Susan Crawford called the massive error in the Thomas Gogin sexual assault case a “simple miscalculation,” citing “faulty memories,” news reports from the time say.
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford, then a supervisor in the state Department of Justice, made a series of excuses when her unit so badly bungled the state’s appeal of a convicted sex offender’s case that he was freed from prison, archival newspaper research shows. Her comments indicate that she tried to minimize the botched appeal.
“It’s unfortunate that a convicted rapist will now walk free because of the missed appeal deadline,” then-state Rep. Mark Gundrum, R-New Berlin, told the Associated Press in December 2001. That article calls Susan Crawford the “criminal appeals unit director” for then-Attorney General Jim Doyle.
She is now running for state Supreme Court and is widely regarded as a leftist Dane County Judge. The other candidate is former Republican AG Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County judge and former Waukesha County District Attorney. WRN has taken the lead in scrutinizing Crawford’s record because the corporate media don’t appear very interested in doing so; for example, as a judge, she released an accused child molester of a 5 year old girl on a signature bond and allowed him to live across from a school and to work out at Planet Fitness. He’s already free due to her light sentence. She also gave a slap on the wrist to another child molester from Middleton.
However, the Thomas Gogin case goes back further, to when Crawford worked for then-Attorney General James Doyle, in whose administration she would hold several roles.
Another attorney in the unit supervised by Crawford was accused of missing the key deadline, wrecking the state’s ability to appeal an appellate court’s order vacating the conviction of Thomas Gogin. We gave Crawford a chance to comment on this story through her campaign, but she did not respond.
Gogin was “released from prison because the state attorney general’s office missed an appeal deadline” in the high-profile case, confirmed an Associated Press article from the time. The botched deadline deeply upset the accuser. The Associated Press confirmed that Crawford supervised the appeals unit in the AG’s office at that time.
“Woman in rape case blasts AG,” the headline of a 2001 AP story reads. The AP story says the rape conviction “was dismissed because the state filed an appeal too late.”
“He violated me in the worst possible way that a woman can be violated,” the accuser alleged, according to the Waukesha Freeman. Photos allegedly documented bruises on the woman’s arm, and she accused Gogin of holding a spur against her arm while raping her, the Freeman contended. He denied raping the women.
The state’s bungling of Gogin’s appeal sparked major controversy at the time. Then state Rep. John Townsend told the Fond du Lac Reporter that the attorney general showed “gross incompetence.” However, it’s Crawford who was quoted in multiple newspaper stories giving the excuses.
“Susan Crawford, director of the attorney general’s office, was quoted in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as labeling the error as a ‘simple miscalculation,’ and citing ‘faulty memories,'” the Fond du Lac Reporter wrote. “She emphasized that justice will be achieved because the attorney general’s office will put whatever resources it has into retrying the case.”
But that never happened.
After the missed deadline resulted in Gogin’s release from prison, Gogin pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of felony third-degree sexual assault and was given probation and time served, according to the AP. That was in part out of concerns over putting the accuser through a second trial, news reports from the time say.
Three days after attorney Kathleen Ptacek filed the appeal late (she made the error), supervisor Crawford defended her, according to an Aug. 23, 2001, article in The Capital Times. That story called Crawford “director of the Justice Department’s criminal appeals unit,” and quoted her as saying, “This appears to have been the result of just a simple miscalculation, human error.” She called the lawyer involved “conscientious” and said the lawyer did “her level best.”
The prosecutor, Assistant DA Debra Blasius called the late filing “inexcusable” to The Capital Times, saying, “I can’t even put into words how disappointed I am that the time limit was missed on something this important.”
In contrast, Doyle took responsibility. He released a statement saying: “Such mistakes are never excusable.”
“The victim and her family deserve more than my apology,” Doyle said in an AP article that quoted Susan Crawford, the “director of the Justice Department’s criminal appeals unit,” as saying “several staff members” had the appeals date wrong.
The state Department of Corrections subsequently moved to revoke Gogin’s probation after allegedly discovering he had a “firearm, knives, ammunition, and sexually explicit material in his Delafield home,” according to the 2002 AP article.
WRN found this story angle in newspaper archives while doing research on Crawford’s background. Although the newspaper stories quoted her as the unit director, WRN wanted to verify that she was in that supervisory role at the time the mistake was made.
Samantha Standley, DOJ spokesperson, responded to our questions, by saying, “Susan Crawford was employed by DOJ in August 1997, first as an Attorney. She was an Attorney Supervisor at DOJ from December 2000 to February 2003.” We asked which dates she headed the appeals unit specifically. Standley responded a few days later, “The records that old only provide us with the job classification title, not their assignment or working titles.”
The corporate media on the fact that a new ad by Schimel’s campaign on the case alters a photo of Crawford so she isn’t smiling because they thought she should look “ashamed,” according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and AP.
We held the story to continue verifying the supervision dates.
The Associated Press, in a story fixating on the photo, confirmed on February 4, “Crawford headed the division at the time.”
“What I remember about it is that there was (an) assistant attorney general who was assigned that case and prosecuted that case,” Crawford said to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “I was asked by the attorney general, Jim Doyle, at the time to conduct an investigation after that deadline was missed.” She said she investigated the case and “tightened up some procedures
The Botched Appeal
“The victim and Gogin knew each other through their mutual interest in horses and their participation in rodeo-type events,” court records for his appeal say.
“The victim alleged that she accepted Gogin’s invitation to return to his farm after one of these events and that Gogin forcibly restrained and sexually assaulted her Gogin claimed that he and the victim had consensual sexual relations. The jury convicted Gogin,” court records say.
The appellate court had ordered a new trial on the basis of alleged failures by Gogin’s lawyer. According to the Waukesha Freeman, in part, the attorney was accused of failing to bring in a witness who could testify that the accuser had flirted with Gogin and failing to present telephone records showing she allegedly spoke with Gogin on the phone for longer than she claimed. The state wanted to appeal the order to the state Supreme Court in order to keep Gogin behind bars and in the hope the higher court would uphold his conviction. The Supreme Court refused to consider the appeal because of the missed deadline.
According to the Waukesha Freeman, Gogin had originally been sentenced to 7 years in prison.
In a 2001 column in the Waukesha Freeman, Mark Belling wrote that “Doyle’s bungling has turned loose on the streets a man convicted by a jury of rape and false imprisonment.”
Susan Crawford’s Role in Doyle’s Office
Susan Crawford’s LinkedIn page says she was “chief legal counsel” in the office of Gov. Jim Doyle from August 2009 to January 2011.
She also lists that she was an assistant attorney general in the Wisconsin Department of Justice from August 1997 through January 2003.
Her website touts the fact she was “director of criminal appeals” under Doyle.
The appellate court ordered the new trial for Gogin in July 2001. Supreme Court records for the case show that Ptacek filed the petition for review on Aug. 20, 2001. Three days later, Crawford was quoted on the topic.
Doyle took action against the unit, including “providing written instructions to the appeals unit for calculating the deadlines for petitions for review” and “instructing that all due dates for such pending actions be recalculated.”
Republicans in the state Assembly wanted Doyle to order his appeals unit to file appeals with more of a buffer before deadlines.
As a result of the Gogin case bungling, Crawford told the AP the Justice Department was implementing “new procedures that give the agency’s criminal appeals staff 10 days to make a decision on whether to ask the Supreme Court to review a case.”
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