Testing and evidence
Implied consent and refusal in South Dakota
The test requested, legal grounds and applicable statute matter.
Implied-consent laws connect driving and chemical testing under specified legal conditions. The test requested and the officer’s legal grounds matter. The source-checked rules available for South Dakota appear below. A missing suspension figure is not a statement that refusal has no consequences. Check the applicable notice and official provision.
What a refusal does in South Dakota
- Suspension length after a refusal
- Not published yet. We show a figure only once it has been confirmed against the official source and dated.
- Other consequences of refusing
- Not published yet. We show a figure only once it has been confirmed against the official source and dated.Whether a refusal is separately chargeable, and whether it can be used as evidence, varies by state.
- Suspension under the cited rule
- Not published yet. We show a figure only once it has been confirmed against the official source and dated.
Roadside tests and chemical tests are different things
Identify what was requested: a field sobriety exercise, a roadside screening test, or a chemical test of breath, blood or urine. Do not assume the same refusal rule applies to all of them. The relevant statute, any warrant, and the circumstances of the request determine the legal question for a lawyer to review.
The two legal questions
The criminal charge and driving privileges can involve different proceedings. The notice, order and cited rule identify the applicable process.
Driving privileges
The licence case
- Forum
- The agency or court identified by the applicable licence proceeding
- Clock
- Check the applicable notice or order for the deadline and its starting event
- Deadline to request a hearing
- The deadline depends on why your license is being taken away.
- DPS notice: If your notice cites §32-12-49 or §32-12-49.4, your written hearing request must be postmarked—or received by fax—within 15 days after the date on the notice. Send the request to the South Dakota Department of Public Safety (DPS).
- Under-21 test refusal: If your license is being revoked because you refused a test after an arrest under South Dakota’s under-21 driving law, you have 120 days from the arrest to request a hearing.
- The 120-day deadline is only for that under-21 refusal process. It does not replace the 15-day deadline for the notices described above.
- Requesting a hearing does not, by itself, establish that you may keep driving. These license hearings are separate from your criminal case.
- Suspension under the cited rule
- Not published yet. We show a figure only once it has been confirmed against the official source and dated.
- After a refusal
- Not published yet. We show a figure only once it has been confirmed against the official source and dated.
Criminal charge
The criminal case
- Forum
- A criminal court
- Clock
- Check court notices and orders; no case duration is predicted here
- Alcohol-concentration threshold
- 0.08% or more by weight of alcohol in blood while driving or in actual physical control of a vehicle.
- The statute specifies chemical analysis of breath, blood or another bodily substance. It separately prohibits driving under the influence; the numeric threshold is not permission to drive while impaired.
- This is the general alcohol-concentration rule, not a separate rule for commercial drivers or drivers under 21.
- First-offense penalty rule
- Not published yet. We show a figure only once it has been confirmed against the official source and dated.The cited rule may describe a range or a minimum with conditions, not a predicted sentence.