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It’s been just under two years since Merle Northrup was convicted of stealing more than $400,000 worth of grain from a Mount Vernon farming family.
After a year and a half in prison and about five months on parole, Northrup, 50, says he’s living from one two-week paycheck advance to another and expects to spend the rest of his life repaying restitution for a crime he told The Daily Republic he didn’t commit.
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Nearly 25 years ago, Joaquin Ramos entered the South Dakota State Penitentiary to begin a life sentence for first-degree manslaughter, angry about the circumstances that led him there.
On Aug. 22, he sat down with The Daily Republic during regular evening visiting hours in the penitentiary’s visitation room. Over the course of about an hour and a half, as other inmates chatted and played cards with family members, he spoke about his time in prison and said if he hadn’t been put behind bars, he would likely have remained the angry person he was when he committed his crime.
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A mother and son in Mitchell were arrested Thursday after 31 cats were recovered from two residences.
Brandy Smith, 44, and Michael Smith, 19, each face 10 counts of cruelty to animals, a Class 6 felony, officials said Friday afternoon.
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After being sentenced Tuesday to six years in prison, Dawn Long will be parole-eligible in less time than her ex-husband, Todd Long, has waited to see her sentenced for what began as an attempted murder case.
Two judges and eight cancelled trial dates later, Todd Long said he’s relieved to be able to, for the first time in the three years and seven months since the caffeine poisoning that sent him to the hospital, go out in public without worry of seeing the woman who was at one point accused of trying to murder him.
Dawn Long was given a 15-year sentence with nine years suspended for one count of aggravated assault. The plea agreement she accepted in February allowed for a maximum sentence of 15 years with seven suspended, and Todd Long told The Daily Republic on Thursday that considering the restrictions of the deal, he was relieved by Judge Chris Giles’ decision not to suspend additional time.
“It was a nice surprise,” Todd Long said. “I think, the way it sounds to me from the state’s attorney’s office, the judge knew a lot of the evidence. I think he looked at everything carefully … I don’t want to say I’m happy with him, but with what he had to work with, as far as the plea and this, I’m happy with where it’s at.”
Todd Long told The Daily Republic on Thursday he thought the Davison County case might have moved faster from the beginning if bond had been kept higher when Dawn Long was charged with attempted murder. That was months after she was charged with setting fire to the house she and Todd Long used to live in.
“She wouldn’t have been out of jail, running around, getting pregnant twice,” Todd Long said. “I can see having a smaller bond on the fire, but when you get charged a second time for a felony, I think somebody should be looking at that and going like, ‘No, this person needs to be in jail and off the streets.'”
Instead, Dawn Long paid 10 percent of a $250,000 bond and spent more than two and a half years among the public, serving 21 days in jail prior to sentencing. Earlier this year, she accepted a plea deal that dismissed attempted murder and reckless burning charges in exchange for a no contest plea to one count of aggravated assault.
Ashley Anson, one of Dawn Long’s attorneys, said at the sentencing hearing that her client’s employment status, a presentence evaluation stating she had a low risk of reoffending and the fact that she’s given birth to one child while out on bond and is now expecting another all pointed in her favor.
“The state would ask that she not move on with her life,” Anson said.
Deputy State’s Attorney Bob O’Keefe said Dawn Long’s two pregnancies instead were intended to garner sympathy from the court, in contrast with internet searches on how to kill someone and Todd Long’s statements on the stand that Dawn Long had faked brain cancer when they began discussing divorce.
“When Dawn was asked to describe herself, (she said), ‘I care about others, I put their needs before my own,'” O’Keefe said, referencing the presentence investigation. “This was a planned and calculated attack to cause her husband pain and injury, maybe even death. … A person doesn’t put others’ needs in front of their own by faking cancer.”
In terms of its outcome, Dawn Long’s case was not abnormal among others that started with attempted murder charges.
Of the 34 people in South Dakota who were accused of attempted murder and accepted plea deals between 2014 and 2018, 19 were convicted of aggravated assault and are serving an average of just under eight years in prison. Seven others were convicted of aggravated assault against a law enforcement officer, which, like attempted first-degree murder, is a Class 2 felony.
