The Amendment's definition of judges includes citizen boards and other bodies protected by judicial immunity, such as the following:
Worst of all, under Amendment E, almost all our families, neighbors and friends would be vulnerable if called to jury duty: they could be sued by disgruntled litigants and criminal defendants they convict. (More fear-mongering -j4j)
It also puts a chilling effect on citizens whose duty it is to protect the most vulnerable in our community: our children. Health care professionals often report to law enforcement authorities suspected cases of child abuse they may witness in a hospital or clinic setting. For the safety of children, that is a difficult but essential duty - so critical that the law affords those doctors and nurses immunity so they can't be sued by a vulnerable child's angry relative or perhaps the even the abuser himself. The same immunity applies to health care providers for reporting the abuse of the elderly. Amendment E would remove that protection and create a tragic disincentive for people in our medical community to report suspected abuse or children or seniors.
And what happens in a state where people who serve on a citizen board are vulnerable to lawsuits by convicts? The citizen boards will grind to a halt - and South Dakotans will lose the services that help make their communities safe and productive.
"Each month, the Board of Pardons and Paroles conducts as much as 300 discretionary hearings," explains Mark Marshall, who has served for years on the Board of Pardons and Paroles. "Those hearings involve South Dakotans who have been convicted of minor crimes... but many of them involve crimes like rape, murder, child molestation. If Amendment E passes, I don't know any board member who would be willing to remain on the board and expose their assets, their livelihood, their life's work to lawsuits by disappointed felons who shouldn't be on the street but think they ought to."
Our response:
The Club says: "The Amendment's definition of judges includes citizen boards and other bodies protected by judicial immunity, such as the following: [They then list various and sundry agencies]
(The following is taken from "The Parable of the Left-Hand Turn" listed in the menu on the Home page of this website):
"Violations" are specific, articulable, and limited. "Decisions" are non-specific and are made by the tens of thousands. Hence, these Flat Earth cultists never talk in terms of a violation by a judge, but rather in terms of tens of thousands of decisions made by hundreds of "decision-makers" which are composed of an unending list of government agencies such as school boards, township boards, parole boards, water boards, medical boards, zoning boards, mental health boards, professional licensing boards, city councilmen, city commissioners, county commissioners, and hundreds more, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, etcetera, etcetera, --all of these bureaucrats enjoying judicial immunity for their "decisions." One can go down the inexhaustible alphabet-soup bureaucratic departments of government agencies until they get sick of hearing of them. These are the decision-maker "judges" about which these Flat Earth cultists are talking about. Again, the Legal Maxim: "Fraud lurks in generalities."