“Everybody cares about community safety,” Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz said in a recent interview. But the Democrat’s record as a Milwaukee County judge has drawn the scrutiny of conservative critics who highlight a pair of egregious sex crimes where she handed down light sentences, as well as her incorrect claim she has sentenced “tens of thousands” of people during her career on the bench.
The race for a soon-to-be vacant seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court has drawn national attention and hundreds of thousands of dollars in out-of-state campaign contributions as Republicans and Democrats struggle for control of a court that has and will continue to play the role of political tiebreaker in contentious issues such as redistricting and abortion.
Although nominally a nonpartisan election, the contest is between Protasiewicz, who generally is perceived as a liberal Democrat, and Republican Dan Kelly, a conservative appointed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court by then-Gov. Scott Walker in 2016 but was voted off the court in 2020.
Kelly
| Courtesy photo
Protasiewicz is winning the fundraising contest so far, having drawn heavy support from out-of-state Democrats since she began her campaign in earnest last year.
In February alone, she has received more than $300,000 from contributors in New York, California, Washington, Minnesota, Massachusetts and elsewhere. Donors who hit the state’s $20,000 limit for Supreme Court races included Lee and Luis Lanier of Los Angeles; New Yorkers Martha Escobar, Hana Ginsburg, Sandor Lehoczy and Yaron Minsky; and Oklahoma oil billionaire Lynn Shusterman. Protasiewicz’s in-state contributions, by contrast, were less than $110,000.
Kelly’s sole out-of-state contribution this year was $20,000 from conservative Virginia billionaire Leo Leonard. He received $40,000 last year from billionaires Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, owners of Wisconsin-based shipping supplies company Uline. His total take this year is less than $60,000, according to state campaign finance records.
Protasiewicz was a Milwaukee County prosecutor for 26 years before being elected as a county judge in 2014. Since then, she has handed down more than 3,000 sentences, according to an analysis by Wisconsin Watch. That’s far less than the tens of thousands she has claimed, and a pair of cases have drawn particular attention for their mismatch between the violence of the crimes and the sentences the perpetrators received.
In July 2021, she sentenced Anton Veasley to four years probation for kidnapping a 15-year-old girl off the street and taking her to a motel room where he raped her and tried to force her into prostitution. The prosecutor charged Veasley with kidnapping, child trafficking and second degree sexual assault of a child, all of which carried 25-year prison terms.
Protasiewicz allowed him to plead guilty to a single felony and sentenced him to five years in prison, then stayed the sentence and placed him on probation for four years. Asked about it later, she said, “The person had already served more a year in custody, and you balance, you know, what’s the appropriate time versus what’s the possibility and the hope that that person is going to do well on supervision.”
Veasley later was charged with illegal possession of a firearm.
In another case, she sentenced Nathaniel Molinar to 30 months of probation for luring a 14-year-old girl with the mental abilities of a first-grader and raping her in her home. The initial charge of second degree sexual assault of a child carried a maximum of 25 years in prison, but Protasiewicz ordered a six-year sentence which she immediately stayed for 2.5 years of probation, half of what the prosecutor requested.
In campaign statements and interviews, Protasiewicz has described herself as a “victim advocate” and said, “The decisions that you make and how you make them impact people. They impact neighborhoods.”
She also has criticized her conservative opponents for ignoring the law, describing a controversial redistricting maps drawn by Republican lawmakers that the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld last year as “absolutely, positively rigged.”
Despite the flow of out-of-state contributions to the Janet for Justice campaign, Protasiewicz recently said, “We haven’t accepted any outside money, to the best of my knowledge,” although she said she expected that will change now that she has won the primary.
“I don’t know it, you can’t coordinate it,” she said. “I haven’t talked to anybody about it. But to the best of my knowledge no outside money has come in for me up to this point.”