Crime

State AG Who Killed A Pedestrian Suggests It Was Suicide As Opposed To His Scrolling The Internet While Driving

Blaming the victim is a well-worn strategy, but it doesn't even seem relevant here.

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South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg struck and killed a man while driving home from a fundraiser at a bar/restaurant held during the height of COVID where they raffled off a handgun with Trump’s name engraved on it. At the time, he claims that he thought he’d hit a deer.

Ultimately, authorities found the man’s glasses inside Ravnsborg’s car, which makes one wonder what kind of prescription he thought that deer needed.

Ravnsborg faces a number of misdemeanors in the case, including “using a mobile electronic device” while driving. Specifically, “Ravnsborg had been surfing the internet on one of the two cell phones he was carrying, reading conservative websites” as explained in a new South Dakota Standard article. This is in no way a defense of texting while driving — which is a horrible thing to do — but sending “omw now thx!” is orders of magnitude different than reading an article. How is there not some higher charge for burying your head in the Daily Caller at 75 miles per hour?

With members of his own party distancing themselves from him, Ravnsborg has dug in and is pursuing an interesting strategy to push back: what if the victim intended to be hit by a car in the middle of the night?

In a court filing Friday, Rapid City lawyer Timothy J. Rensch asked retired Sixth Circuit Judge John L. Brown, who is presiding over the case, to order the release of psychiatric or psychological records “for exculpatory information concerning his suicidal ideation.”

Ravnsborg… wants to see records from Avera St. Luke’s Hospital in Aberdeen, S.D., Avera St. Mary’s Hospital in Pierre, the Avera Medical Group Pierre, and Aberdeen Psychiatric — all of whom filed claims against Boever’s estate — as well as the South Dakota Human Services Center in Yankton. Boever had been committed to the Yankton facility, the defense claims.

Not to begrudge an accused’s chosen criminal defense, but given that he’s only facing relative slap-on-the-wrist charges related to failing to pay attention to the road, the state of mind of the victim doesn’t seem particularly relevant. Assuming that the victim had put himself in danger, that doesn’t change the fact that investigators claim to know that Ravnsborg was surfing his phone at the time. It’s obviously relevant to a hypothetical civil suit and can be litigated there, but seems unimportant at this point. Unless, of course, the defendant is just using this process to launder his political reputation.

But it seems like this is the argument Ravnsborg will be making at his August 26 trial. Even though experts are prepared to testify that the victim was struck while walking on the shoulder and the fact that the victim was logically (if perhaps unnecessarily at that time of night) inspecting his own immobilized vehicle as opposed to randomly seeking out a dangerous stretch of road.

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Meanwhile, the state’s top law enforcement official is still on the job.

S.D. Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg hopes to save his career by attacking the man he ran down and killed [South Dakota Standard]

Earlier: State Attorney General Told Officers He’d Hit A Deer… In Reality, A Man Is Now Dead
State AG Killed A Man And Told Cops He’d Hit A Deer, Will Only Face Misdemeanor Charges
Dead Man’s Glasses Found INSIDE South Dakota AG’s Car

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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