South Dakota Department of Corrections inmate Roscoe Primeaux testifies for a commutation of sentence before the Board of Pardons and Paroles on Feb. 16, 2023, at the Jameson Annex of the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls. Board members pictured from left to right are Patricia Meyers, Chuck Schroyer and Board Chair Myron Rau. (John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight)
In 1984, an intruder broke through the back door of a Winner home and fatally shot Karol Kniffen’s brother in his bed.
Kniffen’s Korean War-veteran father disarmed the intruder. She began to hit the man with a wooden block at her father’s direction.
In the heat of the moment, Kniffen said, after seeing that her 20-year-old brother Bobby Soukup had been murdered, her father looked at the captured intruder and said “don’t kill him.”
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“And I said, ‘But Bobby’s dead,’” Kniffen recalled.
When a prosecutor asked the family if they wanted the perpetrator, Joseph Fields , to get the death penalty or life without parole, Kniffen’s father held firm to mercy.