Susan Crawford, an attorney and judge who previously worked with Planned Parenthood, has been elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Crawford defeated Brad Schimel, a county court judge and former attorney general. She had served as a Dane County Circuit Court judge since 2018, and was an assistant attorney general in both Wisconsin and Iowa. But for the pro-life movement, she is most notable for her work with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU Reproductive Rights Project, in which she helped to block a 2011 Wisconsin law requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. She told voters she would not recuse herself from any abortion-related cases, as “[t]he law does not require judges to automatically recuse just because they have done some kind of legal work in the past as a lawyer.”
Furthermore, Crawford came under heavy criticism for her ruling on a previous case, in which she gave a light sentence to a man convicted of repeatedly raping and molesting a child beginning at the age of five. She sentenced him to four years in prison and credited him with 777 days already served in prison, followed by six years of supervised release afterwards, which was significantly less than what prosecutors had requested.
During a debate with Schimel, she defended that sentence, and said she didn’t regret it. “I followed the law in that case as I always do. I applied the law which says that judges have to consider every relevant factor in sentencing,” she said. “You have to consider both the aggravating and mitigating factors, and the Supreme Court has said you have to order the minimum amount of prison time you believe is necessary to protect the public.”
The highest amount of money she was given for her campaign came from largely out-of-state donors, with just 17 out of the 65 top donors being Wisconsin residents. Donors also included superstar director Steven Spielberg and his wife, actress Kate Capshaw. Spielberg previously helped defeat the pro-life Value Them Both amendment in Kansas. Other out-of-state donations came from George Soros and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker; Soros donated $1 million to the state Democratic Party and Pritzker donated $500,000. Those donations were specifically given for the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. While both Crawford and Schimel received major donations, she received more money in a 2-to-1 margin.
In her victory speech, Crawford promised to be a fair and impartial judge. “I’m here tonight because I’ve spent my life fighting to do what’s right,” she said. “That’s why I got into this race — to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of all Wisconsinites.”
Yet as a pro-abortion activist, Crawford doesn’t support the rights and freedoms of all Wisconsinites. She has, in fact, worked to strip fundamental rights and freedoms from preborn children, the most vulnerable and at-risk human beings. It remains to be seen if she will continue this pattern in the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
