SAC CITY, IA – The Sac County Attorney has announced that the death of David Schultz was not a homicide, according to the Iowa State Medical Examiner, and that more information will be released this week.

Ben Smith confirmed the medical examiner’s findings on Wednesday. Schultz’s body was found in a field months after his truck was found on a rural Sac County road.

Schultz went missing in November of 2023, but his body was found in April of 2024 in the 1900 block of Union Avenue, which is very close to the location where his truck was found at the intersection of Union Avenue and 190th St some five months earlier.  Schultz’s disappearance sparked a manhunt from law enforcement and volunteer groups.

The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation previously said preliminary autopsy results showed no signs of trauma or serious injury. A DCI spokesperson previously said no foul play is suspected in Schultz’s death.

A spokesman for the Iowa DCI told KTIV television that because Schultz’s death was ruled not a homicide, and there is no threat to the public, the DCI’s case has officially been closed.

 

PIERRE, S.D. (Seth Tupper/South Dakota Searchlight) – A new court fight over South Dakota’s abortion-rights ballot measure could hinge on a complicated answer to a simple question: Does a set of six-year-old petition requirements still exist?

The court fight started Thursday, when the Life Defense Fund filed a lawsuit in state court. The lawsuit challenges the legitimacy of a citizen-initiated Nov. 5 ballot question that would reinstate abortion rights. The Life Defense Fund is a ballot question committee organized to oppose the measure.

Dakotans for Health is the ballot question committee that supports the measure and gathered the petition signatures to put it on the ballot. Instead of filing a response in state court, Dakotans for Health asked a federal judge on Tuesday to intervene on its behalf. To understand why, it’s necessary to retrace a series of legislative and court battles dating to 2018.

That’s when the Republican-dominated Legislature enacted restrictions on the petition process that citizens use to place measures on the ballot. The restrictions were intended to prevent non-South Dakotans from circulating petitions, in part by requiring petitioners to provide information proving their South Dakota residency.

One year later, in 2019, some lawmakers said out-of-state petitioners were circumventing the law. So the Legislature repealed part of the 2018 law and replaced it with a new law. Among other things, the 2019 law required all petition circulators to publicly disclose personal information including their address, email and phone number.

A ballot question committee, SD Voice, and a liberal blogger, Cory Heidelberger, successfully sued to block the 2019 law. They said the law violated their First Amendment free speech rights, had a chilling effect on petition circulators, and imposed “unwarranted new restrictions on the ballot measure process, for the purpose of further consolidating power in South Dakota’s dominant political party.”

In 2020, legislators responded with another new law applying similar requirements, but only to paid petition circulators. Dakotans for Health successfully sued to block that law. A federal appellate judge in the case wrote, “While South Dakota has important interests in protecting the integrity of the ballot initiative process, it has no interest in enforcing overbroad restrictions that likely violate the Constitution.”

Both the 2019 and 2020 laws included a 30-day residency requirement for petition circulators. That specific requirement was challenged in yet another lawsuit, filed by the League of Women Voters. The league agreed to drop its narrower lawsuit when Dakotans for Health succeeded with its wider suit.

According to the Life Defense Fund, the end result of all that lawmaking and litigating is that the original 2018 law still stands. It’s still “good law,” the group claims, because none of the subsequent bills that sought to repeal or amend it are currently in force. Those bills were challenged by opponents and blocked by the courts.

The Life Defense Fund therefore asserts that the abortion-rights petitioners were obligated to comply with the 2018 law, which requires sworn statements including information proving the petitioners’ South Dakota residency. The Life Defense Fund says Dakotans for Health failed to obey that law, and “therefore the entire petition is disqualified.”

Dakotans for Health says the Life Defense Fund lawsuit is an illegal attempt to resurrect the 30-day residency requirement for petitioners and “flout” the related court decisions. That’s why Dakotans for Health is asking a federal judge to prevent any state court from enforcing the residency requirement.

There are other allegations in the Life Defense Fund lawsuit: petition circulators failed to provide a required handout to signers, some signatures were counted as valid even though they’d been crossed out on the petition, some signers didn’t list the county where they’re registered to vote, some signers were allegedly duped into thinking they were signing a petition about repealing the sales tax on groceries, and so on.

