Every inmate sentenced for any term less than life, or who has had an indeterminate sentence set at a term of years, or who has had a life sentence commuted to a term of years, and subject to the provisions of §§ 24-2-17 and 24-2-18, is entitled to a deduction of four months from his or her sentence for each year and pro rata for any part of a year for the first year to the tenth, and six months for the tenth year and for each year thereafter until the expiration of the period of the sentence as pronounced by the court, for good conduct.
S.D. Codified Laws § 24-5-1
Graduated scale of reductions from sentence for good conduct
Applied in 14 court decisions — leading case Delano v. Petteys (1994)
Most recently applied in West v. Dooley (December 2010)
Source: SDC 1939, § 13.4718; SL 1939, ch 33; SL 1943, ch 47; SL 1959, ch 41, § 1; SL 1965, ch 34; SL 1988, ch 196, § 1; SL 2004, ch 168, § 21.
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.