PIERRE — After an emotional hearing marked by passionate arguments, on-the-fly research and disputes over the rules, a legislative committee voted narrowly Wednesday to ban the death penalty in South Dakota.

Criminals on Death Row don’t get to celebrate yet, though — the committee passing the measure wasn’t the Senate or House Judiciary committees. It was the Intern Committee, made up of 22 interns and aides spending the session at the Capitol to gain firsthand experience about the legislative process.

“Intern Committee is fun,” said Katie Douglas, a House Republican and 2007 Riggs High School graduate. “We get to go to the committees and watch our bosses ask all these questions and go through the motions. This gives us a chance to do what they’re doing and experience it ourselves.”

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The interns heard testimony from legislators including Rep. Gerry Lange, D-Madison, Rep. Dan Ahlers, D-Dell Rapids, and Rep. Brock Greenfield, R-Clark, before debating among themselves and passing HB1245 by a 9-7 vote.

“This is a real great exercise for the interns,” said Ahlers. “I always find it very informative to sit and listen to these guys discuss the same issues we do. Quite often you see the same arguments resurface for or against a particular issue.”

This year’s interns invented Intern Committee themselves after getting oriented the first week of the session.

“The second week I thought, ‘How fun would it be if we actually sat in the chairs?’” said Borjan Jaksic, a House Republican intern from Sioux Falls who was elected the chairman of the intern committee. “This is a great learning experience — hands on. We get to put our opinions out there and be in the front seat.”

Ahlers, who was an intern himself in 1996, said he envies this year’s interns the opportunity.

“I really wish they would had this when I was an intern,” he said.

Wednesday was the third time the Intern Committee met this session. At previous sessions, the committee has debated resolutions and approved a bill to allow guns on campus.

This was the second time HB1245 got heard by a committee this year — and a much more favorable result for the bill’s actual sponsor, Lange. The House Health and Human Services Committee killed the bill by an 8-5 vote.

The bill was supported in the Intern Committee by all five Democratic interns and four of the 12 Republican interns.

Interns said the different perspective of holding a committee hearing helped them better understand what actual lawmakers go through.

“We thought, when we were originally discussing the idea of having the committee, what a good idea this would be to actually have us sitting at the big desk rather than in the chairs in the audience,” said Jon Hansen, a House Republican intern from Dell Rapids. “Even more so than being here watching, it immerses you in the process.”