(The Center Square) – As the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court continues to focus on the state’s old backlog of rape kits, Brad Schimel says there’s more to the story than most people have heard.
Schimel was on News Talk 1130 WISN on Wednesday, and said liberal Justice Jill Karfosky is “willing to lie” about the 2015 backlog of untested rape kits that Schimel inherited as attorney general.
“Jill Karofksy was the creator of this program,” Schimel explained. “And not like she created little pieces of it, or she had a general idea, Jill Karofsky was doing the nuts and bolts.”
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Tuesday that Karofsky was blaming Schimel for and accusing him of playing politics with the rape kit backlog.
“He tied our hands,” the paper quoted Karofsky. “What I saw Brad Schimel do was put partisan politics ahead of everything, including when it came to testing 6,000 sexual assault kits.”
Schimel, on Wednesday, said it’s Karofsky who is playing politics.
“She is desperately trying to hang on to power,” Schimel said “And she’s willing to say anything to keep the [liberal] majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court because she’s not going through her political agenda.”
Schimel’s opponent in the race for the supreme court, liberal judge Susan Crawford, has made the handling of the rape kit backlog a central issue.
“Schimel only tested nine rape kits in two years, out of a backlog of more than 6,000, causing justice to be delayed. Now Schimel is running scared, and like a true politician, he’s trying to rewrite history,” the Crawford campaign said in a statement earlier this week.
Schimel, who lost his bid for reelection as the state’s attorney general to Democrat Josh Kaul, said the truth is that he inherited the rape kit backlog when he was elected, and cleared every single kit that needed to be tested by the time his term was up.
In campaign ads, Schimel said he cleared 4,000 of the 6,000. Wisconsin media also said Schimel tested only nine of the 6,000 by January 2017 after taking office two years earlier and receive $5.1 million in grants for the process.
Before the November 2018 election when Schimel lost to Kaul, he announced he had 4,000 rape kits tested.
“In 2015, 2016, 2017 [Jill Karofsky] was not just defending the work we were doing. But aggressively advocating for how we were doing it the right way. The way we should do it, to be sensitive crime victims’ rights,” Schimel added.
