BROOKINGS – Chief Deputy State’s Attorney Ben Kleinjan, a fifth-generation Brookings County native, has been at the Brookings County State’s Attorney’s Office since 2019, and alongside State’s Attorney Dan Nelson, he has been working to create a safer community for Brookings.
“I am a fifth-generation Brookings County resident on my dad’s side; on my mom’s side it’s four generations. So, my grandfather’s grandfather emigrated to the United States and bought a farm just north of Volga in 1904, and Kleinjans have been farming there ever since.
“I grew up in that area. I grew up on a farm 7 miles north of Volga with my four brothers and cousins as well. Dad married a local girl … she also lived on a farm around the Volga area, too,” Kleinjan said.
Kleinjan was born in 1983 and is the youngest of five brothers. He said that despite so many generations of Kleinjans staying in Brookings County, he is the only one of the five to have stayed in the area.
“I graduated from Sioux Valley in 2002, and I initially came to SDSU because I wanted to do engineering because two of my older brothers also graduated from SDSU with engineering degrees … and I did that for two years. I enjoyed the math aspect but really didn’t enjoy the rest of it. It just wasn’t me, and I couldn’t see myself being an engineer forever. So I said, ‘This is my money, these are my classes, and I’m going to do what I like and enjoy,’ so I graduated with a history degree,” Kleinjan said.
He wanted to go to law school, but he wasn’t quite ready or sure. So he moved to Sioux Falls and got a job at Wells Fargo in legal compliance.
“One of the things they had to do post-9/11 was screen everyone and make sure that money wasn’t going into terrorist organizations and things like that – so that’s what I became involved with. After a couple of years I wondered if I wanted to continue that track at Wells Fargo or go back because my LSAT score was about to expire,” Kleinjan said.
Career change
As the 2008 housing crisis was coming on, Kleinjan’s future wife was selling home equity lines of credit at Wells Fargo.
“We could just see the writing on the wall. We knew this wasn’t going to work, she needed to get back into teaching and I needed to pursue something different in law,” Kleinjan said.
Kleinjan ended up at Drake University in Des Moines.
“They have a very old law school that I respected because of my history background. … I also like the fact that they had an agricultural law program. That program is probably the No. 2 program for agricultural law in the world,” Kleinjan said.
Kleinjan graduated with his juris doctor degree and was certified in agriculture and food law.
“After the housing crisis, there was a shortage of legal positions. … The job market was very bad for attorneys after I got out of law school. I graduated with high honors from Drake … and I couldn’t find a job, and I think I did around 40 job interviews. Eventually, I just happened to be home, and a friend of mine told me that there was a job opening at Helsper’s,” Kleinjan said. “They offered me the job then and there, and I couldn’t believe it. Rich insisted on meeting my newborn daughter that minute. So, I moved back to Brookings and began working in 2012.”
The couple, who got married during Kleinjan’s first semester of law school, had their daughter a year after Kleinjan graduated. Kleinjan’s wife now teaches at Mickelson Middle School.
“Brookings has always been my goal for retirement. I never anticipated being able to move back home this soon. So I always joke with people that I got to retire at age 29 when I moved back home,” Kleinjan said.
Kleinjan practiced with the firm Helsper, McCarty & Rasmussen for about seven years. Then he was asked about a potential opportunity with the State’s Attorney’s Office.
“I was pretty heavily involved with crop insurance, to the point where I could have developed a national practice in crop insurance. I had cases on appeal. I had attorneys calling from out-of-state calling and asking for advice. … There’s probably 100 attorneys that do this nationwide. But I had to ask myself if this was what I really wanted to do,” Kleinjan said.
He said he had a dilemma between a national practice or establishing deeper roots in Brookings.
“(Dan Nelson’s) deputy was moving to New Orleans, and his new second-deputy was still in law school. So I said that I could probably make it work and would be interested in trying something different. At that time my practice was primarily insurance litigation – and so I would go all over the state for an insurance company to do litigation – which was a good living, but I wanted to stay home with my family more often,” Kleinjan said.
He said that traveling was difficult as well because he was born legally blind and cannot get a drivers’ license.
Now in criminal law
Kleinjan began his work at the State’s Attorney’s Office in 2019. He said he will remain there for at least 10 more years because he wants to see his daughter graduate.
“The work itself is interesting in a way that is hard to describe, because I’ve seen it for the better part of a decade from the other side of the table when I was a defense lawyer. So now I see it from the government side and I see how different that is,” Kleinjan said.
“Not only has that part changed, but we’ve seen a great change in our culture and how we culturally deal with what traditionally state’s attorney’s offices do – which is criminal law. It’s become much more robust. … We’re no longer looking to punish people. We’re looking to deal with the problems that are caused as a result of criminal acts and also the problems that create the problems of criminality.”
Kleinjan said the growth in the Brookings office is not exclusive to South Dakota.
“This county is on the front-end of this because we have a young administration here. Dan and I get along really well – we’re both big-picture-people and we understand the priorities. We’re not supposed to keep things going the way they’ve always been going. It’s not that institutional inertia – we’re not trying to maintain inertia. We’re trying to do things that make sense, even if nobody has ever done them before. I’ve been excited with what we’re doing.”
The attorney said a lot of the progress that has been made has been furthering accountability for violent crimes and offering counseling and rehabilitation programs, becoming an office of “solution-based” proceedings. Kleinjan said focusing on helping people recover came naturally for him because he always sought out the best for his clients when he was a defense attorney.
Kleinjan said the deputy state’s attorney has traditionally been in charge of the misdemeanor docket, but he and Nelson have worked to create an office that has more redundancy.
“The redundancy that we’ve built is a process and a philosophy that is more spread out so that we are both able to do kind of the same things as needed. And that has been a really reassuring office style in COVID. If one of us were to get sick, you lose a person for a couple weeks and we don’t have the same flexibility as a private firm. We have to be here to help these people and the public – we don’t get to say ‘no thanks’ to a client,” Kleinjan said.
“I never expected to be here, but I think this role fits my personality much better,” Kleinjan said.
Contact Matthew Rhodes at mrhodes@brookingsregister.com.
