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CHAMBERLAIN — A Chamberlain man was sentenced Thursday afternoon to 22 years in prison for killing a man in June 2018.

Nicholas Yellow Lodge, 20, pleaded guilty but mentally ill to the first-degree manslaughter of 77-year-old David Hart in September and will be evaluated at the Human Services Center in Yankton prior to beginning his prison sentence.

In a 25-minute hearing at the Brule County Courthouse, Yellow Lodge was sentenced to 30 years in prison with eight years suspended and given credit for the year and a half he’s spent in jail since his arrest. He is the first person convicted of first-degree manslaughter in Brule County in more than 30 years.

Police found Yellow Lodge with blood on his cheek and clothes on the night of June 3, 2018. Early the next morning, a Brule County jailer was informed Yellow Lodge may have beaten Hart to death and robbed him.

Hart was found dead at his apartment, with the cause of death later determined to be blunt force injuries to the head and torso, and Yellow Lodge was detained. According to court documents filed after his arrest, Yellow Lodge then told investigators he had hit Hart with a large glass liquor bottle when they had been drinking together.

A search warrant executed on Yellow Lodge’s apartment revealed bloody clothes and a pair of shoes with a tread pattern matching bloody shoe prints in Hart’s apartment, where a bottle with dried blood on it was also found. Yellow Lodge, who had no prior criminal history in South Dakota, was then charged with Hart’s murder.

At the change of plea hearing in September, comments from Yellow Lodge, counsel and Smith indicated Yellow Lodge may have hit Hart with the bottle out of fear of being sexually assaulted. Yellow Lodge said during that hearing that he did not remember hitting Hart but did remember Hart trying to pull down his pants and acting as if he were going to hit Yellow Lodge with an object while the two were drinking together.

Yellow Lodge’s conviction stipulates he killed Hart unnecessarily while or after resisting Hart’s attempts to commit a crime.

Prior to sentencing, the defense called Matthew Christiansen, a clinical psychologist with Avera Medical Group in Mitchell, as the only witness at the hearing. Christiansen testified that during an evaluation, he found Yellow Lodge to have PTSD, bipolar disorder, ADHD and an intellectual disability. He also said Yellow Lodge scored a 59 on an IQ test, below 99 percent of the population and at an intellectual level equivalent to that of a fifth- or sixth-grader.

The defense recommended Judge Patrick Smith sentence Yellow Lodge to time in a facility such as the HSC or Northeastern Mental Health Center rather than a penitentiary sentence. Doug Papendick, one of Yellow Lodge’s attorneys, said he had spoken to staff of at least one mental health facility that indicated Yellow Lodge’s conviction would not be a barrier to him receiving treatment.

“If he gets 30 years and he gets to be eligible for parole in half that time, he is probably going to be in the same position he is in now,” Papendick said. “… A facility like this would be able to provide some kind of future for him.”

Christiansen said based on his experience with people with similar diagnoses, he believed Yellow Lodge would benefit from treatment and would likely not pose any more of a threat than anyone in the general population afterward.

Michael Moore, who represented the state in the case, asked Christiansen if any of those he’d worked with in the past had killed anyone, and Christiansen said they had not.

“I do need help. I do need these opportunities,” Yellow Lodge said. “Right now, my goal is to change my life and have a future.”

Smith said he wanted to ensure Yellow Lodge’s sentence would be both rehabilitative and sufficiently severe enough to reflect the seriousness of the offense. He said all parties were generally in agreement about Yellow Lodge’s mental status but that the state’s recommendation of 30 years, as opposed to up to life in prison as allowed under state law, already took that into account.

Smith also said Yellow Lodge’s mental health issues did not justify his actions against Hart but may help to explain why he acted the way he did.

“You are not a person that is attempting to hide behind a mental illness as an excuse for behavior, but rather a person that suffers from real challenges,” Smith said to Yellow Lodge at sentencing. “I would not have accepted that plea if I thought it excused your behavior.”

Yellow Lodge was ordered to repay the cost of his psychological evaluation and court attorneys’ fees and to pay $106.50 in court costs.