The South Dakota Senate on Tuesday convicted Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg of two impeachment charges stemming from a 2020 car crash in which he killed a pedestrian, triggering his automatic removal from office.

Ravnsborg told a 911 dispatcher the night of the crash that he might have struck a deer or other large animal, and has said he didn't know he struck a man — 55-year-old Joseph Boever — until he returned to the scene the next morning.

Criminal investigators said they didn't believe some of Ravnsborg's statements.

As the impeachment trial opened Tuesday, prosecutors drove at a question that has hung over developments since the September 2020 crash: Did Ravnsborg know he killed a man the night of the crash.

The prosecution played a series of video clips during their closing arguments that showed Ravnsborg's shifting account of his phone use during interviews with criminal investigators.

The attorney general at first outright denied he had been using his phone while driving, but then acknowledged he had been looking at his phone minutes before the crash.

"We've heard better lies from 5-year-olds," Pennington County State's Attorney Mark Vargo, who was acting as an impeachment prosecutor, said of Ravnsborg's statement.

Investigators had determined the attorney general walked right past Boever's body and the flashlight Boever had been carrying — still illuminated the next morning — as he looked around the scene the night of the crash.

Prosecutors also raised an exchange that Ravnsborg had with one of his staff members three days following the crash, after he had submitted his phones to crash investigators.

Ravnsborg's defense attorney contended that the attorney general had done nothing nefarious and instead had cooperated fully with the crash investigation.

His defense attorney, Mike Butler, described any discrepancies in Ravnsborg's memory of that night as owing to human error.

Ravnsborg was willing to take a polygraph test, though criminal investigators determined that it would not have been effective to test the attorney general's truthfulness.