— 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 stinging rebuke that showed most senators didn’t believe his account of the crash.
Ravnsborg, a first-term Republican who only recently announced he wouldn’t seek reelection, showed little emotion as senators convicted him first of committing a crime that caused someone’s death.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 a man — 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.
Schoenbeck also 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.Senators mustered the bare minimum of 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 — Ravnsborg also asked investigators what data could be found on his cellphone, among other things — sailed through with 31 votes.
Prosecutors also told senators that Ravnsborg had used his title “to set the tone and gain influence” in the aftermath of the crash, even as he allegedly made “misstatements and outright lies” to the crash investigators.Investigators identified what they thought were slips in Ravnsborg’s statements, such as when he said he turned around at the accident scene and “saw him” before quickly correcting himself and saying: “I didn’t see him.” And they contended that Boever’s face had come through Ravnsborg’s windshield because his glasses were found in the car
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