The Rape Kit Backlog and Wisconsin's 2025 Supreme Court Race

Frederica Freyberg:
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 & Now” senior political reporter Zac Schultz tells us why the rape kit backlog is an issue in this race.

Zac Schultz:
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 6,800.

Ilse Knecht:
We’ve been very instrumental in sounding the alarm on this issue.

Zac Schultz:
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.

Ilse Knecht:
The issue is, once you determine that you have 6,000 plus untested rape kits, what do you do about it? And that is definitely very complex.

Brad Schimel:
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 4,000 kits. Every single kit that needed to be tested was done in that four years.

Kalvin Barrett on TV:
Brad Schimel let thousands of rape kits go untested for years.

Dave Mahoney on TV:
While rapists walked free.

Sue Riseling on TV:
And victims waited for justice.

Zac Schultz:
As a candidate for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Brad Schimel stands by his work as attorney general.

Brad Schimel:
I’m proud of the work. What we accomplished for survivors of sexual violence.

Zac Schultz:
His opponent, Susan Crawford, says he shouldn’t be so proud.

Susan Crawford:
He only put his foot on the gas when it became an issue in his reelection campaign. So again, this is Brad Schimel’s partisanship, 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.

Zac Schultz:
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.

Susan Crawford:
And he pushed them back and said, go look for a cheaper way to do this. Look, maybe for some grant funding.

Brad Schimel:
We also recognized we couldn’t just take 6,000 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.

Zac Schultz:
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.

TV announcer:
Over two years, Brad Schimel tested only nine rape kits out of 6,000 that needed testing.

Zac Schultz:
Knecht says the concerns were not just partisan attacks. Her group had the same questions.

Ilse Knecht:
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?

Zac Schultz:
Crawford says the state budget that year provided new positions that Schimel requested. They just weren’t for the crime lab.

Susan Crawford:
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 Schimel’s priorities, instead of addressing this backlog of sexual assault kits.

Ilse Knecht:
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.

Zac Schultz:
Schimel says he won’t let attacks over the backlog go unanswered.

Brad Schimel:
Frankly, we’re ready for it. And we’ve got — we’ve got sheriffs that have come forward to talk about this very issue.

Dale Schmidt on TV:
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.

Zac Schultz:
Schimel says the people that worked on this issue with him agree he took the backlog seriously.

Brad Schimel:
Check with groups like the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

Zac Schultz:
We did ask the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault for comment, and they declined to weigh in, citing the, “highly partisan nature of this nonpartisan election.” After the backlogged rape kits were tested, sexual assault charges and convictions soon followed.

Ilse Knecht:
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.

Susan Crawford:
He got nine kits tested in a period of two years. And, you know, justice delayed is justice denied.

Brad Schimel:
We worked a miracle. And it’s a — it’s a scam to suggest to voters that this was anything other than that.

Zac Schultz:
Reporting from Madison, I’m Zac Schultz for “Here & Now.”