S.D. lawmakers convict AG over 2020 accident
PIERRE, S.D. — The South Dakota Senate on Tuesday convicted Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg of two impeachment charges stemming from a 2020 fatal accident, removing and barring him from future office in a rebuke that showed most senators didn’t believe his account of the crash.
Ravnsborg, a first-term Republican, showed little emotion as senators convicted him first of committing a crime that caused someone’s death. They then delivered another guilty verdict on a malfeasance charge that charged he misled investigators and misused his office.
Sen. Lee Schoenbeck, the chamber’s top-ranking Republican criticized Ravnsborg for declining to testify in his own defense, saying Ravnsborg should have shared “what the hell he was doing” the night of the crash.
The convictions required a two-thirds majority.
Senators mustered the bare minimum 24 votes to convict Ravnsborg on the first charge, with some senators saying the two misdemeanors he pleaded guilty to weren’t serious enough crimes to warrant impeachment. The malfeasance charge sailed through with 31 votes.
Votes to bar Ravnsborg from future office, taken on both counts, were unanimous.
Ravnsborg told a 911 dispatcher the night of the crash that he might have struck a deer or other large animal, and has said he didn’t know he struck 55-year-old Joseph Boever until he returned to the scene the next morning. Criminal investigators said they didn’t believe some of Ravnsborg’s statements, and several senators made clear they didn’t either.
“There’s no question that was a lie,” Schoenbeck said. “This person ran down an innocent South Dakotan.”
Prosecuting attorneys probed Ravnsborg’s alleged misstatements during the aftermath of the crash, including that he never drove excessively over the speed limit, that he had reached out to Boever’s family to offer his condolence, and that he had not been browsing his phone during his drive home.
The prosecution played a series of video clips during their closing arguments that showed Ravnsborg’s shifting account of his phone use during interviews with criminal investigators.
“We’ve heard better lies from 5-year-olds,” Pennington County State’s Attorney Mark Vargo, acting as an impeachment prosecutor, said of Ravnsborg’s statement.
Investigators had determined the attorney general walked right past Boever’s body and the flashlight Boever had been carrying — still illuminated the next morning — as he looked around the scene the night of the crash.
Ravnsborg said neither he nor the county sheriff who came to the scene knew that Boever’s body was lying just feet from the pavement on the highway shoulder.
“There isn’t any way you can go by without seeing that,” Arnie Rummel, an agent with the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation who led the criminal probe, said in testimony Tuesday.
Ravnsborg resolved the criminal case last year by pleading no contest to a pair of traffic misdemeanors, including making an illegal lane change and using a phone while driving, and was fined by a judge.
The attorney general’s defense asked senators to consider the implications of impeachment on the function of state government. Ross Garber, a legal analyst and law professor at Tulane University who specializes in impeachment proceedings, told senators to impeach would be “undoing the will of the voters.”
Ravnsborg’s defense attorney, Mike Butler, contended that the attorney general had done nothing nefarious. Butler described any discrepancies in Ravnsborg’s memory of that night as owing to human error, and disparaged testimony from Rummel as “opinion” that would not hold up in a court of law.
Ravnsborg in September agreed to an undisclosed settlement with Boever’s widow.
Nick Nemec, Boever’s cousin who has been a constant advocate for a severe punishment for Ravnsborg, said the votes were “vindication.”
“It’s just a relief. It’s been nearly two years that this has drug on and it just feels like a weight off my shoulders,” he said.
Ravnsborg is the first official to be impeached and convicted in South Dakota history.
Gov. Kristi Noem, who will pick Ravnsborg’s replacement until the candidate elected to replace him in November is sworn in, called for Ravnsborg to resign soon after the crash and later pressed lawmakers to pursue impeachment. As the saga dragged on, Noem endorsed Ravnsborg’s predecessor, Republican Marty Jackley, for election as his replacement.
“It is now time to move on and begin to restore confidence in the office,” Noem said on Twitter, but gave no indication as to who she will pick for the interim position. Ravnsborg did not answer questions from reporters as he exited the Capitol.