South Dakota
South Dakota comedy performer dies
Rally against eminent domain for carbon pipelines held at Iowa Capitol
Iowa lawmakers and landowners spoke at a rally at the Iowa Capitol Rotunda against eminent domain for carbon capture pipelines.
PIERRE, S.D. — The South Dakota coalition that successfully pushed for a state ban on eminent domain for carbon capture pipelines last winter will propose broader limits on eminent domain and more protections for landowners this legislative session.
Sen. Mark Lapka, R-Leola, announced the efforts. One would send a proposed state constitutional amendment to voters in November that would further restrict eminent domain.
“Codified law is too easily amendable over time,” Lapka said. “It’s the constitutionally protected rights that hold firm forever.”
The amendment would “eliminate eminent domain for private gain,” Lapka said, while allowing for public works projects such as public highways, water lines and other infrastructure.
Eminent domain is a legal process for gaining access to privately owned land when a deal can’t be reached with landowners. It’s often used for public infrastructure projects. It became controversial in South Dakota when Iowa-based Summit Carbon Solutions attempted to use it for a five-state pipeline that would capture carbon dioxide from ethanol plants and transport it to an underground sequestration site in North Dakota. The project would benefit from federal tax credits incentivizing the prevention of heat-trapping emissions into the atmosphere.
Landowner opposition to the Summit project in South Dakota culminated in the Legislature’s passage of a law last year banning carbon pipelines from using eminent domain. Summit is still pursuing the project and has permits in other states, but has been denied permits twice by South Dakota’s Public Utilities Commission.
Lapka announced his new proposals at a property rights rally Monday in the state Capitol rotunda, attended by dozens of South Dakota farmers, ranchers and lawmakers.
SD bill named after Jared Bossly of Aberdeen
Along with the constitutional amendment, Lapka announced what he’s calling the “Bossly Bill,” named for Jared Bossly, of rural Aberdeen, who is suing Summit Carbon Solutions for allegedly trespassing on his land while it was asserting its right to use eminent domain.
Lapka said the bill will mirror language in a decision by the South Dakota Supreme Court in 2024. The decision said Summit had not proven it was a common carrier. That meant the company could not use eminent domain to access landowners’ property.
Lapka’s bill would “clean up” the language that exists in state law, he said, and protect against “invasive tactics.”
There was a bill introduced last legislative session that would have empowered citizens to sue for allegedly deceptive practices, fraud, harassment, intimidation or misrepresentation during the acquisition of land access agreements by carbon pipeline land agents. The bill narrowly failed in the Senate after passing the House.
The text of the bills announced by Lapka had not been released as of Monday afternoon. The 2026 session of the South Dakota Legislature begins Tuesday and continues through March.
South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
WATERTOWN, S.D. — A man who spent 1,217 days as the only suspect in the 2020 murder and beheading of an Indigenous woman filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court on Thursday, Jan. 8, alleging he was negligently and maliciously prosecuted.
The complaint, filed in the United States District Court of South Dakota Northern Division, on behalf of Jeremiah Peacemaker, 49, names nearly three dozen defendants, including current Watertown Police Chief Timothy Toomey, department officers, South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley, as well as agents from the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation, the city of Watertown, and others.
Peacemaker was
acquitted on March 5, 2024,
of murdering 28-year-old Kendra Rae Owen, an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate.
Patrick Lalley / Sioux Falls Live
Peacemaker argues his rights under the 4th, 5th, 8th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution were intentionally, recklessly and willfully violated, and claims the ordeal has left permanent damage to his reputation, his emotional well-being, his livelihood and his relationships.
Represented by Steven Beardsley, Kate Benson and Scott Bratland, of South Dakota law firms, Peacemaker is seeking compensatory damages in an amount to be determined by a jury at trial.
In the complaint, Peacemaker claims little of Owen’s case was actually investigated: Witnesses were ignored, evidence was ruined, misplaced and lost, and other suspects besides Peacemaker were not investigated.
