By Todd Richmond, AP

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul waded into the state’s Supreme Court race on March 10, renewing an old feud with conservative candidate Brad Schimel over delays in testing sexual assault evidence kits almost a decade ago.

Kaul, a Democrat, ousted Schimel, then a Republican, from the attorney general post in the 2018 elections. Kaul hammered Schimel relentlessly during the campaign for taking more than two years to test about 4,000 kits sitting unanalyzed on police department and hospital shelves.

Schimel’s opponent in the Supreme Court race, Susan Crawford, has attacked Schimel over his handling of the kits in ads. Kaul brought up the delays again on March 10 during an afternoon news conference organized by the state Democratic Party. He accused Schimel of not paying close attention to the testing project and prematurely declaring he had completed the work when his administration left hundreds of kits for Kaul’s administration to test.

When asked what the testing delays have to do with being a state Supreme Court justice, Kaul said justices must be straightforward and Schimel isn’t candid about what went on with the kits.

Schimel defended himself in the days before the 2018 election by saying the state Justice Department needed time to inventory the kits and struggled to find private labs to test them because labs were overwhelmed with untested kits from other states. Jacob Fisher, Schimel’s Supreme Court campaign spokesperson, said in a March 10 statement that Schimel voluntarily took the initiative to lead a first-of-its-kind effort to test the kits. He accused Kaul of playing politics and rewriting history.

Schimel and Crawford are vying for an open seat on the Supreme Court in an April 1 election. The race is officially nonpartisan, but Schimel was a Republican attorney general and has GOP backing while Democrats are rallying behind Crawford.

The race has enormous implications in swing state Wisconsin, with majority control of the state’s highest court on the line as it is expected to face issues that will affect abortion and reproductive rights, the strength of public sector unions, voting rules and congressional district boundaries.

Crawford and her allies are increasingly trying to nationalize the contest against Schimel by focusing on Elon Musk, a top adviser to President Donald Trump. America PAC, a group created by Musk, has spent $3.2 million on digital ads, mailers and canvassing to support Schimel in the Supreme Court race. Another Musk-funded group, Building America’s Future, has spent more than $2 million on TV ads attacking Crawford.

In 2014, the state Justice Department learned of some 6,800 sexual assault evidence kits that had not been tested. They went unanalyzed for various reasons. Prosecutors may have decided cases were too weak to pursue or been forced to drop cases because victims wouldn’t cooperate, according to Schimel’s administration.

The problem wasn’t unique to Wisconsin. A USA Today Network investigation in 2015 found at least 70,000 untested kits nationwide, leading to calls from victim advocacy groups to analyze them all in hopes of getting DNA hits that would identify serial offenders.

Schimel took over as attorney general in 2015. He secured a $4 million federal grant in September of that year to start testing Wisconsin’s kits, but the work didn’t begin until January 2017. He announced in September 2018, two months before the election, that his administration had finished testing 4,150 kits and declared the project finished. He chose not to test the rest because victims in those cases wouldn’t consent to analysis or prosecutors had already won a conviction in those cases, according to Schimel’s administration at the time.

Kaul announced in November 2019 that his administration finished the work after discovering Schimel had left about 300 kits untested.