Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul announced a proposal to address the past mishaps of a backlog of untested sexual assault kits.
State leaders are doing their best to make sure a future backlog of untested sexual assault kits never happens again. A bipartisan proposal announced Tuesday is aimed at making testing sexual assault kits quicker and easier.
In recent years, backlogs of 6,000 sexual assault kits occurred across the state, slowing the pace of justice for offenders. Under current law, there is no clear statutory procedure for the collection and processing of sexual assault kits, according to the state.
But this new proposal, which was touted by Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and a bipartisan group of state legislators, is focused on victims' wants. “This will help us ensure that survivors’ cases are prioritized and that justice isn’t unnecessarily delayed,” Kaul said about the legislation.
Under the new legislation, when a health care professional collects evidence from a sexual assault victim, the victim will have the choice to report it to law enforcement or not. If they choose not to, the health care professional will still send the kit to state crime laboratories where it will be stored for up to 10 years in case the victim does choose to report it.
If a victim chooses to report it to law enforcement, the health care professional must notify law enforcement within 24 hours of collecting the kit. Law enforcement then has 72 hours to collect the kit, and 14 days to send the kit to state crime laboratories.
Speeding up this process can help stop serial rapists. When the cities of Detroit and Cleveland recently cleared up their backlog of untested rape kits, it identified 1,287 serial and potential serial rapists. “I believe this legislation will take a very large step from preventing that from ever happening again,” Kaul said at a press event in Milwaukee Wednesday.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul spoke about his first 100 days in office at a press event in Milwaukee Wednesday.
The First 100
Kaul spoke about this new legislation and what he has accomplished as Attorney General in his first 100 days at a Milwaukee Press Club luncheon Wednesday. Of his main goals as Attorney General, fighting crime, ensuring public safety and performing the duties of a watchdog continue to be the top three. “When it comes to enforcing our laws… doing that in a way that is objective, even-handed, fair and consistent, I think is critical,” Kaul said.
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Kaul discussed efforts at the state level to alleviate the opioid epidemic. Wisconsin recently joined a multi-state investigation into multiple opioid distributors that began in 2017. Kaul said that holding companies and individuals accountable for the epidemic is important.
It’s because of the opioid epidemic that Kaul discussed his approval of legalizing medical marijuana. He said that in cases where doctors can prescribe opioids, he would rather be in favor of the doctor prescribing medical marijuana “in every circumstance.”
Human Trafficking and Juvenile Justice
After news that the Milwaukee Common Council is increasing the fine for johns who solicit prostitutes, Kaul said tackling the issue of human trafficking across the state is also on his agenda.
“There’s been a shift in understanding of people in law enforcement that often people who historically may have been prosecuted in prostitution cases are often not people who we should be prosecuting. They are often survivors of human trafficking,” said Kaul Wednesday. “What we need to be doing is working with those people to make sure they have services, and we must prosecute the people who are the most culpable, which is the traffickers themselves,” he said.
Kaul is also focusing on improving juvenile justice across the state. He said Wednesday that he will likely not continue to investigate the troubled Lincoln Hills facility after a federal investigation ended with no charges. However, he did say he supports the state’s efforts to regionalize juvenile facilities, as proposed in WI Act 180. “We need to fundamentally rethink the way those facilities are operating,” Kaul said.
