Last night’s episode of Law & Order: SVU featured a special cameo by everyone’s favorite vice president – Joe Biden.
The veep appeared on the show as himself, and the episode opened with him addressing a crowd in the police station and discussing the importance of testing backlogged rape kits.
The premise of the episode – “Making a Rapist” – is that a man wrongly accused of rape is released from jail thanks to officials finally testing a 15-year-old rape kit.
“DNA technology is the guilty person’s worst enemy and the innocent person’s greatest friend.”
Mariska Hargitay (star and producer of SVU) founded the End The Backlog initiative in 2004, which aims to get every backlogged rape kit in the U.S. tested, ultimately ending the backlog.
Joe Biden is a supporter of the initiative, and he even has a statement on the organization’s website.
“DNA technology is the guilty person’s worst enemy and the innocent person’s greatest friend,” Biden’s statement reads.
As explained on their website, when someone is the victim of sexual assault and reports it, an invasive examination of the victim’s body is often taken in hopes of finding DNA evidence that will identify the rapist. The evidence is then preserved and called a rape kit. Hundreds of thousands of rape kits remain untested in the U.S.
Biden’s speech on SVU perfectly summed up his belief in the importance of testing rape kits.
“My dad used to have an expression. He said the greatest sin any person can commit is an abuse of power. And the greatest abuse of power was rape,” Biden said on the show.
“When the victim isn’t believed, when she goes through the invasive process of having a rape kit put together and then it’s stuck on a shelf somewhere, and then the rape kit is never ever tested, we fail.”
The full episode is available for streaming on NBC’s website, and is embedded here:
