What exactly did the South Dakota Supreme Court rule in Annette Bosworth's 2017 appeals?
Executive summary
The South Dakota Supreme Court in 2017 vacated six felony perjury convictions against former U.S. Senate candidate Annette Bosworth while affirming six felony convictions for offering false or forged instruments for filing related to nominating petitions she submitted to the Secretary of State [1] [2]. The court’s narrow statutory interpretation held that the perjury statute applies only to oaths taken in a “state or federal proceeding or action,” and signing circulator verifications on nominating petitions did not qualify as such a proceeding [3] [4].
1. The legal question the high court resolved
At issue was whether a circulator’s verification on a nominating petition—where Bosworth attested she had personally circulated petitions and witnessed each signature—constituted a statement “made in a state or federal proceeding or action” for purposes of the perjury statute; the Supreme Court concluded it did not, meaning the elements of perjury were not proved under the statute the State used [5] [3].
2. What the court actually did — convictions split in two
The court vacated (reversed) the six perjury counts against Bosworth but expressly affirmed the six convictions for offering false or forged instruments for filing — the separate felony counts tied to submitting petitions that contained untrue circulating verifications [1] [2]. In short, Bosworth’s perjury convictions were undone on statutory-interpretation grounds while the findings that her petition verifications were false instruments remained intact [1] [6].
3. Why the court reached that result — statutory interpretation and scope
The opinion rests on the reading that the perjury statute is limited to oaths administered before a “competent tribunal, officer, or person” in a “proceeding or action” where such an oath may by law be administered; submitting a nominating petition with a written oath to a state office was not the sort of adjudicative or quasi‑judicial proceeding the perjury statute contemplates, so the State failed to prove an essential element of perjury [4] [3].
4. Immediate practical consequences and reactions
Practically, Bosworth avoided the additional legal stigma and exposure tied to the six perjury felonies after the vacatur; she had earlier received a suspended sentence with probation and 500 hours of community service for the convictions that originally stood, and she maintained that the court’s decision was a vindication [7] [2]. The Attorney General’s office celebrated the affirmance of the false‑instrument convictions as protecting election integrity, and the ruling prompted officials and legislators to propose statutory fixes to ensure petition falsehoods could be prosecuted as perjury if that was their intent [7] [6].
5. Competing narratives, limits of the record, and why the ruling mattered beyond Bosworth
Bosworth and some supporters framed the decision as a partial victory and evidence of unfair prosecution, with her camp pointing to absence from the state during circulation and alleged political motives; prosecutors and the AG’s office framed the split ruling as upholding election‑law enforcement while noting a statutory gap the court exposed [8] [9]. The reporting and the court documents consistently show the outcome hinged on statutory text and legal definitions rather than factual disputes about whether signatures were forged or improperly witnessed, but source material here does not permit definitive conclusions about prosecutorial motive beyond the parties’ competing claims [5] [9].