Statement from SDBML on Judge Klinger’s February 8 Ruling

We completely disagree with Judge Klinger's ruling and we remain confident that the South Dakota Supreme Court will uphold Amendment A as constitutional upon appeal.

We wrote a detailed policy for Amendment A so that the law would actually be implemented. If we had written a vague or open-ended policy, then politicians would have been able to delay implementation for years. The people of South Dakota wanted a thoughtful and well-structured marijuana legalization policy. That is the initiative that we wrote and that voters approved at the ballot box.

Amendment A is clearly limited to one subject: cannabis. It addresses multiple policy questions but all of them relate to cannabis.

Invalidating Amendment A on the basis of the single subject rule would severely restrict South Dakota's ballot initiative process in the future. This ruling is about marijuana policy, but the precedent established by the ruling would adversely affect many other issues in the future.

The idea that Amendment A is a substantial change to South Dakota's system of government that requires a constitutional convention is preposterous. Amendment A does not change the fundamental structure of South Dakota's political system or elections in any way.

We think that Judge Klinger's ruling was deeply flawed. We are confident that the South Dakota Supreme Court will recognize that Amendment A is constitutional and should be upheld.

If Amendment A is invalidated by the South Dakota Supreme Court, voters would be deprived of the legalization policy that they chose to adopt. Furthermore, it would do considerable damage to the public's faith in the judicial system. There needs to be a very high threshold for overturning the will of the people, certainly higher than the arguments presented by the lawsuit against Amendment A.

South Dakotans do not want activist legal rulings. They just want common sense and fairness in their courts. If those principles guide the South Dakota Supreme Court's final decision, then Amendment A will be upheld.

Amendment A is arguably less detailed and more streamlined than the vast majority of the other ballot initiatives that have been enacted in other states thus far. Voters in Missouri and Colorado both amended their state constitutions through initiatives more detailed than Amendment A. Both established a tax. Both directed a state agency to regulate. In both states, elected officials accepted that the voters disagreed with them and then proceeded to properly implemented the laws. Their governments did not collapse, their constitutions still function, with each branch of government maintaining its proper power. There is not a problem with Amendment A -- it is the same as what a number of other states have successfully done. The issue here is opponents in South Dakota with power refusing to follow the will of their voters, unlike officials in other states.

The Attorney General does not support the initiative politically, yet he is chief legal advisor to the state and the chief law enforcement officer in the state and he says that Amendment A is entirely lawful.

The South Dakota Attorney General, in his opposition to the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment, stated the following: “Supporters of Amendment A employed the initiative process for precisely the reasons stated above. The Legislature failed to act on an issue of importance to a majority of the voters, so the people acted through their constitutional right of initiative. And they chose to memorialize their desired enactment in the Constitution, as is their right to do. Now, Plaintiffs want to punish the voters for exercising their right to initiative, arguing that they have wrestled power from the legislature and degraded the separation of powers. In reality, it is Plaintiffs who are trying to wrestle the right to initiative, specifically retained by the people through Article III, section 1, from the voters.”