Republican state lawmakers want to shield children by closing the curtains on drag performances.

Legislation moving through several GOP-controlled capitols would ban the gender-diverse shows in front of young people — including at schools, colleges, or on public property — sparking a furious response from the LGBTQ community and civil liberties groups.

“We’re just trying to keep minors away from sexually explicit material,” Arkansas Republican state Rep. Mary Bentley told her fellow lawmakers at a hearing Wednesday about a bill she’s co-sponsoring to prohibit children from watching drag shows that might affect student performances. Many drag shows do not contain sexually explicit content, especially when performers — who often wear more clothing — are entertaining in spaces where children may be present.

Continue reading “Republican states are fuming — and legislating — over drag performances” →

The state House of Representatives passed a bill to impose mandatory minimum sentences on anyone who gets four or more driving under the influence convictions.

The passage of House Bill 1170 comes shortly after Senate passage of a proposal to limit parole for the most violent offenders.

HB 1170 comes from Rep. Chris Karr, R-Sioux Falls, who lost his grandmother to a drunken driver who had nine DUI convictions.

Continue reading “House advances mandatory minimums for multiple DUIs” →

South Dakota and Utah are the latest states to pass laws banning transgender surgeries on children under 18, moving against court challenges to such limitations in other states.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem signed the Help Not Harm Act on Feb. 3, preventing gender reassignment surgery and drug treatment on children suffering from gender dysphoria, following Utah Gov. Spender Cox’s signature on a similar bill there. Court challenges are promised against the Utah measure already in effect, NBC News reported, and challenges are anticipated against the South Dakota law set to take effect in July.

Continue reading “States move to block childhood transgender surgery” →

Kentucky resident Deric Lostutter is fighting to regain the right to vote.

Lostutter is now a paralegal but previously was a member of hacktivist group Anonymous and served out a prison sentence after violating a federal anti-hacking law.

His particular state and the nature of his conviction are proving to be sticking points as he seeks re-enfranchisement: Kentucky indefinitely revokes voting permissions for residents with certain kinds of felonies on their records. That includes offenses that, like Lostutter’s, were tried in federal court; as such, he’d need a governor’s pardon to be re-enfranchised.

Lostutter lost voting rights after being convicted in 2017 of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and lying to the FBI about his actions, and he served two years. He and a co-collaborator had conducted a hack in an effort to put pressure and public attention on two Steubenville, Ohio, high school football players’ rape of an unconscious 16-year-old, as well as on school employees believed to have enabled or hidden the assault.

“I went after a coverup of a rape case,” Lostutter told Government Technology. “Did I commit a crime? Yes: I accessed a website without permission — a football fan website, where I posted allegations and evidence of the coverup to protect the football team. Do I admit that was wrong? Yes. Did I serve my time? Yes. Was it violent? No.”

That lack of permission is where the CFAA comes in. The federal law criminalizes accessing information on an Internet-connected device either without “authorization” or by exceeding the authorization one already has.

The CFAA is a controversial law. While it appears intended to prevent malicious hacking, it’s also come under fire over the years for its vague wording that some say risks scooping up more innocuous individuals alongside genuinely dangerous actors.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) appeared to acknowledge this concern last May when it issued a policy revision clarifying the law’s scope. The DOJ explained that the CFAA should not, for example, be used to charge security researchers or people who exaggerate in their online dating profiles.

Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told GovTech that the latest DOJ revision is helpful but still fails to clearly pin down the parameters of the law and create bright lines between common online behavior and genuinely dangerous and damaging activity.

You can read the full article at Government Technology.

Holly Wilson had just left to pick up soda for a steak dinner for her nine grandchildren last May, when a barrage of bullets was fired into her home on the largest Native American reservation in South Dakota.

Her 6-year-old grandson, Logan Warrior Goings, jumped from the family’s loveseat and raced across the room to his grandfather — and was shot in the head. It took at least 15 minutes for a single tribal law enforcement officer to arrive, but by then, the drive-by shooters were gone, and Logan — a “kind and gentle” boy who loved Xbox and his Siamese cat, Simon — was dead.

“He was the sweetest little boy,” said Wilson, 62. “He was so helpful for grandma. He was my best partner.”

Continue reading “South Dakota tribe sues US over crime” →

A new bill, called “Truth in Sentencing,” would require people convicted of serious violent crimes to serve either all or a majority of their sentence before being eligible for supervised release or parole, a step toward a tougher stance on who gets released from prison.

Those in favor of the two-part bill, like the South Dakota Attorney General, the Minnehaha County State’s Attorney and Sioux Falls Police Department chief, argued that South Dakota cities are facing a wave of violent crime being committed by people who have violent criminal records,

Meanwhile, opponents worried it could lead to increased prison populations in a state where the prisons are already overcrowded, and de-incentivize programing like addiction treatment.

Freshman Sen. Brent Hoffman, R-Sioux Falls, brought the bill after having conversation with law enforcement, various state’s attorneys and others involved in the criminal justice system. He called it a landmark law and order bill while explaining its various sections.

“It is not a cure-all for every crime that ails us, but I think it is an important first step to address the violent crime in particular that so ravages our community, affects our citizens, and for which they want us to do something about,” Hoffman said.

Currently, inmates can gather sentencing credits, from either their time served in jail before they had their trial or by attending programming. These credits can then be applied for a shortened sentence, making the person parole eligible. The bill would change parts of this programming, depending on the person’s crime.

In the first section of the bill, anyone convicted of one of 13 high level violent crimes, such as first-degree manslaughter and first-degree human trafficking, would have to serve the full sentence imposed on them by a judge without credits for a shortened term. The inmate would then be eligible for supervised release.

You can read the full article at Yahoo! News.

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.

Continue reading “Senate Bill 70: Protecting children’s rights while testifying” →

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.

Continue reading “Finding missing persons in South Dakota” →

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.

Continue reading “Lack of rural lawyers leaves much of America without support” →