A good while back, former South Dakota governor and congressman Bill Janklow made headlines. Not for some controversial or groundbreaking bill however; the guy was a leadfoot and apparently boasted about his wild and aggressive driving escapades. Of course, all of that caught up with him when he mowed down and killed a motorcyclist, and was sentenced to jail time for his crime.
It was bad enough that the guy managed to muster up enough boo-hooers and doo-gooding supporters to testify about his “character” enough to make a judge forget that he killed someone and had a long history of driving offenses, for which he was proud of:
Janklow’s heavy accelerator foot is legendary with state employees who rode with him when he was governor and reporters who tagged along during disasters. Just last summer, two reporters were riding with Janklow when he made a 99 mph mad dash, through heavy smoke, down a mountain highway in the Black Hills during a raging forest fire.
Fleeing the area before the blaze made the most direct escape route inaccessible, Janklow tried to go faster, but the computer in his sport utility vehicle kept the engine from going past 99 mph.
State court records show that Janklow got 12 speeding tickets in 11 South Dakota counties from 1990 to 1994 and paid more than $1,000 in fines. He often drove 15 mph to 20 mph faster than legal speed limits and once got caught going 90 mph in a 65-mph zone.
Despite his history of daredevil wheeling on taxpayers’ public roads instead of the racetrack, Janklow got a slap on the wrist for this latest lethal offense. For his crime, which could have netted him 10 years in jail, he received a mere 100 days, and the manslaughter charge would be purged from his record if he successfully completed 3 years of probation afterward.
With the sentencing having occurred in January, I imagine he is already a free man, so to speak, by now. But the biggest injustice here is that the family of the victim cannot take their case to civil court to punish Janklow civilly, to make up for the fact that the criminal justice system basically failed them. Why? Because a court has ruled that Janklow committed his crime while “on duty,” and thus any damages awarded would come from taxpayers, and not from Janklow’s own pockets:
U.S. Magistrate Arthur Boylan sided with a federal prosecutor’s conclusion that Janklow, 64, was on official business Aug. 16, 2003, when he sped through a stop sign on a rural road and collided with motorcyclist Randy Scott.
Janklow had appointments or appearances over two days around the state and was on his way home when the accident occurred. Boylan concluded that Janklow did not stop at his mother’s home in nearby Flandreau minutes before the accident.
“Even assuming he had stopped to visit his mother… the diversion would have been inconsequential in this instance,” Boylan wrote.
So watch out. If a politician is “on official business,” s/he can apparently do whatever the hell they want and be pretty heavily shielded by the courts for it.
An interesting sidenote: why is it that when a politician is liberal, and found to be committing a crime, s/he is lambasted as the scum of the earth and indicative of the behavior of all liberal politicians, yet when a conservative ends up caught doing the same things or even worse (as in Janklow’s case), he’s just “a really good guy who made some mistakes?”