“This will be proven by witness testimony,” Sara Frankenstein, the attorney for the Life Defense Fund, told South Dakota Searchlight.

Dakotans for Health, represented by attorney Jim Leach, asserts that the Life Defense Fund’s other allegations are insufficient to achieve its aim of removing the abortion-rights measure from the ballot. The petition circulator residency questions are “critical to the possible success” of the lawsuit, Dakotans for Health says in its federal court memorandum.

Nancy Turbak Berry, a Democratic former legislator who leads a coalition advocating for the ballot measure, panned the Life Defense Fund’s legal strategy.

“It is a press release masquerading as a lawsuit, designed solely to allow the opponents of reproductive freedom to peddle more inflammatory lies,” she said.

Dakotans for Health filed its ballot petition in May with about 55,000 signatures. The Secretary of State’s Office validated the petition after sampling the signatures and estimating that 46,098 of them were from South Dakota registered voters — more than the 35,017 needed to qualify for the ballot.

Abortions are currently banned in South Dakota, except to “preserve the life of the pregnant female.” The ballot measure would legalize abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy but allow the state to impose limited regulations in the second trimester and a ban in the third trimester, with exceptions for the life and health of the mother.

 

POCAHONTAS, IA – A Pocahontas, Iowa man is facing multiple charges after an investigation that involved law enforcement from eight different counties.

On Friday, June 14, 26-year-old Corey Goeders was arrested on a Palo Alto County warrant that stems from an investigation that began in April of 2023 and took place between June 2023 and February 2024.

Authorities say Goeders was arrested for ongoing criminal conduct, money laundering and tax evasion. Goeders was also arrested on seven counts of first-degree theft, nine counts of second-degree theft and one count of fourth-degree theft all related to livestock.

He was booked into jail and released after posting bond.

This investigation was far-reaching and ultimately included law enforcement departments in the counties of Kossuth, Buena Vista, Calhoun, Clay, Pocahontas, Webster, and Woodbury along with officials from the Iowa Department of Public Safety and the Iowa Department of Revenue.

 

PIERRE, S.D. (John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight) – Hundreds of bills about artificial intelligence and internet use by minors have been filed in statehouses in recent years.

Even Heather Morton, who tracks state legislation as an analyst for the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, has a hard time keeping up.

“This probably feels a little bit like a firehose,” Morton told South Dakota lawmakers.

“Yes, it does,” said Rep. Mike Weisgram of Fort Pierre.

Weisgram is co-chairing a summer study committee, which met for the first time Tuesday in Pierre. The Legislature opted to appoint the committee after rejecting proposed regulations on AI and internet use by minors during last winter’s legislative session.

More than 300 bills or resolutions have appeared on AI so far this year, Morton said.

There are proposals to force the disclosure of AI use, to require state agencies to develop AI policies, to ensure the provenance of the data used to train AI systems and to give patients the right to consent to the use of AI by their doctors.

There have even been proposals on “whether or not an AI system can or could be considered or granted status as a person,” Morton said.

The creation of study groups represented the single largest category of enacted AI laws, she said. That’s what South Dakota did after rejecting a proposal from Sen. Liz Larson, D-Sioux Falls, that would have required disclosure of AI use in electoral communications, and another from Sen. David Johnson, R-Rapid City, to criminalize AI-generated “deepfakes” that put real people into sexually explicit photos or videos without their consent.

Lawmakers in Pierre did pass a law to criminalize AI-generated child pornography, which had the support of Attorney General Marty Jackley.

On the social media side, Arkansas and Ohio passed laws requiring kids to verify their age to use social media platforms. Those bills are on hold due to lawsuits filed on free speech grounds, Morton said. TikTok, meanwhile, challenged a Montana law banning that app within that state’s borders.

“There is a preliminary injunction stopping Montana from enforcing that law,” Morton said.

