A rape suspect who remained free for more than a year while a Madison police report sat unread in the Dane County District Attorney's Office could soon be returned to Wisconsin from Massachusetts to face charges in the March 2007 assault.

Anderson R. Dasilva, 29, first identified by Madison police as a suspect months after the assault, has agreed to be brought back to face a charge of second-degree sexual assault in Dane County Circuit Court, authorities said.

"Wisconsin is free to get him," said Tim Connolly, spokesman for the District Attorney's Office in Worcester, Mass., where Dasilva is being held.

The delay in prosecuting Dasilva, with the resultant loss of potential evidence and fading memories of witnesses, has put the spotlight on how the Dane County district attorney's office manages its case file.

But prosecutors say the case highlights a more fundamental problem: District attorneys' offices around the state are woefully understaffed, they say, and lawmakers and others seem deaf to their pleas for help.

"My job is to make sure people don't die and people don't get hurt and people don't get raped," Assistant District Attorney Robert Kaiser said. "At some point something really bad is going to happen because there aren't enough of us here, and no one cares."

Prosecutors describe a situation in which they're continually playing catch-up with the growing number of cases referred to them by police, whose numbers in Dane County have doubled over the past 20 years, while the number of prosecutors is the same as in 1988.

Still, District Attorney Brian Blanchard says the Dasilva case should have been dealt with in a timely manner, and there's no excuse for the way it was handled.

By law, cases in which a suspect has been arrested and is in custody must be processed within a set time. But out-of-custody cases -- which are often less-serious cases, cases in which the whereabouts of the suspect are not known, or cases in which charges are questionable -- are dealt with as prosecutors can fit them in, Blanchard said.

Sometimes those referrals sit on a prosecutor's desk for weeks, months or even a year or more.

To try to address that, the office is working on instituting a cumbersome short-term procedure to begin generating reports as soon as possible to remind attorneys of the out-of-custody cases assigned to them, said Deputy District Attorney Judy Schwaemle. That will be followed by a more efficient, long-term process.

A similar system is used in the Brown County District Attorney's Office to keep track of cases there, said District Attorney John Zakowski.

Work on Dane County's tracking program began even before the Dasilva case. But Blanchard said the staffing shortage in his and other district attorney's offices throughout the state makes it impossible to say such lengthy delays won't happen again.

Alleged assault

It was around bar closing time on March 10, 2007, when a woman left the Kollege Klub, 529 N. Lake St., and couldn't find her friends. She told police she got into a van with Dasilva and another man and tried to call her friends, but her cell phone battery was dead.

She said Dasilva then drove to an apartment complex, where the other man went inside and brought her another cell phone to use. It's unclear from a criminal complaint whether she talked to her friends or just left messages.

The other man then left them, she said, and Dasilva drove her to a deserted road where he raped and threatened to kill her, according to the criminal complaint. He later dropped her off near the Essen House, 514 E. Wilson St., where a passerby called 911, the complaint said.

That same month, Dasilva's wife, Jessire, later told the State Journal, she and her husband moved back to Massachusetts. The couple had been in Madison for just three months, and Jessire Dasilva, who was pregnant, wanted to be close to family there.

At the request of police in Madison, police in Clinton, Mass., located Dasilva and obtained a photo of him, which helped identify him as a suspect in the Madison rape.

On May 17, 2007, Madison police referred the case to the district attorney's office, along with a request for a warrant they said Clinton police required before they could arrest Dasilva.

There, the request sat for more than a year.

Delays

The case first went to Schwaemle, who said her time is mostly consumed with making charging decisions for the in-custody cases that have time limits. Schwaemle said the case sat in a stack with other cases -- which in her experience did not require immediate attention -- for seven weeks, without her ever reading it.

Although a cover sheet indicated the case involved a second-degree sexual assault, Schwaemle said that in her experience, such cases often involve situations in which there is not a threat to public safety or circumstances in which charges might not even be filed.

The decision to charge any case also requires extensive review of the evidence; the limitations of many out-of-custody cases makes decisions in those cases even less cut and dried, Schwaemle said.

On July 5, 2007, Schwaemle passed the Dasilva case to Assistant District Attorney Michael Finley.

Finley said the Dasilva case came to him in a stack of bad check cases, which he never looked at until Madison police detective Julie Johnson called him more than a year later to inquire about the case. Finley said he looked though the stack of cases and didn't find it. After checking and learning that the case had been assigned to him, Finley said, he went back though his stack and found the case file caught under a paper clip behind a bad check case.

A few days later, on Aug. 5, Dasilva was charged with second-degree sexual assault. Clinton police arrested him three days later.

By then, the van that Dasilva's wife said he was driving when he went out with a friend on the night the assault took place had long been sold. "We got rid of the van maybe a year after we got here," Jessire Dasilva said.

Madison Police Lt. Mary Lou Ricksecker said the van would have been "a critical piece of evidence."

Talk on procedures

Blanchard declined to say whether Finley was disciplined for the oversight, but Finley said he was not. However, the case did spark discussion about how to improve procedures in the office, Finley said.

When Johnson called him, Finley said, she apologized for not calling sooner, saying she had been busy working on multiple homicide investigations. Johnson referred questions about the case to Ricksecker.

Schwaemle said police or victims advocates often will call her attention to cases that need to be acted on quickly, but she does not recall that happening in Dasilva's case.

But both Schwaemle and Blanchard stressed that making decisions on cases that have been referred to their office is their responsibility, and it should not fall to police, victims or their advocates to remind them of cases.

Unlike most district attorney's offices, Dane County's does not use a vertical prosecution model -- in which the same attorney who initially reviews a case and makes charging decisions continues to handle the case through its conclusion -- because it doesn't have enough staff to do so, Blanchard said.

While it might seem the simplest approach, a vertical prosecution model in a large county like Dane can mean a single prosecutor is scheduled to appear in different courtrooms on multiple cases at the same time.

Consequently, Schwaemle said, efficiency is lost and efforts are duplicated because the assistant assigned to a case often has to repeat the work of others just to become familiar with the case.

The Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office has a separate sensitive crimes unit with six attorneys who rotate responsibility weekly for making charging decisions and following new cases that come in, said Deputy District Attorney Kent Lovern. That office also uses a "low-tech" tracking system of clipboards and sign-up sheets on which police log in cases, which are then noted as either having been charged, not charged or pending.

Legislative help asked

Since the Dasilva case surfaced in August, both the Dane County Board and Madison City Council have passed resolutions urging state legislators to provide funding to adequately staff the district attorney's office. Melanie Hampton, a Madison police officer and Dane County supervisor who co-sponsored the county resolution, said her concern about staffing began long before the Dasilva case and was one of the reasons she sought a seat on the County Board this year.

Currently, the office has the equivalent of 28.6 full-time attorneys, according to an analysis by the state Department of Administration. That analysis concluded the office needs 11 more attorneys to reach an adequate staffing level.

Blanchard said he is concerned that the delays in charging some crimes, particularly burglaries, will encourage criminals to continue committing the same crimes and embolden them to commit more serious crimes because they perceive the risk of being caught and punished is low.

Schwaemle said it's "the nightmare of everyone working here" that something sitting on an attorney's desk is going to turn into a tragedy. They're taking the risk that something real bad is going to happen," Schwaemle said, "because they have more to do than what they can get done."