Chief Justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court, David Gilbertson retires this year. He has served the Unified Judicial System for more than 3 decades. Justice Gilbertson says, over his career, he remembers working on and implementing new drug and alcohol programs.
“I have tried to change our court system into a proactive system; where we will take a person with a problem who’s in front of the judge for probably a criminal accusation and deal with that problem so that we don’t see them over and over and over again. Maybe the wake-up call for me goes all the way back the beginning my first ten years of my legal career was a prosecutor and by the end of those ten years I was seeing some of these people going to the pen three or four times. Slowly it dawned on me that the system as it was operating wasn’t really succeeding in a great number of cases.”
Justice Gilbertson says over the last year one of the more promising programs he has seen developing is a remote mental health services program that equips different parts of the justice system with iPads and access to mental health professionals for consultation of detainees. He says the idea was a pilot project last year and may be expanded based on the results of this upcoming legislative session.
-Contact SDPB’s David Scottby email.