With internet pornography, Morton pointed to states like Texas, which passed a bill requiring age verification to access websites where a third or more of the content is adult-oriented. That particular law has survived an attempt to block it, but the adult entertainment industry’s Free Speech Coalition has appealed in hopes of bringing it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

José-Marie Griffiths, president of Dakota State University, said AI has been around in some form since the mid-1950s. There are four basic types:

Sequential algorithms, which are like a “recipe” of instructions used by systems to do a job, like alphabetizing names.

Pattern recognition, which can be used to find anomalies in datasets, making it possible for banks to send you an alert if your credit card is used in a foreign country.

Classification, which could involve using systems to differentiate between images, initially with the aid of a human.

Statistical prediction, which uses probabilities to determine what might come next.

As useful as AI can be, Griffiths said, the inevitability of its use by bad actors will require humans – and other AI systems – to combat new threats.

“Data poisoning,” or inserting incorrect data into an algorithm to disrupt or do damage, is of particular concern. DSU is studying data poisoning on roadways, where someone could disrupt traffic signals by feeding bad data into the systems controlling them.

“But you could do a lot more damage by going into the GPS system and just tweaking it a couple of degrees, literal degrees, and you’d have chaos everywhere, because everybody would be just off enough,” Griffiths said. “And that can be done.”

Joe Graves, secretary of the Department of Education, said the state hasn’t moved to regulate AI in schools.

“Frankly, DOE is not aware of any districts struggling or seeking direction on what to do or what not to do with artificial intelligence in the classroom,” Graves said. “So right now, we’re taking a fairly hands off approach.”

The Associated School Boards of South Dakota has adopted a model AI policy, he said. It defines AI, prohibits its use by students unless directed to use it by their teachers, and says it’s OK for teachers to use it in the creation and refinement of lesson plans but cautions against “overuse” for that purpose.

Last fall, the school boards, school administrators and state education department partnered with DSU for a four-session AI training with David De Jong, dean of the College of Education for DSU.

The idea was to get a sense of how teachers might use AI, and to teach them how to ask the right questions of systems like ChatGPT and use the answers to refine their lesson planning.

Graves told the committee he wasn’t asked about social media or adult websites by the group’s leaders and was therefore unprepared for that part of the discussion. But when asked about smartphones, Graves said, he’s become personally convinced that they’ve had a deleterious effect on students – in and outside the classroom.

“I’m not sure that a smartphone should be in the hands of a teenager, period,” Graves said.

David Edmonson of the tech industry trade group TechNet said states should first build data privacy laws. Only then should they target specific uses of AI, and they should only create new agencies or regulations when existing ones are shown to be ill-equipped to handle AI-related problems.

To do otherwise could stifle innovation and slow the adoption of valuable AI technologies that create efficiencies or save lives, he said.

He pointed to a California proposal that would require a watermark on AI-generated content. The ubiquity of digital tools with some AI elements, Edmonson said, would mean that “basically every single advertising image that would exist in print, online or on TV, would have to have a disclosure stating that that AI was used.”

With social media age verification laws, Edmonson’s message was blunt: Don’t pass them.

The trouble, he said, is that a law requiring proof of age sweeps up adults and forces them to hand off personal information to private companies to engage in speech protected by the First Amendment.

Yet Edmonson’s group supports age verification for pornography site access, as long as there are clear markers, such as the Texas standard that requires verification for sites where a third or more of the content is adult-oriented.

That struck Rep. Tony Venhuizen, R-Sioux Falls, as illogical.

“If we can do age verification for pornography, I don’t know why we couldn’t do that for social media,” Venhuizen said.

Rep. Bethany Soye, R-Sioux Falls, is also a member of the group. She introduced a bill for age verification on adult websites during the 2024 session. It passed the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate.

Soye asked Edmonson about suggestions that minors should not be allowed to use social media because social media companies require users to sign contracts.

“Another way that they’re viewing this is that children don’t have the capacity to enter into a contract,” Soye said.

Edmonson called the contracts question “an evolving area of the law,” and said he couldn’t offer any expertise on it.

Soye said the committee should find constitutional scholars who could address that question at a future meeting. Other group members suggested bringing in Attorney General Jackley to discuss efforts to address tech issues across state lines, some of which involve concerted efforts by state attorneys general, or to create subcommittees to dig into specific aspects of social media, adult content and AI.

