Provisions of this chapter and chapters 26-8A, 26-8B, and 26-8C shall be liberally construed in favor of the child, the child's parents, and the state for the purposes of protecting the child from abuse or neglect by the child's parents, guardian, or custodian and for the purposes of affording guidance, control, and rehabilitation of any child in need of supervision or any delinquent child.
S.D. Codified Laws § 26-7A-6
Liberal construction for protection of child
Applied in 10 court decisions — leading case State v. Harris (1993)
Most recently applied in State v. Bettelyoun, Ehret, Osborne (March 2022)
Source: SDC 1939, § 43.0409 (2); SL 1991, ch 217, § 5B; SDCL, § 26-8-2.
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.