Liberal state Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford again accused her opponent Brad Schimel of letting rape kits go untested when he served as attorney general.
Schimel has defended his approach while AG to processing the kits, saying he sought permission from victims before proceeding.
Crawford said during a Madison news conference Tuesday it is important to give victims a “voice in the process.” But she claimed that Schimel has still not explained why, in two years as attorney general, he tested only nine of the 6,000 rape kits, but when he was facing reelection, got thousands tested.
“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” Crawford said, adding that Schimel is too extreme for the state Supreme Court. “Our state deserves a justice who will apply the law impartially, with fairness, common sense and integrity, and not one who will use the bench to push a partisan agenda.”
Schimel spokesperson Jacob Fischer said in a statement that zero rape kits had been tested before the former AG took that office in early 2015. Fisher said that Schimel cleared 4,000 rape kits during his time in office after inheriting a “broken system” and fixed it.
“Brad Schimel solved a decades-long problem in less than four years,” Fischer said. “Susan Crawford knows she’s lying and will happily do it at the expense of sexual assault survivors in her pursuit of power. Shame on her blatant disrespect for survivors of sexual violence.”
Schimel’s campaign also insisted liberal Justice Jill Karfosky — who is backing Crawford — supported the former AG’s approach to processing rape kits while she was working under him at DOJ.
Karofsky rejected the assertion.
The Schimel campaign sent WisPolitics a statement from former Chief Deputy Attorney General and Senior Counsel Paul Connell, who said that Karofsky defended the process of inventorying kits before sending them for testing. According to Connell, Karofsky had supported this as a “victim centric” approach.
“When it came to law enforcement issues and taking care of victims, there was no daylight between Jill and Brad, who gave Jill authority to seek grant funding for testing and free reign to work with Division of Law Enforcement Services to find private labs to test the kits, as she agreed was the best process for survivors and the state,” Connell said in the statement. “She regularly reported progress and it was terrific to see the numbers of completed tests grow over time.”
Karofsky said in a statement that Schimel “failed” sexual assault victims, because he didn’t fulfill his responsibility to ask the Legislature for funding to accelerate testing. She also accused him of inflating testing data to cover up his failure.
“He knows he could have shown leadership so we could have moved faster while also respecting victims’ wishes,” Karofsky said in the statement. “As a result of his decisions, our hands were tied with red tape that slowed down testing for years, while he poured millions into his own partisan lawsuits and pet projects instead.”
Ahead of the press conference, the Crawford campaign shared a letter from 44 former assistant attorneys general endorsing Crawford. Six of those attorneys joined Crawford at Tuesday’s event. A few of the attorneys had served under Schimel and a few were Republican, including attorney Diane Sorenson, who spoke at the press conference.
