SOUTH DAKOTA
Indian Country Today Media Network
By Stephanie Woodard
February 9, 2012
“It was a sad day,” said Mary Jane Wanna, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, of the South Dakota House Judiciary Committee killing a bill to remove the statute of limitations for lawsuits alleging childhood sexual abuse. The measure was presented on February 6, by Representative Steve Hickey, Republican from Minnehaha County, and co-sponsored by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Proponents, opponents and spectators packing the committee room heard emotional testimony from victims, who recounted sex trafficking as well as brutal serial sexual assaults. Afterward, abuse survivors wept openly in the hallway.
Hickey’s new bill had proposed eliminating the statute of limitations for childhood-sexual-abuse complaints in the state. It was intended to remedy a 2010 measure that added restrictions to such suits, banning victims over age 40 from suing institutions (such as churches and schools). The 2010 law was written as a “constituent bill” by Steve Smith, an attorney representing an institution—Congregation of Priests of the Sacred Heart, which runs St. Joseph’s Indian School, in Chamberlain—and defending about a dozen such cases.
During Smith’s 2010 testimony to the legislature, the transcript shows he told the group that the perpetrators in such cases were typically “long dead” and “can’t defend themselves,” but neglected to say that his cases in fact included living alleged perpetrators, including Brother Matthew Miles (who had already told a South Dakota court he had pled guilty to sodomizing young boys in another jurisdiction), John Donadio, Father Thomas Lind and Father William Pitcavage. About 10 other living persons have been accused in current South Dakota-related childhood-sexual-abuse cases.
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