BY SIMONE ELLIN
JMORE
JANUARY 5, 2026
Not long after she was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 2015, Sen. Shelly L. Hettleman (D–11th) read a newspaper article that deeply disturbed her.
It was about a young woman in Baltimore County who was raped. The woman opted not to involve the police, a decision commonly made by survivors reeling from the trauma.
Approximately a year later, she felt ready to come forward to hold her rapist accountable. But when contacting law enforcement authorities, she learned her rape kit no longer existed; she was told it was thrown away.
Hettleman discovered Maryland did not have a consistent policy for preserving rape kits. Some counties kept them for a year, others for longer, a few indefinitely.
“That meant whether a survivor had access to justice depended not on the facts of the crime but on where the crime occurred,” Hettleman said. “That struck me as fundamentally unjust.”
In 2017, Hettleman introduced House Bill 1076 to standardize rape kit retention throughout the state.
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