Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit newsroom, is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Sign up for our newsletter for more stories straight to your inbox.
Yes.
Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, the Republican candidate for Wisconsin Attorney General, wants to allow district attorneys from other counties to enforce Wisconsin’s contested 1849 abortion ban and prosecute abortion cases when the local district attorney declines. Current Wisconsin Attorney General Democrat Josh Kaul opposes this proposal and has said he would not enforce the ban.
Currently, the Wisconsin Attorney General and the Wisconsin Department of Justice have limited power to prosecute, and only in certain kinds of cases. The DOJ can step in on other cases, but only at the request of the local district attorney. Expanding the DOJ’s prosecutorial authority to local counties would require action by the state Legislature.
Sources
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Republican Wisconsin attorney general candidate Eric Toney says district attorneys should cross county lines to prosecute abortion cases
PBS Wisconsin: 2022 AG candidates spar over expanding prosecution authority
State of Wisconsin: Wisconsin Department of Justice
WisPolitics: Kaul campaign: AG Kaul slams Toney’s plan for roving abortion ban enforcers
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Credit should be given, in this format: “By Dee J. Hall, Wisconsin Watch”
- If published online, you must include the links and link to wisconsinwatch.org
- If you share the story on social media, please mention @wisconsinwatch (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram)
- Don’t sell the story — it may not be marketed as an individual product.
- Don’t sell ads against the story. But you can publish it with pre-sold ads.
- Your website must include a prominent way to contact you.
- Additional elements that are packaged with our story must be labeled.
- Users can republish our photos, illustrations, graphics and multimedia elements ONLY with stories with which they originally appeared. You may not separate multimedia elements for standalone use.
- If we send you a request to change or remove Wisconsin Watch content from your site, you must agree to do so immediately.
For questions regarding republishing rules please contact Andy Hall, executive director, at ahall@wisconsinwatch.org