However, Long’s stands out among that same set of cases when it comes to the time it took to settle. Between when she was indicted for attempted murder – already nine months after Todd Long was hospitalized and the house fire occurred – and Feb. 21, the day she pleaded no contest to aggravated assault, 944 days passed.
“To me, the police and the state’s attorney’s office, they’re doing what they need to do,” Todd Long said. “But they’re corrected by a judge that gives them a bond that they can just walk out.”
From 2014 to 2018, 51 people, including Dawn Long, were charged with attempted first- or second-degree murder, according to a report from the South Dakota Unified Judicial System.
Of those people, 34 pleaded guilty or no contest to one or more charges, while seven cases went to trial, six were dismissed entirely and four are still pending.
The time it took for those 34 people to accept a plea varied widely, with the shortest being Daniel Zundel’s 52-day span between the date his case was filed in Codington County and Jan. 28, 2015, the day he pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. Most accepted pleas within a year of charges being filed.
The time between Dawn Long’s indictment and plea is about six months longer than that of anyone else charged in the past five years, and it’s about three times as long as the average.
The Long case stretched through the transition period in 2017 during which Judge Chris Giles, who sentenced Dawn Long on Tuesday, took over the circuit court position previously held by Judge Timothy Bjorkman.
Todd Long said that while the Davison County State’s Attorney’s Office generally kept him updated on evidence and the general proceedings of the case, he was frustrated to see newer criminal cases regularly brought before the court and settled before Dawn Long’s.
“It just sat there,” he said about the case’s progress during the fall of 2017. “Wouldn’t we be the first one on the docket to go? We need to get this thing done.”
While proceedings in the criminal case have now ended, Todd Long said his days of seeing Dawn Long in a courtroom are not yet over, as she’s now taking him to divorce court to negotiate over property.
He also said he’ll likely never receive money from the insurance company that covered the house where the fire took place and which he said was valued at $232,000.
“She would not meet with (the insurance company). If the insured won’t meet with the insurance company, it’s right in the policy that the claim is automatically denied,” he said.
Todd Long said the past three years and seven months have also been hard on the son he and Dawn Long have in common, but that in the past month or so, he’s seemed relieved.
“When I saw him on Tuesday afternoon, I told him it was done and she was going to prison,” Todd Long said. “The only thing he asked is, ‘how long?'”
During his testimony at the sentencing hearing on Tuesday, Todd Long said that throughout the case, their son has not wanted to see Dawn Long and declined to testify.
While Todd Long said he and his son are both working on moving on, he noted that he’s still been going over the case in his head since sentencing.
“It’s taken three years of my life that I’ll never get back,” he said.
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At 31 years old, Nick Tischler has spent nearly a third of his life in prison for drug charges.
In a letter he sent to The Daily Republic recently, Tischler wrote that if presumptive probation had been in place when he was first sentenced at age 18, he might have been able to get treatment, rather than being sent somewhere he said did not rehabilitate him.
“The years in the penitentiary taught me the code of conduct, taught me the rules to survive in prison,” Tischler wrote from the Davison County Jail. “What it did not do is prepare me for the real world. It has absolutely crippled me, chastised me; realistically, it institutionalized me.”
Presumptive probation was one of many changes made to the state’s criminal justice system as part of Senate Bill 70, also known as the Public Safety Improvement Act, which was passed in 2013. Now, it’s written into South Dakota law that courts are to sentence people convicted of a Class 5 or 6 felony to probation, unless there are aggravating circumstances in the case or if the person being sentenced is otherwise ineligible for probation.
Tischler was discharged from the Department of Corrections in May of 2018 but was arrested a total of four times in November and December. He’s now spent several months in the Davison County Jail as he awaits trial for charges of possession of a controlled substance, forgery and possession of an invalid license.
“If I was condemned at 18 years old to be broken and penitentiary bound, should one expect a rehabilitated me or a broken me after 10 years inside the South Dakota (State) Penitentiary?” Tischler wrote.
South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg has made repealing presumptive probation one of his top priorities since he took office in January, arguing that the statute restricts power from law enforcement and courts.
But Senate Bill 19, which would have been a step toward implementing the repeal, failed with an 18-12 Senate vote on Feb. 22.
