South Dakota AG to agree to plea deal after fatally striking man with his car, prosecutor says

PIERRE, SD – South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg will avoid trial and strike a traffic misdemeanor plea deal in a traffic accident last year in which he hit and killed a walking man along a rural road, a prosecutor said on Wednesday.

Beadle County State Attorney Michael Moore, who is one of two prosecutors in the case, told The Associated Press that “there will be no trial and there will be no trial. would have a plea, “but declined to discuss further details of the arrangement. The plea will be entered on Thursday, when the Ravnsborg trial was due to begin, he said.

Moore said a judge’s order barring state officials from disclosing details of the investigation prevented him from disclosing further details.

The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ravnsborg, the state’s top law enforcement official, has faced three counts of misdemeanor each carrying a sentence of up to 30 days in jail and up to $ 500 d ‘fine.

The widow of Joseph Boever, the man who was killed at the age of 55, has indicated that she is considering filing a wrongful death lawsuit against the attorney general.

Ravnsborg, who was elected for his first term in 2018, first told authorities he believed he struck a deer or other large animal as he returned home to Pierre from a Republican fundraiser late on September 12. He said he searched the unlit area with a cell phone flashlight and only realized he had killed a man the next day when he returned to the scene from US 14 near Highmore.

Crash investigators said in November Ravnsborg was distracted when he veered onto the shoulder of the highway where Boever was walking. But prosecutors took months longer to make a decision to charge in the crash, launching an investigation that examined GPS data from cellphones, video footage along the Ravnsborg route and DNA evidence. .

In videos released by Governor Kristi Noem this year, criminal investigators confronted Ravnsborg with gruesome details of the crash, including that Boever’s glasses were found inside Ravnsborg’s vehicle. At one point, they told him, “His face was in your windshield, Jason. Think about it.

Ravnsborg didn’t seem sure in the videos as to how he swerved on the shoulder, but detectives told him bone scrapings were found on the rough shoulder band.

” I never saw it. I’ve never seen him, ”Ravnsborg told detectives.

Noem called on Ravnsborg to resign in February after the investigation ended, but Ravnsborg resisted those calls, saying he was still able to perform his office duties and asking that he be given due process in under the law. Three law enforcement groups, the South Dakota Fraternal Order of Police, the South Dakota Association of Police Chiefs and the South Dakota Sheriffs Association, have joined the governor’s calls for that he resigns.

The Republican-dominated legislature considered impeaching the attorney general at the end of criminal proceedings, but the momentum quickly died away.

Ravnsborg lawyers filed a lawsuit last month alleging that a pattern of alcoholism and prescription drug abuse by Boever led at least one family member, a cousin, to believe that a depressed Boever s ‘committed suicide by jumping in front of Ravnsborg’s car.

Ravnsborg has not said if he will run for a second term next year, but his predecessor, Marty Jackley, is running for his old job. Jackley served for 10 years in that post before losing the governor’s Republican primary to Noem in 2018.