>> Early voting is already underway in the spring election
for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. While many voters
are focused on what decisions the winner will make as a member
of the court for the next ten years, Liberal candidate Susan
Crawford wants voters to focus on decisions made by
conservative candidate Brad Schimel. Ten years ago. Here and
now, senior political reporter Zach Schultz tells us why the
rape kit backlog is an issue in this race.
>> Reporter. >> Ten years ago, Brad Schimel
was the newly elected Republican attorney general of Wisconsin as
he came into office. Wisconsin was still counting how many
untested sexual assault kits were sitting on evidence shelves
in police stations and hospitals around the state. Some of them
decades old. Eventually, the tally reached more than 6800.
>> We've been very instrumental in sounding the alarm on this
issue. >> Ilse Knecht is the policy
director for The End. The backlog Initiative, a national
group that was instrumental in pushing states across the
country to inventory and test their backlog of sexual assault
kits. >> The issue is, once you
determine that you have 6000 plus untested rape kits, what do
you do about it? And that is definitely very complex.
>> We found those survivors. We talked to them. We got their
consent to test those kits. And before my term of office as
attorney general, we tested over 4000 kits. Every single kit that
needed to be tested was done in that four years.
>> Brad Schimel led thousands of rape kits, go untested for
years. >> While rapists walked free.
>> And victims waited for justice.
>> As a candidate for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court,
Brad Schimel stands by his work as attorney general.
>> I'm proud of the work. What we accomplished for survivors of
sexual violence. >> His opponent, Susan Crawford,
says he shouldn't be so proud. >> He only put his foot on the
gas when it became an issue in his reelection campaign. So
again, this is Brad Schimmel's Partizanship, his political
future was at stake, and he was worried about it. So he started
working on that backlog and made some progress in it. But voters
saw through it, and they sent him home.
>> The key question is whether Schimel showed enough urgency on
this issue. Crawford says staffers in the Department of
Justice told Schimel about the backlog and asked him to get the
Republican controlled legislature to secure the
resources needed to test the kits.
>> And he pushed him back and said, go look for a cheaper way
to do this. Look, maybe for some grant funding.
>> We also recognize we couldn't just take 6000 kits and dump
them on the crime lab. They have day to day responsibilities, so
we had to go forward and secure funding to be able to pay for
getting those kits tested. >> Eventually, the state secured
more than $6 million in federal grants to process the backlog
and send the tests to private labs. Schimel announced the
backlog was cleared just a couple of months before he was
up for reelection in 2018. He lost, and the backlog delays
were a big part of the campaign against him, just as they are in
2025. Over two years, Brad Schimel tested only nine rape
kits out of 6000 that needed testing.
>> Knecht says the concerns were not just partisan attacks. Her
group had the same questions. >> We kept sort of asking, what
is going on? Why is it taking so long? There were, you know,
years when very, very few. I think it was even less than ten
kits were tested. And so we were engaging with folks in the state
trying to find out, you know, exactly what was happening. But
it was a big concern in our office what is going on in
Wisconsin. budget that year provided new
positions that Schimel requested. They just weren't for
the crime lab. >> He was going to the
legislature asking for a new unit of attorneys called the
Solicitor General's Office that he then utilized for the entire
time he was in office to pursue right wing lawsuits. So those
were Brad Schimmel's priorities. Instead of addressing this
backlog of sexual assault kits. >> It really does come down to
where your priorities are. If this is a priority for a
governor, an attorney general, I have seen them move mountains to
get this done and to get it done, you know, relatively
quickly. attacks over the backlog go
unanswered. >> Frankly, we're ready for it.
And we've got we've got sheriffs that have come forward to talk
about this very issue. >> I was there when Brad Schimel
initiated the sexual Assault Kit initiative, pushing hard to make
sure that victims of sexual assault were able to see their
offenders convicted, to make sure that there is justice.
>> Schimel says. The people that worked on this issue with him
agree. He took the backlog seriously.
>> Check with groups like the Wisconsin Coalition Against
Sexual Assault. >> We did ask the Wisconsin
Coalition Against Sexual Assault for comment, and they declined
to weigh in, citing the, quote, highly partizan nature of this
nonpartisan election. After the backlogged rape kits were
tested, sexual assault charges and convictions soon followed.
>> This is a justice issue. I mean, I will just say overall,
the rape kit backlog exists because of a failure of the
criminal justice system as a whole to take sexual assault
seriously and to prioritize the testing of rape kits.
>> He got nine kits tested in a period of two years. And, you
know, justice delayed is justice denied.
>> We worked a miracle. And it's a it's a scam to suggest to
voters that this was anything voters that this was anything