Ravnsborg told The Daily Republic in December, before he took office, that he admired SB 70’s goal of decreasing the state’s prison population, but that it had not been effective. He also said that by repealing presumptive probation, he hoped to use the possibility of prison time to incentivize lower-level drug offenders to work with law enforcement to track down and put away drug dealers.
Legislators estimated prior to the vote on SB 19 that repealing presumptive probation would cost the state an additional $4 million per year to house additional inmates, and with current facilities nearing capacity, an additional prison would have to be constructed, at an estimated cost of $14 million.
Ron Freeman, chief court services officer for South Dakota’s First Judicial Circuit, said that he’s seen an uptick in the number of people on probation in the circuit since SB 70 was passed, estimating the number of those on probation has increased by about 10 to 15 percent.
“I think we would definitely see an increase in the number of offenders sentenced to the penitentiary and, from what I am hearing, most likely a need for the state to build additional prison space,” Freeman said on what might happen if presumptive probation were repealed.
Freeman said that in fiscal year 2017, it cost $75.83 per day to house one inmate in the South Dakota State Penitentiary. Some of the state’s other facilities, however, cost significantly less.
In South Dakota, people on probation don’t have to pay supervision fees on top of their court-ordered fines and other payments, but the average daily cost to supervise someone on probation is $3.74, according to Freeman
As of Feb. 12, 13.64 percent of the state’s prisoners were incarcerated for possession of a controlled substance in schedules I or II, a Class 5 felony which includes the possession of drugs such as methamphetamine, according to the South Dakota Department of Corrections. More people are in prison for that charge than for any other.
The next most-represented charge in South Dakota’s prisons is unauthorized ingestion of a controlled substance in schedules I or II – also a Class 5 felony – of which an additional 9.48 percent of all inmates were convicted.
For those two charges, 890 people are currently serving time in one of South Dakota’s prisons – more than are incarcerated for rape, robbery, murder, manslaughter and burglary combined.
In total, drug offenders make up just under a third of the state’s current prison population, and 82 percent of those offenders are serving time for violating one of South Dakota’s 15 Class 5 or 6 felony drug statutes.
At the end of January, there were 2,930 people in South Dakota on either parole or supervision for a suspended sentence, meaning about 43 percent of people who have been convicted of a crime and haven’t yet completed their sentences are not currently serving prison time.
Freeman said that although slightly more people may be on probation now, because the Department of Social Services administers many of the community-based treatment programs implemented by SB 70, such as drug courts, Cognitive Behavioral Interventions for Substance Abuse (CBISA) and Moral Reconation Therapy (MRT), court services has not seen a drastic change in workload.
Freeman thinks it’s beneficial to send people to treatment programs rather than prison, though it depends on the person.
“People need to remember that prisons are for punishment,” he said. “Drug Court programs are intended to provide rehabilitation in the community with the additional expectation of accountability.”
Since May 2015, 25 people have graduated from the James Valley Drug and DUI Court, which meets regularly in Davison County. Of those 25, two are currently in prison for offenses committed after their graduation, and one is currently awaiting sentencing for drug charges.
Freeman also said that while presumptive probation does place some restrictions on sentencing, most people who have been placed on probation under it would have been placed on probation anyway if presumptive probation were not in place, and those who violate probation or commit subsequent offenses are not exempt from going to prison.
“Some of the folks that are on presumptive probation are under the impression that, ‘Well, I can’t go to the penitentiary because I’m on presumptive probation, and the court doesn’t have a choice,'” Freeman said. “Well we do have a choice, and if you aren’t going to follow the rules and we bring you back into court on a probation violation maybe once or twice, eventually the judge will get tired of seeing you, and you will go to the penitentiary.”
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On the night of Oct. 5, 2015, Todd Long said he felt the way someone explained the sensation of a heart attack to him: like an elephant was sitting on his chest.
Earlier that night, he had come home planning to draw up divorce papers with his now-ex-wife, Dawn Long, with whom he had been discussing divorce since around March of that year.
Long had made himself a drink that evening and thought the rum he used didn’t taste quite right. He made a second drink and said that when he poured it out, Dawn Long got angry with him.
