Keegan Kyle

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

MADISON - For the second time in four months, Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel struggled Tuesday to describe the state’s progress in testing a backlog of sexual assault evidence.

Schimel punted when he was asked at a public meeting in Madison to verify recent news reports that 60 packages of evidence from the backlog have been tested so far, a fraction of the thousands of rape kits in Wisconsin that have never been submitted to a lab for analysis.

“I don’t know that number," he said. "I don’t know where they got that number from."

The figure — rounded down from precisely 63 packages of evidence — was provided by Schimel’s communication office to the Associated Press Monday and to USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin last week.

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The Department of Justice, which Schimel oversees, has received $5.1 million in grants since September 2015 to help pay for testing evidence from the backlog, provide victim services and improve the handling of evidence so a backlog doesn’t accumulate again.

State and federal authorities hope that testing evidence from the backlog may help identify serial rapists through DNA profiles contained in national offender databases.

Shortly after Schimel said he couldn’t verify the number, a Department of Justice prosecutor at the meeting backed up the figure. However, she indicated testing hasn't been finished for all of the packages.

Fifty of the packages undergoing DNA analysis at a private crime lab are “in the very end stages of being tested,” said Audrey Skwierawski, the Department of Justice’s violence against women resource prosecutor.

On May 9, Schimel's communications office said 13 packages had been tested at state labs and 50 packages had been tested at a private lab under contract. In the private lab cases, state officials were "awaiting the formal results."

DOJ spokesman Johnny Koremenos attributed Schimel's comments at the meeting Tuesday to confusion over news reports referencing 60 packages rather than the exact numbers for kits tested at state labs and the private lab.

"This is a very complex and important issue, and we are trying to be very precise," Koremenos said.

Schimel last struggled to explain the state’s progress in testing evidence at a January press conference. Days after claiming “a few hundred” packages of evidence had been tested, his communications office clarified that just nine packages had been tested.

Wisconsin’s backlog of untested sexual assault evidence includes more than 6,300 packages of biological material, colloquially known as rape kits, which were collected from victims but never sent to state crime labs for testing over more than two decades.

The majority of Wisconsin’s evidence is being sent to private labs for testing at a rate of 200 packages per month.

Keegan Kyle is an investigative reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. He enjoys writing about powerful people, injustice and what the government does with your money. What should he write about next? Send tips to kkyle@gannett.com or reach him on Twitter @keegankyle.