No person may be convicted of a crime based upon conduct in which that person engaged because of the use or threatened use of unlawful force upon himself, herself, or another person, which force or threatened use of force a reasonable person in that situation would have been lawfully unable to resist.
S.D. Codified Laws § 22-5-1
Conduct forced or under threat of force
Applied in 7 court decisions — leading case Commonwealth v. Robinson (1981)
Most recently applied in State v. Ducheneaux (November 2003)
Source: SDC 1939, § 13.0501; SL 1976, ch 158, § 5-1; SL 1977, ch 189, § 14; SL 1978, ch 158, § 3; SL 2005, ch 120, § 379.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.