Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford says she’ll use experience to protect Wisconsinites

Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford is running for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She will face Republican former Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County Circuit Court judge, in an April 1 general election.

The Wisconsin Independent spoke with Crawford, a former prosecutor and private practice attorney, on Feb. 10 about her vision for Wisconsin and her career experiences.

The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Your website says that it is important to have Supreme Court justices who understand how to keep communities safe. I would love to get your thoughts on what that means for Wisconsin and how that matters in a Supreme Court justice.

What I mean by that is we need commonsense justices on our Supreme Court who know right from wrong and believe that if somebody has committed a violent crime, hurt people, hurt the community, that they need to be out of the community. They need to be in a prison or a jail.

Likewise, if a corporation has harmed our community, like the opioid manufacturers did, for example, they need to be held accountable as well. 

And finally, if the government is taking rights away from people and undermining our fundamental rights and freedoms under the Wisconsin laws or the Constitution, we need justices on a court that are willing to stand up for Wisconsin citizens and protect them.

So that’s what I mean when I say that we need a court that is focused on safety. 

Would you discuss any experiences you’ve had that prepared you for this?

I started out my legal career in Wisconsin as a prosecutor at the Wisconsin Department of Justice, handling the toughest felony cases, all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and making sure that I was keeping our community safe, that I was protecting the rights of the crime victims in those cases, and that I was doing justice. So that is how I started my career. I was the director of criminal appeals statewide while I was at the Department of Justice, and part of that was making sure that the state of Wisconsin, in making arguments in front of the Wisconsin Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, that we were advancing justice and making sure that we were protecting the rights of all citizens to safe communities in Wisconsin, with a consistent voice. 

Later I worked in private practice as a lawyer, standing up in courts for people when the government took their rights away from them. So I mentioned that I believe that’s an important part of safety as well. For example, I represented public school teachers when their rights in the workplace were undermined and taken away by the state government. 

I protected voting rights, particularly voting rights for the most vulnerable Wisconsin citizens, when Wisconsin enacted a law that made it harder for them to exercise their constitutional right to vote, even for registered voters. 

I represented Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin and their doctors to make sure that women can get the health care services they need without the government coming in between women and their doctors. As a woman who has gone through pregnancy and birth, I always wanted to be able to make my own decisions about my health and my family. And I was fortunate not to be in the really difficult situations when some women find themselves in as they’re going through pregnancy. But I think it’s really important that the government stay out of those kinds of decisions and that people be able to make their own decisions when it comes to their bodies and their families. 

And then, finally, I’ve been a judge for about six and a half years now in Wisconsin. I’ve handled all kinds of different cases, from criminal cases to various different kinds of civil cases, juvenile cases, and when it comes to particularly those involving violations of the criminal law, situations where somebody has been the victim of a serious crime, I put public safety first. And that’s always my primary consideration when I’m making decisions in those types of cases, in criminal cases. 

That’s all the experience I’m going to bring with me to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and I’m going to use that experience and apply common sense to protect the safety of all Wisconsinites and of our communities.

How, as a judge, do you balance the need to make sure that the people who commit violent crimes against the most vulnerable people are taken out of the community and also making sure that you get it right?

I do what the law requires us to do in those cases. We have to look at all of the relevant factors in a case and make a decision on a sentence that I, as a judge, believes is going to protect the community and protect the rights of that crime victim, and the law gives very broad discretion to judges in Wisconsin to do that. 

But as I said, I always put community safety first, and I’ve always worked hard to structure sentences that protect the community and also in particular cases if, for example, the defendant is somebody who has an underlying addiction or a mental health problem, to try to make sure that the sentence is structured in a way that allows them to get the resources that they need to try to address those underlying drivers of criminal conduct, whether it is within a prison or in a community, if it’s a less serious offense. I think that it’s important for judges to look at what’s driving criminal conduct and to try to make sure that we reduce the likelihood that somebody is going to repeat criminal conduct in the future by, for example, making sure they have access to drug or alcohol treatment. 

The Supreme Court is somewhat of a different kind of judicial body than any other in Wisconsin. How has your background prepared you for that specific position?

I think that having the broad experience that I have had both in working as a prosecutor, standing up in court for ordinary Wisconsin citizens, and then serving as a judge has prepared me really well for the wide variety of cases that the Wisconsin Supreme Court hears. 

I’m a judge. I have never been a politician. My opponent, Brad Schimel, is a partisan politician. He’s bringing a political agenda to this campaign, and ultimately, I think he wants to bring it to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And I think it is really important that we have justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court who are not trying to drive an extreme political agenda, but who are there because they want to protect the rights of Wisconsinites under our laws and our Constitution, that they want to use common sense to make sure that the decisions that are reached by the court take into account the real people who are behind those cases. 

This isn’t about abstract principles. These are real people’s lives that we are making decisions about. It really requires courts to apply some common sense and make sure that what they’re doing is going to protect Wisconsinites in the immediate cases and then in the future.