“Investigators refused to consider the possibility that they had arrested the wrong person,” his complaint states.
Peacemaker told investigators that he met Owen only once, days before her murder, and he was the victim of a beating and a hit-and-run the night before his arrest.
At the time, police thought Peacemaker’s story strange, according to the complaint, and fingered him as the primary suspect hours after Owen’s body was found.
“They wanted to prove that (the) plaintiff made up the story about the assault and hit and run. When they actually did an investigation, what they discovered is that he had told the truth,” the complaint states.
Shortly after Owen’s murder, investigators agreed to trick Peacemaker, according to the complaint. Outwardly, they pretended they were going to investigate the hit and run, but quickly focused on placing Peacemaker at the scene of the murder.
At the police station, Peacemaker alleges he was tricked into giving a DNA sample, and into talking about a woman with pink hair.
Owen had pink hair.
Patrick Lalley / Sioux Falls Live
Eventually, he was read his Miranda Rights. A photograph of Owen’s corpse and her head propped on a mattress was “slapped” in front of him, the complaint stated.
Even though Peacemaker tried to tell investigators that he had only met Owen one time, two days before the hit-and-run, they called him a psychopath and a serial killer.
“He was completely blindsided and stunned,” the complaint stated.
Video evidence later revealed that Peacemaker was telling the truth, according to the complaint — he was seen with Owen buying beer from a nearby bar.
“The plaintiff explained that he was not trying to hook up with her and that she did not make him mad. He was happy to meet her and to have made a new friend,” the complaint stated.
After an entire night of interrogation, Peacemaker was arrested.
Patrick Lalley / Sioux Falls Live
Nearly three years after Owen’s death, Peacemaker’s defense lawyers returned to the crime scene. While walking around the house, they saw a strange saw on the roof. After reviewing crime scene photographs from 2020, the saw was visible in the same spot, according to the complaint.
“Defendants did not find it because they did not look. It remained on the roof for three years. By the time it was finally collected, the forensic evidence was gone,” the complaint stated, adding that there were reddish-brown stains on the roof under the saw.
Patrick Lalley / Sioux Falls Live
No reasonable investigating officer could have believed there was probable cause to arrest Peacemaker, the complaint stated.
“Because of the quick arrest of Mr. Peacemaker and subsequent press releases, the public was led to believe that this was an open and shut case. Law enforcement officers were hailed as heroes for the quick arrest. The victim’s family had no idea how flawed the case was until they showed up to watch the trial,” the complaint stated.
Contributed / Jewel DeMarrias
Owen, whose Indigenous name according to her obituary was Gakiya Nagun Wiyan or “Hears the Voice in the Distance Woman,” lived a “high-risk lifestyle,” the complaint stated, adding that she had disabilities that impaired her judgment. She had a substance abuse disorder, but she was also independent and a fighter.
Owen’s case worker, Marciella Espinoza, from the Human Service Agency, called her “Mike Tyson” because her initials were “K.O.,” and at times she was involved in fights, both as an assailant and a victim, according to the complaint.
But Owen was much more than that, her mother Jewel DeMarrias told Forum News Service in a brief interview.
She played bowling, basketball and softball in the Special Olympics. She was a churchgoer, DeMarrias said.
“She was an earth angel. She would give you her last penny to help you,” DeMarrias said.
Contributed / Jewel DeMarrias
Because of her lifestyle, intoxicated people were frequently in her home, according to the complaint. From Jan. 1, 2020, until the day her body was found, she called 911 six times, usually asking for help removing people from her home.
“A quick search of Ms. Owen’s record yielded a ton of potential suspects. The 911 records had the names of individuals who should have been interviewed because they were recently in altercations with Ms. Owens, but they were not,” the complaint stated.
From that suspect list of eight people, some have already died since the trial, according to the complaint.
One possible suspect had had Owen’s keys and threatened to kill her.
A second possible suspect — a woman — tried to hire an undercover FBI agent to commit murder, and when asked what she would do to help with the murder, she offered to cut up the body, according to the complaint.
