody here, I think, is a student, but I will talk briefly about campus rapes. Campus sexual assault cases have long been one of the great dilemmas within the campus community. There have been traditionally an ideal all the time with Columbia, Fordham, and NYU in New York; a lot of antagonism between the college administration often and the student victim population, student survivor population. Generally, when victims in the past have been met at hospitals or making decisions about whether to report a crime or not, traditionally in universities all over America, the administrative response was let’s deal with it here if it was not a stranger coming onto the campus and assaulting someone, if was two students. Especially when both students are a part of the college population. There was a big movement in the early nineties for many colleges to try and handle these cases. I believe you’ve got a student board that tries to do it here. Many cases became involved with doing these cases on campus when they involved date and acquaintance rape and the President of Princeton; there is a fascinating article in Wall Street Journal about four years ago when Princeton decided to abandon that practice after a lawsuit. Lawsuits all over the country because the parents have wanted the students convicted ended up suing because he’d been denied due process. These proceedings occur without lawyers, without representation usually for either side. Without the ability to question and cross examine witnesses who are involved and I for one have very strong feelings that a campus board is not the appropriate way to handle a penal code violation. But that depends on having a prosecutor in the community who will handle violations of the penal code.

I am often asked how I made the transition to writing. Writing was something that I had wanted to do long before I ever thought about practicing law. Go back and look at all the high school yearbooks and junior high school yearbooks – ambition writer. And I had a wonderfully loving, but a very practical father who used to say to me, “You have nothing to write about so get a job!” And he wasn’t wrong, I was an English-Literature major at college and used to dream about just having a garret somewhere where I could write stories, but really had no theme and I loved classic English Literature, but I have always loved Crime Fiction and I have always gone back to it over and over again for pleasure. And when I was doing the non-fiction book, I was asked to do that by a publisher because there had been so much change, so much legislative reform in the first fifteen years after I came to the practice. So that was a labor of love that I did having being asked to do it, but having completed it, my dream had been to do the novels. To do crime fiction and so I took the old adage, “write what you know”, it was very easy to ground it in the work that I had done. I write these books, they are meant to entertain, but the people who won’t go into a bookstore and buy a book called Sexual Violence and there are millions of those people will buy a crime novel or a murder mystery and read it on an airplane or on a beach any yet, they are still full of the same issues. The prosecutor, I have said many times, is younger, thinner, and blonder than I am. There are procedures and the main character’s a prosecutor and they really are meant to explore all of the issues that I’ve encountered in my work and do it in a way that gently educates people who would not otherwise, I think, come to this issue.