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Jackley Recognizes Crime Victims’ Rights Week, Ignores New Amendment

“Attorney General Marty Jackley would like to remind South Dakotans that this week is National Crime Victims’ Rights Week,” but he apparently doesn’t want to remind us of the constitutional damage his campaign manager Jason Glodt made possible with Amendment S, the crime victims’ bill of rights that we voters wrote into our constitution last November.

The Attorney General’s press release touts the Attorney General’s Automated Victim Information Notification System and Crime Victim Services program. His official Twitter feed, where he promises more updates on victims’ rights, then turns to the Amazon Prime series Fireball Run, which will visit Yankton, Vermillion, Pierre, and Rapid City this fall and distribute thousands of missing-children flyers as it passes through.

I think the last we heard from A.G. Jackley on Amendment S was his second opinion on the new amendment (Article 6, Section 29) stating that it does not apply to civil court proceedings, local ordinance violations, or minor traffic violations. Jackley’s February 9 opinion also states that Sexual Assault Response Teams may continue to share information about victims unless victims explicitly invoke their Article 6 Section 29 rights.

Billionaire Henry T. Nicholas hasn’t dropped by to make sure Attorney General Jackley is properly implementing Nicholas’s vanity law. Nicholas has already turned his attention toward writing his skewing of due process and presumption of innocence into state law in Oklahoma, Idaho, and Maine.

Nicholas’s exploitation of our initiative process—pouring his out-of-state money into a petition drive and campaign for a ballot measure that had zero grassroots support—is one of the reasons the South Dakota Legislature passed House Bill 1141 to create an interim task force to study and propose reforms the initiative and referendum process. (The other main reason is to come up with more tricks to deny voters their right to pass laws.) Nicholas has provoked a similar response in North Dakota, where the Legislature is considering a similar study of initiative and referendum (see ND Senate Bill 2135). Let’s hope we voters don’t become victims of Nicholas’s big-money vanity campaign for crime victims.

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U.S. Attorney Randy Seiler will be hosting a public meeting on crime victims rights in Pine Ridge on Thursday. According to the re-emergent Bob Mercer, speakers will include “Oglala Sioux Tribe president Troy Weston; victim witness program national coordinator Darlene Averick from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Modoc County (Calif.) Sheriff Mike Poindexter, who lost four tribal members including the tribal chairman in a shooting at a tribal council meeting during 2014; Cheryl “Renee” Bourque, a federal Bureau of Indian Affairs official who lost two close friends who were Native American in a shooting at the Seminole, OK, sheriff office; and Frank Kelsey from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who will discuss gun violence, the nature of the problem and how to avert the consequences.”