“He Tied Our Hands”: How Brad Schimel Orchestrated Wisconsin’s Rape Kit Testing Delays

Liberal state Supreme Court Justice Jill Karofsky says her former boss and conservative Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel could have moved faster to clear a decades-old backlog of untested rape kits when he took over as attorney general in 2015 — an argument she’s making for the first time as she backs his opponent in the race.

Karofsky charged that Schimel did not ask his fellow Republicans who controlled the state Legislature and the Governor’s Office for funds to more rapidly move testing forward. And she accused him of directing Department of Justice resources that could have gone to testing to a new Solicitor General’s Office that pursued partisan outcomes in courts across the nation.

“What I saw Brad Schimel do was put partisan politics ahead of everything, including when it came to testing 6,000 sexual assault kits,” Karofsky told the Journal Sentinel earlier this month.

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Schimel’s critics focus on the first two years of his tenure, during which just nine kits were tested. He tends to direct attention to the DOJ’s testing of evidence from the more than 4,100 kits for which victims gave permission during his tenure.

Karofsky said when Schimel came into office, she and others asked that he go to the state Legislature to request more resources to test the kits. The agency needed the rape kits to be tested at the State Crime Lab, a project that would require more analysts, she said.

Instead of going to the Republican-controlled state Legislature or Republican Gov. Scott Walker to make that request, he instructed DOJ employees to seek a grant, she said.

“It took nine months to get the grant, and under the terms of the grant it took us another year to start testing because we had to inventory every single one of those 6,000 kits before we could test one kit,” she said. “That’s why in the first two years he was attorney general, we only tested nine kits at the Department of Justice out of those 6,000.

“He tied our hands.”

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But a group of 44 former assistant attorneys general in a letter attacked Schimel for the time it took to address the backlog.

“Like a true politician, Schimel did not make a real effort to clean up the backlog until the clock ticked toward November 6, 2018, when his name appeared on the ballot in front of voters,” they wrote in a letter urging voters to reject his bid for the Supreme Court.

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Karofsky also accused Schimel of directing DOJ dollars and resources that could have been used for testing rape kits toward a new Solicitor General’s Office that was pursuing partisan outcomes in the courts.

The office’s efforts included filing friend-of-the-court briefs in cases playing out in other states to stop environmental regulations.

She also pointed to the key role Schimel’s solicitor general Misha Tseytlin played in developing a strategy to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide until it was struck down in 2022. Schimel told the Journal Sentinel he did not discuss efforts to end Roe with Tseytlin.

Walker and the state Legislature created the position in 2015.

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Fischer contended that Walker and Van Hollen had advocated for funding the office well before Schimel was in the position.

He also said that at the time Schimel came into office in 2015, “the state budget was already crafted” and Schimel did not have the authority to shift funds from the Solicitor General’s Office to testing of rape kits.

However, deliberations on the two-year state budget were underway when Schimel came into office that January. On March 2, 2015, Schimel testified to the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee on the DOJ budget.

The state budget was signed by the governor on July 12, 2015.