John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight
Judges in South Dakota routinely order people charged with alcohol or drug offenses to get chemical dependency evaluations or sign up for drug treatment programs as a condition of pretrial release from custody.
In practice, those orders have long functioned more like suggestions in most counties.
“Nobody follows up on that,” South Dakota Supreme Court Chief Justice Steven Jensen told the Legislature’s Joint Appropriations Committee on Friday at the Capitol in Pierre. “We don’t have anybody doing that, because we’re not doing pretrial probation.”
That’s about to change in South Dakota’s second most populous county, Jensen told lawmakers earlier this year.
The chief justice told the committee that the pretrial supervision pilot program in Pennington County will use a $385,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation to build a base-level of supervision for people who’ve yet to be tried in court. Probation officers will follow up with people released on bond to notify them of upcoming court dates.
One piece of the Pennington County program is already in place in Minnehaha County, and has been since 2018.
In all counties outside of Minnehaha, Jensen said, judges set bond conditions without seeing a criminal or drug abuse history for the person asking for pretrial release.
Under the pilot program, Pennington County court staff will gather that information and share it with judges upfront, as staffers in Minnehaha County already do.
The Unified Judicial System isn’t asking for any extra money from lawmakers this year for the pilot program, as Jensen said existing employees should be able to shoulder the workload. He also said, however, that the pilot program could point the way to a future expansion of pretrial services.
Jensen is asking lawmakers to take an action without a price tag, however. House Bill 1015 would authorize the state court system to offer probation-like services to people who’ve yet to be convicted. The House Judiciary Committee voted 10-3 on Wednesday to send that bill to the full House of Representatives.
Committee members commended court system officials for exploring ways to refine bond condition decisions and reduce problems with missed court appearances. Some members expressed concerns about ongoing funding when the grant money runs out.
One opponent, St. Onge Republican Rep. Mary Fitzgerald, said she couldn’t support a bill that put more responsibilities on overworked court service officers.
“How in the world do you expect them to do this in Pennington County without hiring?” she said Wednesday.
Rep. John Hughes, R-Sioux Falls, said he understands concerns about ongoing funding, but that he supports the program. The issues created by a lack of pretrial services for people at risk of missing court or misbehaving are too serious to ignore, he argued.
“I’m of the mindset that doing something is mandatory, and doing something like this is way better than doing nothing,” Hughes said.