Testifying in court can be difficult. For children, it can be even harder.

Senate Bill 70 would make testifying less traumatic for children. The bill hit the South Dakota Senate floor Wednesday for the second time and passed. The bill is designed to address courtroom modifications when children are required to testify in a court of law against their abusers.

Tifanie Petro is the director of Advocacy and Prevention at the Children’s Home Child Advocacy Center and was the one who drafted the bill, taking guidelines from states that already hold similar laws like Illinois, Colorado, and North Dakota.

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It might surprise you to find out that there are more than a hundred people reported missing in South Dakota right now. Some are runaways and return home in a few days, but others may find themselves in dangerous situations.

Today in South Dakota, the state Division of Criminal Investigation reported 129 total missing people; 85 were juveniles, and 44 were adults. While these numbers might seem high, they align with what we’ve seen in recent years. On average, there are 70 to 90 missing juvenile cases at any given time.

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One of the key tenets of juvenile justice reform in South Dakota – keeping low-level youth offenders out of custody in favor of rehabilitative services and a return to public school attendance – is causing headaches for South Dakota education officials, who say they are not equipped to deal with habitual offenders in school settings.

That balancing act is the backdrop for Senate Bill 4, one of several proposed bills resulting from a 2022 legislative summer study that explored ways to improve cooperation between schools, law enforcement and courts as the state continues to assess its youth corrections strategy amid major reforms enacted over the past decade.

Continue reading “Back to school or off to jail: Legislators seek update to South Dakota juvenile justice assessment system” →

While the running joke may be that there are too many lawyers in the world, in many rural places in the United States, there are demonstrably too few.

Despite efforts in recent years by a handful of states, universities and legal associations to ease the problem, there remains a glaring lack of lawyers in many far-flung places. This leaves those areas and their residents without easy access to legal advice for family issues, wills, estates and property transactions, in addition to any criminal or civil legal disputes. Residents often have to drive long distances to another city or rely on remote video meetings.

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A little more than four weeks ago, a Sioux Falls police officer pulled over a car with suspicious license plates. According to police, the 22-year-old driver refused to get out of the car and then tried to drive away, putting the officer’s life in danger. The officer fired several shots, striking the driver multiple times, and the front-seat passenger was also hit.

Continue reading “Record year for officer-involved shootings in SD” →

South Dakota is short on lawyers, and it is impacting lower income, rural defendants more than anyone else in the state.

But for State Supreme Court Chief Justice Steven Jensen, it is not enough to give University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law graduates a ticket out of the Bar exam.

The proposal last year to provide for “diploma privilege” was brought by Rep. Mary Fitzgerald (R-St. Onge). Fitzgerald’s daughter, a graduate of USD’s School of Law, has been unable to clear the Bar exam after numerous attempts.

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Continue reading “A legal desert – Attorneys are scarce in Nebraska’s rural areas” →

While the number of serious crimes committed in the state has fallen to the lowest number since 2014, the number of cases where the state decided not to prosecute someone who was arrested with probable cause doubled from 595 to 1189 between 2019 and 2021, according to the South Dakota State Crime Reports for those years.

For some number of arrestees to go uncharged is not abnormal. After someone is arrested by police for being suspected of committing a crime, a prosecutor working for the state must decide whether or not to bring criminal charges against them. If the prosecutor decides that there isn’t enough evidence to secure a conviction, they may decide not to bring charges at all.

Continue reading “Crime in South Dakota is dropping, but more and more cases are slipping through the cracks” →

Members of Congress, state legislators, regulators, and legal advocates are calling on prisons to explain their poor hepatitis C treatment rates, after a STAT investigation revealing that more than 1,000 people had died from complications of the curable disease.

In South Dakota and Oklahoma, lawmakers have written to their respective departments of corrections about STAT’s reporting. In Nebraska, the state’s inspector general of corrections requested that the prison explain a policy, obtained by STAT, requiring that incarcerated people sign a consent form that misrepresents the benefits of available hepatitis C treatments. Lawmakers in other states are pledging broader probes into the issue, too.

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A new law that makes it easier for people to sell homemade foods directly to consumers in South Dakota could expand business opportunities for small producers and increase product offerings at homes, farmers markets, fairs and roadside stands.

House Bill 1322 was passed unanimously by the state Legislature in 2022, an d was signed into law by Gov. Kristi Noem. It took effect July 1, 2022.

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