 

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – Odarie Massiah, a 34-year-old man from Sioux Falls, has been convicted of Sex Trafficking of an Adult by Force and Coercion.

He was sentenced to 27 years and three months in federal prison on Monday, followed by five years of supervised release.

Massiah was indicted by a federal grand jury in August of last year and found guilty in March following a three-day trial. The conviction pertains to events between July 1, 2020, and September 24, 2022, where Massiah coerced an adult woman into prostitution through physical and emotional abuse.

According to court records he then forced the victim to give him the money she earned from prostitution. After a warrant was issued for his arrest in Minnehaha County for strangling the victim on two occasions, Massiah fled with her to Tennessee, where they were apprehended in August 2022.

U.S. Attorney for South Dakota, Alison Ramsdell, emphasized that Massiah’s conviction highlights the office’s dedication to pursuing justice for victims of such crimes and praised the collaborative efforts of local and federal law enforcement in making communities safer.

The case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations and the Sioux Falls Police Department.

 

ST. PAUL, MN (Mike Moen / Minnesota News Connection) – This week, Minnesota leaders touted early numbers under a new automatic voter-registration law.

The provision was among the highlights in a report grading each state’s voting policies. The Movement Advancement Project gives Minnesota a stronger overall score, 24 of 34.5 points, for voting access and election security measures. Automatic registration was among the positive checkmarks.

Negative points included added requirements for returning absentee ballots.

Brian Hinkle, senior voting policy researcher for the project, said no matter which direction a state goes, such actions can have a significant impact on voter turnout, which is especially important when a tight presidential election is expected.

“In the 2020 election, there were seven states decided by less than three percentage points,” Hinkle noted.

Minnesota was not among them but polls indicate a tight race here in 2024. Minnesota has taken steps to increase funding for local election offices to cover expenses, which differs from many conservative-led states, with 26 banning private funding grants. As for automatic registration, Minnesota officials said more than 15,000 people have been successfully registered so far through the new system.

Nationally, Hinkle emphasized the project’s latest report shows that since 2020, 18 states have taken steps to expand access to the ballot box, while nearly half of states have enacted tighter voting restrictions.

“I think it’s evident that the continued polarization of states and the divergence highlighted in this report has the potential to sow confusion among voters and lead to potential disenfranchisement,” Hinkle stressed. “Particularly for marginalized groups, who already face barriers to the ballot box. ”

With the 2024 presidential election coming up, Hinkle predicted state legislatures will be very active early next year in updating voting policies based on any fallout, as there was after the 2020 vote.

 

RAPID CITY, S.D. (Kathleen Shannon / Greater Dakota News Service) – The Black Hills National Forest is one of the latest federal lands to enter a co-stewardship agreement with local tribal nations-a management model encouraged by the Biden administration.

The Pactola / Ȟe Sapa Visitor Center sits on the south end of the Pactola Dam, along the 1.2 million acres making up the Black Hills. A ceremony held this month honored a new memorandum of understanding for co-stewardship of the center, bringing together local tribal nations and the U.S. Forest Service to jointly administer the site.

About 80 similar agreements were made after a 2021 federal order, according to the Interior Department.

Ada Montague, staff attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, said the agreements are opportunities to make good on federal treaty promises; ongoing legal obligations the U.S. government has toward tribal nations.

“There’s often a difficult history to reconcile with,” Montague acknowledged. “That’s usually a big first challenge. But when there are engaged folks on both sides who want to see something go forward, then typically the difficulties are more technical.”

The technical challenges may be around the structure and terms of agreement, Montague pointed out, but there are increasingly more models for them, including a sovereign-to-sovereign cooperative agreements online resource launched by The University of Washington Law Library in March.

Tribes involved in the Black Hills agreement include the Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Oglala, Rosebud and Crow Creek Sioux Tribes.

Weston Jones, who is Oglala Lakota and a summer law clerk for the Native American Rights Fund, said co-stewardship of the visitor center allows tribes to teach the public.

“They can share stories, they can share plant knowledge, animal knowledge, watershed knowledge and all the natural resource knowledge and pass that to their next generation,” Jones noted.

The Forest Service said the center averages about 40,000 visitors a year.