A third potential suspect, who made the last nine phone calls to Owen, stopped by her house numerous times looking for his jean jacket. Owen was wearing a jean jacket at the time of her death.
A fourth potential suspect once broke Owen’s arm, and a fifth was with Owen when she met Peacemaker. Both these people are now deceased.
The sixth person on the list described by the complaint was described as Owen’s occasional boyfriend.
The seventh was a violent meth user who once gouged out a person’s eye.
And the eighth possible suspect was once married to a woman who assaulted Owen. While in jail, he made a “strange phone call” to Peacemaker, saying that whoever killed Owen was after him.
Cigarette butts found in Owen’s apartment were also not tested until defense attorneys in Peacemaker’s felony trial insisted. When DNA evidence came back, the genetic trail led to a woman named Brianna Lawrence, who spent time in prison for hiring a hit man to kill the father of her children, according to the complaint.
“She planned to assist the hit man by chopping the body into pieces,” the complaint stated, adding that Lawrence was also not interviewed until three years after the murder, a delay that made documentation of Lawrence’s location difficult.
The Watertown Police Department’s failure to properly investigate the case “shocks the conscience,” the complaint stated.
“Key pieces of evidence were recklessly ignored. Evidence proving Mr. Peacemaker was innocent, lost, not collected, not tested and not documented,” the complaint stated. “Investigators were more worried, tiptoeing around each other’s egos, than doing a proper investigation.”
Watertown Police Capt. Ryan Beauchamp — one of the defendants — told Forum News Service that the department could not comment on the lawsuit at this time.
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It’s expensive to extend fiber-optic cable to the remaining locations in South Dakota that don’t have high-speed internet, so the state is leaning into providers offering service from satellites in space.
The state’s ConnectSD initiative, which began in 2019, had helped bring broadband access to 91% of South Dakota by 2024. A state report noted the remaining 9% would be costly, given the price of bringing miles of fiber to remote areas with few customers.
The broadband initiative has cost $300 million so far, with funding from federal, state and private sources. Gov. Larry Rhoden announced recently that the state will soon receive another $72 million in federal funding for the effort.
A little more than a third of the new funding will go toward “Low Earth Orbit Satellite” technologies, like SpaceX’s Starlink, to reach 2,705 of the 7,060 locations in the state targeted for the funds. Most of the other targeted connections will come by way of fiber-optic cable, and 177 will come via signals beamed from cellular towers.
The satellite funding will not be used to pay for individual subscriptions, said a spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Economic Development.
“Instead, the award reserves network capacity with the provider so service is available in those locations,” said Bri Vande Pol. “The provider is reimbursed on a per-location basis only when a customer subscribes to the service.”
Vande Pol said the federal funding requires providers to make high-speed internet available to each eligible location for at least 10 years. She said the provider receives 25% of the award upon confirming service is available, and the remaining payments for the reserved network capacity are made quarterly over the 10-year period.
The new federal money comes from the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, authorized by the 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act, passed during the Biden administration.
“Under the Trump administration’s changes to that program, states are encouraged to use a technology-neutral approach and connect locations in the most efficient way possible,” Vande Pol said.
“In some of South Dakota’s most remote areas, Low Earth Orbit satellite service is a strong, reliable solution that meets performance standards while allowing us to maximize the reach of available BEAD funding,” she added.
As of June 2025, South Dakota’s ConnectSD program had used $84.4 million in state general funds, $88.5 million in federal funds and $129.6 million in private investment from broadband providers to connect about 31,000 locations. The state and federal money has mostly been spent on grants to service providers, to help them expand their networks.
Rhoden’s latest proposed budget asks lawmakers to authorize $87 million in federal funding to be spent on broadband in the coming fiscal year.
Rhoden spokesperson Josie Harms said the $72 million figure announced in a press release represents “the amount that will actually be awarded to the subrecipients.”
“The $87 million amount is the total spending authority, which includes the project costs as well as administrative costs and marketing costs,” she wrote in an email to South Dakota Searchlight.
South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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