Dueling Wisconsin Supreme Court ads focus on rape kit backlog
Dueling ads in Wisconsin’s high-stakes Supreme Court election focus on a backlog of criminal cases that took place during one candidate’s stint as the state’s top lawyer.
Sexual assault kits — often referred to as rape kits — are collections of DNA and other evidence taken from an assault survivor that can help identify or prosecute an assailant. But in some cases, the evidence is collected and then goes unprocessed, creating what some advocates have described as a national backlog of hundreds of thousands.
In Wisconsin, that backlog was about 6,000 when Brad Schimel, the Republican-backed candidate for Supreme Court, took office as Wisconsin’s attorney general in 2015. He served until 2019, and in a recent campaign ad, claimed that his office cleared 4,000 sexual assault kits during that time.
This week, his Democratic-backed opponent, Susan Crawford, released a competing ad that focused on the early years of Schimel’s time as attorney general.
https://www.wpr.org/news/schimel-crawford-wisconsin-supreme-court-advertising-rape-kits-backlog