Lance Russell will be South Dakota’s next attorney general whether you vote for him or not.
At the Republican state convention in June, Russell earned the party’s nomination to seek the job of the state’s top law enforcement official, and its defense attorney when the state is sued.
Attorney general is among the statewide offices in South Dakota whose nominees are chosen by delegates at party conventions, not by voters in primary elections. The current attorney general, Republican Marty Jackley, is running for the U.S. House.
Russell is running unopposed to succeed Jackley in Nov. 3 general election. The South Dakota Democratic Party hasn’t nominated anyone to run for attorney general since 2018.
Russell, a Hot Springs native and 1999 graduate of the University of South Dakota School of Law, has spent more than half his career as the Fall River County state’s attorney, beginning soon after he passed the bar exam. He’s also the state’s attorney for neighboring Oglala Lakota County, which is part of the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Russell prosecutes the cases in that county that fall under state jurisdiction.
From 2009-2020, he stepped away from the prosecutor job to serve four terms in the state House of Representatives and two in the state Senate. He was elected state’s attorney for Fall River County again in 2020 and 2024, and will leave two years early to assume the role of attorney general.
Russell bested Austin Hoffman and John Fitzgerald at the state convention with a campaign focused on undoing some of the reforms to criminal justice he opposed during his time in Pierre.
Those reforms, to the adult system in 2013 and the juvenile one in 2015, ushered in drug courts, a presumption of probation for low-level felonies and a host of other policies meant to hold down the state’s prison population without hurting public safety.
Russell argues the reforms haven’t worked for the adult system — South Dakota is building two new prisons in spite of them — and says institutions like the now-defunct boot camp for teens in Custer did a better job helping juveniles change their ways than the alternatives now used for kids who break the law.
You can read the full article at Black Hills Pioneer.