After Dawn Long went to bed, Todd Long went outside, and he soon started throwing up.
“I just thought maybe I was getting sick or something,” he told The Daily Republic on Friday, a day after Dawn Long agreed to a plea deal that could land her in prison for up to eight years for her actions against her former husband.
As the hours went on during that October day, Todd Long started to lose vision and couldn’t breathe while lying down. Long said it became clear that something wasn’t right. He threw up several times in the bathroom, outside Dawn Long’s bedroom, and he said that she never came out of her room. He eventually called a friend and went to the hospital.
“Right when I said, ‘I think she’s trying to poison me,’ the nurse walked in and heard it,” Todd Long said. “And she said, ‘Either you’re calling it in or I’m calling it in.'”
The friend who had helped Long get to the hospital eventually called the police. In the following months, Dawn Long was charged with attempted first-degree murder in connection with the incident. It wasn’t long before her arrest in December 2015 that Todd Long learned that caffeine had been what caused him to feel like he was having a heart attack.
She was later also charged with reckless burning for allegedly setting fire to the house where she and Todd Long had planned to continue living after their divorce for the benefit of their son, who was in sixth grade at the time.
Todd Long has mostly declined comment on the case, but on Friday he sat down with The Daily Republic to give his account of the near-death experience and the long, drawn-out situation with his ex-wife.
Their house has been boarded up and unoccupied for more than three years, and during most of that time, Dawn Long has been out on bond. Since her arrest, she’s moved to Ethan and had a baby, and Todd Long says the thought of running into his ex-wife in public makes him anxious.
“I’ve actually quit going to Walmart, because that’s where she usually shopped. The possibility of running into her coming around an aisle would’ve been more than enough,” he said.
On Thursday, after having pleaded not guilty to both charges for more than three years, Dawn Long pleaded no contest to aggravated assault, and the state dropped the original charges. She’ll be sentenced on April 30, and the court agreed Thursday to a maximum possible sentence of 15 years in prison with seven years suspended.
Todd Long said he hoped to testify at a jury trial that Dawn Long’s actions were planned well in advance and were not the impulsive decisions of an emotional person.
“Even though, in the past, she hasn’t had a criminal record, this wasn’t just an, ‘Oh, I got emotional and I grabbed a hammer and hit him over the head.’ That would’ve been more explainable than this whole plan she had,” he said. “Everything was planned out.”
Todd Long said that plan went as far back as when divorce was first discussed. At that time, he said, Dawn Long began telling people she had a brain tumor. Todd Long said he became skeptical of this a few weeks before she purchased caffeine pills in July.
“In between the poisoning and getting out and having a house fire, the odd twist is, she’s faking cancer, they found out that I had cancer,” Todd Long said.
Dawn Long’s attorney did not respond to a message from The Daily Republic for comment on this story.
Todd Long said that while the past three years have been emotional for him and his now-15-year-old son, he’s grateful to the members of the Mitchell Police Division and Mitchell Fire Department for their work on the case, as well as to his friends, family and others in Mitchell who have helped them.
Todd Long said he’ll presumably have more to say on the case following April 30, the day he will finally have closure on the series of events that turned a plan to file for divorce into a criminal investigation that’s now affected him for nearly three and a half years.
“We were getting divorced. Somewhere along the line, her plan changed,” he said.
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KENNEBEC — A Lyman County court sentenced Gerald Brink on Friday morning to spend 40 years in prison for killing his 7-week-old daughter in May 2017.
Brink, 38, was convicted of domestic abuse first-degree manslaughter, to which he pleaded guilty on Oct. 25. He was sentenced to 50 years in the state penitentiary with 10 years suspended, and he will be eligible for parole in 30 years.
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Two brothers were indicted on Aug. 16 for the alleged sexual assault of a 9-year-old girl in August 2017 in Wagner.
While their charges are some of the most serious in the region recently, the brothers represent two of the seven total men arrested for sexual offenses against minors in The Daily Republic’s coverage region in August.
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Within a week, two men were arrested on separate charges of soliciting minors in Mitchell.
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Texts have been recovered from the phone of the woman accused of attempted first-degree murder and reckless burning in 2015.
ellen bardash 