Conservative Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel said anyone who engaged in violence, assaulted police and resisted arrest “should have been prosecuted” for their actions in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
But he stopped short of condemning President Donald Trump for pardoning more than 1,500 defendants for their actions in the attack, including those convicted of assaulting police.
“Presidents have the power to pardon,” Schimel said during a press call Monday. “President Biden has issued pardons, President Trump has now issued pardons as he’s come in, and presidents over history have done that. It’s a power they have. I don’t object to them utilizing that power.”
Meanwhile, the campaign of liberal Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, said she opposes both former President Joe Biden pardoning his family members on his final day in office and Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons.
Schimel, a former GOP AG who now is a Waukesha County judge, said prosecutors in Washington, D.C., “overreached,” noting the U.S. Supreme Court found prosecutors had improperly charged some nonviolent offenders with felonies for obstructing an official proceeding.
“Prosecutors should never overreach, that’s one of the worst things we can do,” Schimel said. “There’s the old adage that ‘it’s better that 10 guilty people go free than one innocent person sit in prison,’ and … nothing could be more true about how our justice system should work.”
Crawford campaign spokesperson Derrick Honeyman said Crawford believes the president’s pardon authority “should be exercised only to advance justice.”
“Presidential pardons of violent offenders who attack police officers and public institutions—and pardons of the president’s own family members—undermine public trust in our justice system and the rule of law. That’s just common sense,” he said.
Honeyman also knocked Schimel for not condemning the pardons.
“Brad Schimel’s support for violent criminals who attacked law enforcement is sickening, but sadly par for the course for him and his extreme agenda,” he said.
During the call, Schimel also defended his record on testing sexual assault kits during his tenure as attorney general, saying he helped clear a backlog that accumulated over 25 years.
He said his office tested all of the more than 4,200 sexual assault kits that needed to be tested to clear the backlog. The backlog has become a key issue in Schimel’s campaign against Crawford.
In 2017, two years into Schimel’s term, his office said only nine kits had been tested after previously saying a “few hundred” had been tested. That was despite receiving $4 million in grant funding to address the backlog over a year earlier. By fall of 2018, Schimel’s office said all but five remaining kits had been tested.
Schimel said Monday clearing the backlog took time because he had to find out which kits still needed to be tested, obtain grant money to test them without flooding the state crime lab, and ensure sexual assault survivors were contacted before testing them. He noted liberal Justice Jill Karofsky, then executive director of the Office of Crime Victim Services, supported the effort to contact survivors first.
“We’re sitting on evidence collected from their body. You cannot just go test that evidence without getting their approval for it,” he said.
The issue has again surfaced in the Supreme Court race. Schimel is up with a TV ad that proclaims he led the sexual assault kit initiative, clearing 4,000 backlogged kits so survivors could “finally get justice.” Meanwhile, Crawford has been running an ad that charges Schimel “let 6,000 rape kits sit untested for two years, while survivors waited for justice.”
Honeyman charged Schimel with a “long and disturbing record of failing sexual assault victims and delaying justice.”
During the call, Schimel also said he would recuse from any case that he or his immediate family has a personal stake in, though he said it’s “hard to predict” what that might be. He said everyone has “baggage” in any given case.
“The question isn’t whether you have that history; the question is whether you can truly set it aside,” he said. “If I cannot set aside some prior bias or concern because it’s so emotional to me, it’s so impactful to me, or is something I was directly involved in in the past … that I took strong positions on, well, then those are the kinds of things where perhaps I need to, need to recuse. But it’s hard to predict what that might be in a vacuum like this.”
U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Prairie du Chien, said Crawford should be asked if she will recuse herself from cases involving Act 10. Crawford was one of several attorneys to sue to overturn the law ending collective bargaining rights for public employees.
“I haven’t seen that in the paper yet, that’d be nice to see also,” Van Orden said on the call.
Honeyman told WisPolitics that if elected, Crawford “will look at every case that comes before her on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, examine the facts and questions presented, and make a determination as to whether it’s appropriate for her to sit on that case.”
